MAIN MENU     FRONT PAGE MISSION STATEMENT SINCLAIR'S FOUNDRY MINECRAFT IN THE ARCTIC REJECTLAND THE FUNGUSLANDS & OTHER WORLDS RESOURCE PACKS & WORLD DOWNLOADS OTHER LINKS       ASSOCIATED WEB PAGES     THE HAMMER OF RETRIBUTION OGG-CAST HAMMER OF RETRIBUTION PRODUCTIONS PERSONAL PAGES FROM DAYS OF YORE ZX SPECTRUM SECTION: PROGRAMS & VIDEOS COMP.SYS.SINCLAIR CRAP GAMES COMPETITION 2021 RICK DANGEROUS RESURRECTED PROJECT 31: FIXING MORE HOLES     Project coordinates: n/a Screenshots: 19 (+ 2 Sinclair) Date completed: 30 December 2015 Versions: 1.8.8 - 1.8.9 Minecraft day completed: 4334 It's six months since the last round of minor fixes, and four months since there were some tweaks to the base. Which means it's time to get the spanners and Allen keys out again and tighten the nuts and bolts that were about to fall off, and grab the paintbrushes for a bit of much-needed decoration. I'll start with what I did in the base, and then fix the other projects in order of their number, which isn't necessarily the order I made the fixes. The waste disposal unit, only seen in this project, has been updated: see Project 43: Tweaks in 1.10. FIXING THE BASE First of all, a reminder from way back in the days of the original Sinclair Research Hut, this is the old squid tank that was decommissioned when the front door of the base was reworked. The water and lava have all been removed, and the passage blocked. For all intents and purposes, it no longer exists. Squid Tank Two was something I always intended to build with the vast supply of marine blocks that would be available once the 128K Toast Rack guardian farm was completed. It had been started before but then I had to loot most of the prismarine bricks to decorate the Bunny Boiler. Still, this is what the walls would have looked like at the time if I hadn't run out of bricks. Here's the finished squid tank shown from the outside, looking suitably aquatic with its prismarine bricks, and covered with glass for safety. Can't have visitors falling in and suing me, can we? For the new corridor I've mirrored the passage to the old (and probably quite useless now) zombie-based XP farm, and made this Y-shaped fork to the... Schwimmbad? The ink sac collection area is a tribute to the mighty Zipkrowd and their even mightier Totally OP Guardian Farm, built as soon as the new blocks were made available in the 1.8 snapshots, and they did say "the new blocks look like, in Germany we say, Schwimmbad..." cue one of them using buckets of water to make it look like he was having a shower. So that's what I've reproduced - the Zipkrowd's floor pattern, and their shower heads, though I've added the glass shower screens. I'd been under the impression that daylight sensors could be installed upside down to become a night sensor, and would have made an excellent shower head - unfortunately they can't, they just change colour instead. This is my allegedly-upgraded design for the new squid tank, shown in a copy of the world where I've replaced the side of the tank with barrier blocks. The idea was to prevent the squids swimming against any current the way they can by forcing them to fall downwards towards the bare hoppers at the bottom, where they will suffocate and die. However, at this stage, either there are not too many of them spawning in the tank (maybe I need to uncover it?) or my idea to pull them downwards with gravity isn't working too well and they despawn rather than die. Elsewhere in the base, and back in the proper version of the world, the guardian farm is serving its purpose. For the first time ever, the warehouse is properly lit, thanks to the massive haul of sea lanterns I've got, both from looting the innards of the Ocean Monument in the first place, and from the production of prismarine crystals to build more of them with. I was a bit concerned the colour would clash with the wood and End stone, but I reckon it's all fine - a bit like fluorescent lights. And I couldn't have used redstone lamps, before you all ask, because there's no room to put the redstone in. This probably didn't need a guardian farm, just a lot of effort killing guardians by hand, but finally I've put in the prismarine brick sink I'd always promised when building the brewing lab. It complements the Nether brick surround to the Nether wart growing area, and is a whole load better looking than that ugly cobblestone. THE RUINED VILLAGE This was the hut I originally tried to base my chicken breeder in before building Chuckie Egg's Crackin' Bird Seed Dome for exactly that purpose. I've dug a deep pit and lined it with granite, so I can always identify the walls of the pit and know not to dig through it if I start mining on a higher level. The base of the pit is the roof of my working strip-mines, which makes it about 45 blocks deep. Better not fall down it. I've turned on the resource pack that colours trapped chests red so it's obvious how best to fit in six chests per level (with six hoppers between them) for maximum waste storage capacity with the intention of hiding the chests behind some more decorative blocks. These chests, so far, have only had feathers tipped in them - Wurzel Dizzy's Fast Food Silo was maxed out after I'd slaughtered all those chickens to get rid of my vast supply of seeds, and they're not tradeable, but I'll store them all in here in case they are one day. Though that's more out of hope than expectation... FIXING THE NETHER HUB The Nether Hub, only ever seen in a single screenshot during A Brief Interlude, I always thought needed a bit more decoration. I was going to make giant directional letters for each face of the hub, but soon found a problem - I was right up at the ceiling bedrock and couldn't dig upwards even by the two blocks I needed to make the changes. So instead, I thought I'd use banners, which meant I could spell out the