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 56: MAJOR BASE EXPANSION     Project coordinates: X +359 : Y +67 : Z +128 Screenshots: 42 (+ 2 Sinclair) Date completed: 8 September 2018 Versions: 1.13.1 Minecraft day completed: 8130 Minecraft 1.13 finally forced my hand. The Awesome ZX80 Base has had a major expansion. As soon as Technically Updated and Update Aquatic had been combined into a single larger update and added a whole load more stuff that is all available in large quantities and needs to be sorted, it was inevitable. So I've had to get my architect's hat on, and work out the best way to add a second floor to the base warehouse - along with a few further much-needed tweaks. At least it took almost 8000 days to get this far, so we should be fine for a while yet! THE EASY BITS FIRST... Two new potions were added in 1.13, Slow Falling and Turtle Master - so these have been added to the potion chests and I've brewed as many of each as I could - which in the case of the Turtle Master is not many because turtle shells (crafted from five scutes and unstackable...) have been rather harder to come by than phantom membrane. And it's not as if I'm likely to be using it! I thought a few item frames wouldn't go amiss, either - though it'd be easier to see which potion is which if it wasn't for the shimmering visual enchantment effect applied to them! The upshot of this is I've had to move Dragon's Breath over to the Ingredients side of the lab, where it always should have been in the first place. This, and the (unused) chest for pre-made Awkward potions were sacrificed to fill up the other side. So if any more potions are added, this is going to need a huge rethink! Meanwhile, the library is now also completely full to bursting, with the addition of four new enchantments for tridents - I've shown Riptide here, but the others all have their own chest as well. Again, if any more are added, there'll have to be a serious rethink. A noticeable exterior change is the removal of the squid tank. No squids will spawn outside rivers, beaches and oceans any more. There is a section of river biome running through the base, but for reasons we'll see shortly, I couldn't rebuild it there. Das Schwimmbad ist gestorben. Nicht gut. However, even though the chest has gone and the window has had to be reduced in size due to the new roof in the water tank which no longer has anything to see in it, I couldn't bring myself to get rid of this small tribute to the Zipkrowd. The old zombie spawner based XP farm has been gutted rather more dramatically. As it turns out, I could have rehashed it with a soul sand bubble column instead of the old sign-water-sign mob lift that no longer works for zombies, but there's no point - I can't drown them and make tridents suddenly appear like I could in the snapshots, and if I want rotten zombie flesh to trade, I'll stick with Sinclair's Foundry, which I've been using as my most productive XP farm ever since the expansion I've linked to. I've removed anything useful from this old XP farm which meant almost three stacks of hoppers. They'll be recycled soon enough. It's possible that this area might find a new use, but a lot of it isn't under the base. Best to shut it off, I'd say. THE WAREHOUSE EXPANSION, PHASE 1: PREPARATION Before we do anything dramatic, a number of tweaks have to be made in the original warehouse, which will become Level One. Because this is nothing you haven't all seen before, I've lumped the four screenshots into one. Top left, leaf litter has been added at the expense of vines; top right, these have found a new home alongside lily pads, cactus and the clay-class blocks (and I'm now sorting clay blocks instead of clay balls). The ocean blocks used to be here; these have all been gathered up and packed away in unsorted chests downstairs, where they'll form part of the new Level Two alongside all their new aquatic counterparts. Bottom left, I've moved the Nether materials around to fill that corner an added magma and the seemingly-useless blocks that were added in 1.10 (though I've found the occasional use for them here and there). Bottom right, I've added all three types of ice instead of just one, and the newly-renamed tropical fish; flint, feathers and seeds have been sent downstairs to lurk alongside other items I'll only very rarely need to access. Also, I'd been planning to replace the End stone with End brick - but relented, as this warehouse was built in the 1.8 cycle and I'd prefer it to stay as it was at the time. Oooh, look at me in my fabulous shining diamond armour going on a Big Gay Boat Ride. Back in the original build I left this river underneath the base, as I'd worked out the warehouse sat over it and there was no chance of it washing any redstone away, so it stayed there and I could sail through it in a boat, even though boats in those days were so fragile it'd be smashed to smithereens if a squid so much as looked at it. Now, though, Level Two will cut right through it - plus, drowned zombies spawn in rivers at night - so it's time to say "So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish (that didn't actually spawn in here until this update)". One last Big Gay Boat Ride for old time's sake, not that I ever did much of this