Getting started -- rambling, but could use some tips

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MisterFister
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Getting started -- rambling, but could use some tips

Post by MisterFister »

I had to put gaming in general down for a while due to my studies. And really, for the same reason I can't officially afford to pick it up again, but I needed some sanity, so I started a new single player. Literally all of my Minecraft experience is BTW, and 90% of that is on a group server where an End-farm is active and food is essentially free. I was only barely ready to grand out on my own again.

I ended up on a seed where OS is in a swamp biome. I cannot figure out how to make any location, lit or unlit, safe from slime spawns, and holy crap are they a bitch to deal with at stone-tech.

I'm also feeling a LOT of food pressure. I went hoe-first, and like an absolute friggin idiot invested after that in an iron sword, but in my defense, I was skittish when my nearly-completed indoor hemp and pumpkin farm took not one, not two, but three creeper blasts in the same night-cycle during a rainstorm. I managed to survived unkilled, my chest of stockpiled cooked meat and almost a full stack of glass blocks was destroyed, and I lose all but 1 hemp seed and 1 pumpkin seed. Three chickens were killed, too. I myself died the following night, during a new thunderstorm, when an enderman took refuge from the rain in my farm while I was repairing it and it spawned in front of my swinging stone shovel.

By sheer luck, I happened to HCS into an area that I recognized from a previous hunting trip, and with the next day I managed back to base. My hoe and sword are safe, though the sword is in the orange so that's getting stowed until I manage to get an iron pick. For slimes, I've simply resolved to always carry two stone axes on my hotbar.

Food is now a serious issue. Prior to what I'm referring as The Creeper Incident, I had spent several gameplay hours doing nothing but venturing out and literally power-hunted through all the animals I could find in any direction within a systematic three-day radius and distinctly recall stockpiling more than three rows of cooked food in my storage chest. I found one chicken stuck in a hole, prolly injured from the blast that destroyed the chicken pen and the other two chickens I had, but until I can harvest from my single-seed recovery it'll be a while before I have any eggs. Occasional zombie-flesh drops inspired me to build a squid-proof fishing spot with underground access, with the last aboveground portion encased in cobble because screw that. My problem is that spiders do not seem to be dropping any spider-eyes (I haven't seen one all seed) and without a zombie spawner that I know of, I cannot rely on those for bait.

On a lark, I backed up my save and intentionally suicide a few times, just to see if HCS could put me anywhere animals are accessible, but right now I'm simply stubborn and I wanna continue my main base.

Any ideas? I just have over an ingot of iron and I'm low on torches, as well. My first-planted saplings are only just now starting to sprout. I've built up a nice buffer of stone tools, and repaired a small starter plot in my underground farm, but I'll need a lot more glass before I can have it back up to its prior glory again. Should I just say fuck it and use up the hoe looking for random hempseed drops to replenish my chickens?
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MisterFister
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Re: Getting started -- rambling, but could use some tips

Post by MisterFister »

...Or am I at the point of just starting a new seed altogether?
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Ethinolicbob
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Re: Getting started -- rambling, but could use some tips

Post by Ethinolicbob »

Well you have got yourself a mighty uphill start.
Slimes are indeed trouble. Lighting the swamp will stop them from spawning. Unlike other mobs slimes wont despawn over time if you are in range. So the longer you are in or near a swamp the more slimes can get built up and the more places they can go. I am not joking, they can easilly get anywhere thats in your loaded range.

How is your farms taking creeper damage if you are indoors? Not enough lighting?

I wouldn't reroll your world. Instead go settle a biome or 2 away from the swamp and come back to tame it when you have armour, torches and potions a'plenty.
Personally I find swamp mobtraps the bees knees :D
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MisterFister
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Re: Getting started -- rambling, but could use some tips

Post by MisterFister »

Ethinolicbob wrote:How is your farms taking creeper damage if you are indoors? Not enough lighting?
I'm not exactly sure how the first one got in... this was one of those examples where you think your base is secured and you turn around to the hissing down of a detonation. The others came in through the brand new moonroof.