directions. The banners best matched the red stained clay easily obtainable from a Mesa, the grey lettering matches the stone brick lines, and I put in a bit of iron bars for good measure. The borderless alphabet banners are from HiFolksImAdam's useful tutorial. FIXING PROJECT 5: HORACE'S REVENGE Horace's Revenge dates back to the early builds where I wasn't particularly bothered with decorating the farms according to the names I'd given them, I just wanted to find something suitably Sinclair-related for a name. I'd named Horace's Revenge after Horace And The Spiders because, in that game, the spiders were a one-touch-and-you're-dead job; Horace couldn't even jump on them, Super Mario style. Well, in this farm, he can, and is doing. The magenta spiders up above are from a different game, though... ZX Spectrum screenshot: Horace And The Spiders (1983) Watch this game played to the point where it never gets any harder by Keith Rundle via the RZX Archive. Just thought I'd remind you of the game that inspired the name. What we see here is phase two, where Horace has to swing on the spider string over the pit; it's in phase one that Horace has to jump over the spiders, with fixed character-square precision, and it's harder than it looks. ZX Spectrum screenshot: Realm Of The Undead (1984) Watch this game completed by Paul E. Collins via the RZX Archive. No, your eyes do not deceive you, Realm Of The Undead can be completed in three minutes - or, I reckon, under two if only those bats would comply in the second phase (touch them and the scared villagers, even thicker than the ones in Minecraft, are sent back into their prison). Level 1 is slower than a drunk slug on Mogadon, level 5 is impossibly fast, level 4 is a challenge, but I beat this game faster than Paul did in this video when I was ten. The magenta tarantulas are the main problem - hit one and there'll be a loud squeaking noise and you'll lose a clove of garlic, which phase one is all about collecting. I've brought them in as a guest appearance for this farm so Horace can have some different spiders to tackle! FIXING PROJECT 20: LINDA McSEYMOUR'S VEGETABLE VAULT As I noted in the original project page, the Vegetable Vault has never worked quite as it should; though Nims said the farm should be self-sustaining in his original video, eventually the villagers ran out of crops to plant. And when they refused to plant more, I wondered if it was the gathering of zombies that inevitably clustered around the farm if I was out at night that was the problem, as if they were running for the hills, even inside (although Furrmurr Seymour's Bread Bin didn't seem to be too affected. Most of the ground has been lit with Helloween lanterns and covered with green carpet to be a sort of Astroturf, and the fence was built to keep the nasties away from the lit area. There are still some spawnable spots on top of the roofs, but this has cut down the number of zombies bothering the villagers to around one every three or four nights. Did it increase their productivity...? No. A further early problem was, what the villagers planted was getting scrambled - in NimsTV's original design, the hole that all the vegetables fall down is surrounded only on the four edges by slabs that prevent the villagers falling through. However, the water streams that sweep the vegetables away draws them into the corners - so they take whatever falls down the stream meaning potato farmers start planting some carrots, and carrot farmers start planting some potatoes. So I added four slabs to each level to make a square, and the farm started working even slower than before - the villagers just would not plant their crops. But, coming up to see how they were doing (just in case), I noticed one potato farmer standing there, staring intently at one of the four squares of farmland he could not reach to plant with more potatoes... ...so that farmland is now gone and can never be re-used, because it is now stone brick. Hopefully, I'll run a few test harvests and see if they start replanting their crops, and maybe I'll visit with a load of bonemeal and test to see if there are any crop errors. This should do the trick, but I suppose the real test is whether they replant after I go away and build something else. The chances are, you'll know if that was the case if a new potato and carrot farm springs up somewhere in the future! FIXING PROJECT 21: COLONEL HARLAND J. SEYMOUR'S BATTERY HEN BATTERY A quick one, this, but an important one. I found the crushing piston in the killing cell sometimes managed to get itself stuck outwards, and couldn't work out why. The problem hit me when I found the egg lift had backed up and I put a load of eggs straight into the dispenser that fires them into the killing cell. I knew the redstone was always going to be a bit too cramped. I found the comparator that reads the contents of the dispenser was powering the block below it, which was powering the piston. So it was an easy fix - mount the clock for the egg dispenser on slabs instead. Problem solved. AND FINALLY - PROJECT 3: SINCLAIR'S FOUNDRY I wonder what happens if we look in here, the last of the chests to be filled in the Foundry? Crikey! It's full of iron! And I took this screenshot with the F3 HUD up so you can see exactly how long it took to fill the Foundry chests to their maximum capacity. Bear in mind, also, I've removed a fair load of iron from here as well to make hoppers and other machinery with, as well as using a few iron blocks in places like the Battery Hen Battery... So what I did was, I compacted the whole lot down into iron blocks, and it can start churning out iron again. This is the third chest in the stack, which means there are already two double chests and four hoppers full of iron blocks. See, I knew this unbreakable design was going to be the winner.