before. If President Donald Trump really wants to "drain the swamp", he could do a lot worse than arm himself with six stacks of sponge. Dividing the river into strips and attacking it with sponge is a very effective way to get shot of a lot of excess water. I have experience on this front. Lots of it. The river bed is now drier than a desert. A fair bit of this area will form part of Level Two, or at least the hidden storage and redstone area behind the access chests, so this is some digging I don't have to do. The river won't be completely destroyed - I'll just redirect it through the nearby land and make an artificial canal of sorts. First, you can see where the river originally ran under the base. In the real world, the river would cut through where this giant meander is and leave it as an oxbow lake... ...none of that for me. With the liberal application of more sponge, the giant meander is forcibly dried. All that remains now is to cut the new canal and fill in the old area... ...it is done, and it took rather longer than it should have done to carve away the land, smooth it off so that it looks somewhat natural, and dump the spoil where the giant meander used to be. I still think it could do with some more landscaping, mind. And it'll always be obvious where the meander used to be, because the grass is a different colour. Meanwhile, this was the final piece of redecoration of Level One. For a start, I've ditched the diorite and replaced it with quartz pillars, as I recently had so much spare quartz it had spilled over into the junk chests and I had to do something with it. And then, the dull orange sandstone golem has been reduced to rubble. Really, I only built it because I needed something to fill the space and this random statue seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, though, I've got something that's... somewhat meaningful - a statue of the Swarmer from Spectron, which is now repeated on both sides of the warehouse, whereas previously it has been one Swarmer and one Speeder. The fate of the Speeder will be revealed soon enough. Also, I've built the Swarmer out of red Nether brick because... it's the red block that looked least "wrong". Redstone blocks and Nether wart blocks weren't doing it for me, and concrete is just too flat. If there'd been a ruby block that'd have been perfect, but it was not to be. ZX Spectrum screenshot: Spectron (1983) Watch this game played to attack wave 41 (by which time it never gets any harder) by ME! Yes, ME! via the RZX Archive. I don't think I need to write too much about Spectron again, seeing as I already did in the original base construction post and projects 44 and 49 on top of that, so go and look at those (but particularly the first) to remind yourselves of some 1983-spec blasting action. If, of course, you have the correct model Spectrum. Which I didn't. THE WAREHOUSE EXPANSION, PHASE 2: THE BIG BUILD Here's the old mineshaft. I've long since stopped using this entrance, mainly because I don't need to do a lot of mining these days (and I'm about to obtain a large amount of building materials without laying a finger in a new strip-mining tunnel), but also because I don't need chest minecarts any more that would park themselves up the top here - I have shulker boxes for that now, that I can carry with me in an Ender chest. Once upon a time, this was the main storage area. This purpose is about to be revived. Well, that certainly wasn't a trivial dig. I reckon it took around 20 days, with no sleep (but at least in my underground dwarf-hole, the phantoms won't get me). This is the entire area under the main body of the base (i.e. not underneath where the keyboard is; that's where we find the Art Studio and access to the Nether). This is a 54 × 44 × 9 volume, which would be a total of 21,384 blocks, were it not for the fact that I didn't have to dig all of it out - the dried river bed and an underground ravine took care of some of it, while I had to leave the ramp that leads to the rear entrance untouched - that's the two-tone sandstone passage with the lamps attached. That line of hoppers and chests is where I dump scrap wood (and carpet, and anything else I don't need that'll burn) which fuels a furnace in the depths of this system so that iron ore and gold ore are instantly smelted and their ingots returned to the warehouse. That'll need to be moved. The redstone torch line right in front of me is for the indicator light upstairs that turns off while items are being sorted in the system; that's fine where it is. Also, I seem to have forgotten to turn particles off, which explains the strangely-coloured square. I know I have Haste II, the icon in the corner is telling me that. And it was worth it. That's the scrap wood line out of the way. A lot of the item lift on the right won't be used any more, but it might be in the future if I ever have to put a third level in (perish the thought, this job is big enough as it is). That's the walls of chests in - and I've kept the same colour scheme as upstairs, with the End stone and yellow hardened clay. But I have changed the dark red Nether bricks (the original fortress-building bricks, not the red ones made with Nether wart) for dark green kelp blocks. You'll find out why... eventually. The