Edit: I also invested in a pair of shears, thinking creeper oysters would help me fish. Nice idea, but...
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jackatthekilns
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Re: Getting started -- rambling, but could use some tips

Post by jackatthekilns »

I would certainly encourage you to keep at it, but I know it can be tough. eventually, you will be at a tech level where you can conquer that swamp if that is where you want to be. Heck if Mesh can set up a base in a jungle, anything is possible if you work hard and think through your strategy. If, on the other hand, you find yourself in the mood for another seed, I usually play on this one -9057352651117540831 OS is not in a swamp and the reasons I like it become apparent pretty quick. One thing is a nearby river that I like to build my village around. Whatever seed you chose, the early game is tough. What I love about it is that even small amounts of progress make a difference over the long term.
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MisterFister
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Re: Getting started -- rambling, but could use some tips

Post by MisterFister »

I had some insanely fortunate luck during a fishing session and caught 9 fish in all of ninety seconds (thunderstorm, full moon, night, and I had a decent stockpile of bait and sawdust to cook it with.) With that and a healthy stash of tools, plus a few spare workbenches / furnaces / wood chests, a single seed and a single snip of grass, and about two dozen torches, I ventured out again and managed to find some animals. I hunted up a storm, and ventured further out, grabbing some wood and cobble along the way during nighttime. I made a specific point of hunkering down and building a decently-sized "Heidi Hole" (what my play group calls them) that has a separate chamber for animals to run amok inside while I mine cobble and dig dirt at night, with each chamber protected by wooden doorways (double-wide doorway for the animal pen, just in case.) In each base I placed a dirt obelisk at least 40m high, with a torch on top, to navigate by, and in each I placed in the chest a full set of tools, at least one cooked morsel of food, and whatever bibs and bobs and flotsam I generated from chopping wood / killing sheep / etc. (I kept fishing bait with me, of course.)

With no base more than a hundred meters away by high noon, I ended up eleven days' travel away and made my way back with a pair of cows. Thankfully, the blocks remaining loaded at OS resulted in some pumpkins being ready, though I miscalculated the light levels needed and lost some plots. Fed the chicken (it was quite injured, it ended up consuming four rounds of seed before producing the first egg) and managed to get the cows into a 10x8 grass-floored underground room. I expanded my underground farm once I had the fuel to make the glass needed to expand the ceiling, and now I have almost a stack of cooked scrambled eggs that I haven't had to eat yet (fishing has been decent, though I did eat a few fried eggs -- I'm saving the scrambled eggs for exploration trips where inventory space is at a premium, when I run out of basics, or when I have a decent hemp supply to start grinding it) plus almost two stacks of unplanted seeds (I'm not impressed with my farm expansion) and I have a total chicken population of 5 or 6 I think -- three eggs in a row resulted in hatchlings!

Thanks for the encouragement, folks! I think the next step is to venture out to grab some cocoa and junglewood, while also looking for wheat / carrots / potatoes / village. I rather stupidly wasted my iron on a sword and a set of shears, so I don't wanna invest in too many buckets right yet but I will bring along a thing of milk just in case. Right now my major shortage is torches, I've expanded my cobble room looking for coal seams and have come up empty, decent tool stockpile but I'm pretty much at the limits of what I can safely torch off without sealing sections with dirt walls. Torches are what's preventing me from significantly expanding my tree farm, too, or venturing too deep into surface caves for more coal.
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dawnraider
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Re: Getting started -- rambling, but could use some tips

Post by dawnraider »

Make sure you're careful where you keep your animals, zombies will break down doors to get to them. I've made that mistake a couple times. Just because they are inside doesn't always mean they're safe.
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MisterFister
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Re: Getting started -- rambling, but could use some tips

Post by MisterFister »

dawnraider wrote:Make sure you're careful where you keep your animals, zombies will break down doors to get to them. I've made that mistake a couple times. Just because they are inside doesn't always mean they're safe.
Agreed. For the moment, I'm barricading doors behind dirt blocks 1.5x high, and blocking access to the chicken pit and my main base entrance similarly. When I can engineer a moat with pressure-plate-activated doors, I'll upgrade. :)
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