old railway line down to the mines, as I said above, has to come out. This will be part of the floor of the new warehouse. That was a quick and easy job. I've left the shaft in place, because it still looks nice and I can look up it from the mines... not that I'll be spending too much time in here. The mass of random torches wasn't doing the look of the place any good, so I've got a proper wooden floor with lanterns in it - all of which will eventually be covered with carpet. And I had just enough sea lanterns to fill the roof with them as I have upstairs. I count myself very lucky that the stairs could be installed in exactly the same place as they are on Level One! The two-tone backdrop at the top of the stairs is where I've extended the wall from the rear entrance and kept the same pattern. This time I've gone with spruce planks instead of oak for the stairs and the border round the carpet (when I've laid it!) as it's darker than oak - also, I've put oak in the corners of the ceiling whereas upstairs it's birch, for the same reason. I had to improvise with a few stairs and slabs to hide a couple of pieces of sandstone, which is why the central sea lantern column isn't as tall as the others. It's a small compromise. Enough decoration for now, time to make this thing functional. First, I need to get the dwarven hammer out again and dig another deep pit. In true Blue Peter style, here's one I made earlier. And this is why - I needed a whole new item lift. It's the same design as the one seen in the picture where I was moving the scrap wood line - it works how I need it to. And yes, I know, I could have used soul sand bubble columns... but I've never trusted any kind of lift that drops the items out (such as the solid glass columns that Mojang's developers tried their very hardest to break). The items are all sent up this lift, pass round the Level Two filter line from right to left as we look in from the entrance, and are then sent into the last few droppers of the old lift, and round the Level One filter line from left to right, so that any unsorted objects still end in the junk drawers. Testing the system showed that it takes an unsorted object three and a half minutes to get from the input chest to the junk drawers... A minor annoyance of the rear entrance to the base is that the Level Two filter line has to drop down for a bit and then go through another item lift midway. Even more annoyingly, if there's ever a third level this system will have to be repeated again! Here's the final decoration for Level Two. Whereas upstairs was a red Nether brick Swarmer, this time I've built a Speeder - and I'm so filthy rich I can make it out of emerald blocks! On the left as we head into the new warehouse are all the aquatic clocks and items - including sponge which is hard to get hold of, but I figured I had enough to sacrifice 41 blocks to the filter. There's all the "old" 1.8 aquatic items derived from Ocean Monuments, all the new ones added in 1.13 (dead coral is kept in the appropriate chest for its living counterpart) - and phantom membrane is at the far end. Meanwhile, on the right are items I'm unlikely to need very much, but which I have a lot of and need somewhere to be kept in mass storage. Yes, I do have enough name tags to justify it, mainly from fishing sessions. This level needs its own item input chest - and this small alcove was the right place to put it, so that it doesn't interfere with the redstone circuitry (with space for more) behind the new site of the large Sinclair QL picture. On the other side, I'm sticking to paintings for now - though I may one day replace these with some custom maps. The regular 5¼" floppy disc may also be replaced with the 3" CF2 standard championed by Amstrad for the CPC6128 and early PCW models, and also fitted to the Amstrad-built Spectrum +3. I don't have any Amstrad-model artwork in this base, yet - but then, the 5¼" disc was hardly Sinclair-specific, being more associated with the Commodore 64 and BBC Micro, amongst the computers at the time. Maybe I should have a picture of a microdrive instead? THE REST OF THE BASE UPGRADES The construction of Warehouse Level Two has also resulted in a new entrance to the mines, with the decommissioning of the descending railway tunnel. Behind the piston door I've added a standard minecart lift for easy descent and even easier ascent. As I had to remove the picture of the Sinclair QL, I've replaced it with the screenshot of Manic Miner, originally found in the bedroom - what could be more appropriate here? I don't need to repeat the info box, really - see the original decoration of the base for that. Where the minecart lift ends up in the mines, there used to be an item lift. Again, this wasn't needed any more after the addition of shulker boxes, so this has killed two phantoms with one swing of Hawkins' Avenger, and I've recovered even more hoppers, droppers and redstone equipment. With the Manic Miner screenshot moved downstairs, I needed a replacement in the bedroom with "legendary" status, or at least very highly regarded. And so I went for Don Priestley's graphical tour de force, The Trap Door - rated fifth on World Of Spectrum's all-time list. ZX Spectrum screenshot: The Trap Door (1986) Watch this game completed on both levels by Robert Maines via the RZX Archive. Don't you open that... TRAP DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR! Because, obviously, there's always something down there, in the dark, waiting to come out! Don Priestley was already a well-known programmer when his reputation was first set in stone. DK'Tronics had been commissioned to make a Popeye game, and seemingly unaware of the Spectrum's graphical limitations, the American paymasters had demanded that the graphics looked like the cartoon (and it's not as if other micros of the time were going to be completely free of such problems, either). Rather than run away screaming, Don took on the challenge, and by making the sprites half the height of the entire screen and dividing the playing area into parallel layers, pulled off a blinder. A year later, based on the same kind of layered gameplay, came the masterpiece. The Trap Door, created in 1984 and finally broadcast in 1986 (and the six-or-seven-year-old version of me was watching avidly), was due to be turned into a computer game. The blobby Claymation characters that tended to be one bright colour (the most notorious exception being "Vile Pile") were a perfect match with the Spectrum, as the colour clash was a lot less of a problem than it had been for Popeye - plus, graphics like eyeballs could be reused and would be very appropriate here. Much like Popeye, Berk constantly blinks and twitches as he performs four utterly thankless tasks for The Thing Upstairs. All of them, inevitably, involve opening the Trap Door and letting something horrible out of it, whether it's some tiny pink worms, or a huge jumping thing that's needed to (quite literally) make "eyeball crush", then sending the final hideous creation upstairs in the lift. Then, in Super Berk mode, Berk will have to tidy up, which involves throwing everything (including Boni and Drutt!)... I think you know where. Each task is only given a limited time, shown by the creeping meter at the bottom of the screen that increases as The Thing Upstairs' patience runs out. Fail to complete the tasks and Berk will get a "You're Fired!" message, in a chilling prelude to what Sinclair's incoming new owner, Lord "Yes Sir Alan" Sugar, would make his most famous catchphrase 20-odd years later. Meanwhile, on the lower level alongside the Art Studio, I've dug another enormous hole. The glowstone outline nearest to me marks the wall cavity of an all-new Cartography Room, which will be large enough to accommodate the ever-expanding maps of the central area and the empire I've built (and am still building) - taking advantage of a new feature introduced in 1.13. As with the warehouse, I've long since outgrown the original that was built in the 1.8 cycle. I've kept the decoration as it was in the old Cartography Room - ancient oak planks round the border, sandstone walls and roof - with creeper and smooth varieties used everywhere. Further decoration involved the yellow carpet, also recycled from the old Cartography Room - but to fit in the new map tables, I've had to replace a lot of the wood with wool and a hint of extra lighting. The low table legs are made of four upside down corner stairs, which takes a while before they all line up into the correct formation, but it works eventually and the rest can be built from slabs. This is the new feature that 1.13 brought - the ability to put item frames on floors and ceilings, which means the map tables were possible. Both tables are 9 × 9 to be able to accommodate an expanding map - this map of the central area is 5 × 7 and never has putting together a 35-piece jigsaw been quite so complicated when I have to have the pieces in my hand to see what they are. Even more annoyingly, this won't be complete for a while as I've picked up the map on the right and it's updated itself to show the temporary beacon pyramid on top of the base (that's still working, notice the icon in the top right) to make the huge excavation jobs pass quicker. Here's the finished article, with the lamps in the roof giving some addition light. The old Cartography Room had space for ten double-chests to be filled with maps, whether they're for showing the land on the map tables (which were on the wall before, and were about to outgrow it) or the pieces of pixel art I've scattered around the base and some of my builds. As I know I'm going to be using a lot more of these - made, as ever, using mc-map.djfun.de - I've expanded the capacity to 80 double-chests, for a total of 4,320 maps. That should be enough! And here's the completed map of the central area, showing the base and all my creations around it at zoom level 0. The other map table has a 5 × 5 wide-area map at the "classic" zoom level 3, that shows all the area I've revealed in its entirety, with creations such as Heavy On The Magick Witch Farm and The 128K Guardian Farm clearly visible, as well as most of the Dark Empire. Finally, this is the eventual state of the old Cartography Room - it's been blocked off and it will be left this way. The upside is, it will provide a future solution to the potential problem I've already alluded to of the Library and Brewing Lab running out of room - both of them can extend into this now free space.