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Welcome to my very first blog entry on SpaceHey! :D Hey, space!
In this series of blogs I'll be sharing my playthrough of TerraFirmaCraft: Hardrock 3! This Minecraft modpack is focused on the survival aspect of the game, making the process much more realistic (at least compared to the vanilla Minecraft experience).
The goal is to escape the confines of our home planet and explore space. But before I can do that I'll need to experience the progression of technology starting at the stone age. Bashing stones together, worrying about food and shelter will lead into me conquering metallurgy, rotational power, the steam age and the electric age, hopefully carving out a pleasant chunk of land to call my own.
This modpack has always been on my radar and I have a plethora of failed playthroughs before this one that haven't gotten too far; I think that sharing the journey with people on here will make me more motivated to keep going :p I'll try to incorporate any feedback I receive on here as well <3
Also, I'm playing with keep inventory on. I will try not to abuse it, just something to not give me too many headaches. Cheerio :3
Without further ado, we start with day one!
Humble beginnings and.. what's up with this modpack?
Immediately after spawning in many things are apparent: the world that TerraFirmaCraft generates for us is drastically different to the one of Vanilla. The landscape is divided up into gigantic continents that have a changing climate depending on the longitude and latitude, vast rivers flowing into oceans, different flora and fauna depending on where we are.
Also - I only start with 3 hearts! I am very fragile and the tiniest wounds can be the end of me. Thankfully that number can be increased with the help of a balanced and varied diet. Variety is the spice of life, here being taken literally :p
Alongside this the space in my inventory is limited to my hotbar, 5 slots for tools and 4 slots for my offhand that I'll be abusing plenty. The rest will have to be unlocked later, as of now I'll have to get creative and resourceful. Playing Vanilla Minecraft after this makes me very appreciative to each of the 37 slots available straight away there ;-;
To put my (and you, the reader's :p) mind at ease, the night does not spawn hostile mobs! They're purely kept inside caves which I'll try to avoid (until I don't, spoiler alert). There are still plenty of things trying to kill me in form of some fauna that won't despawn in the morning which will pose a big challenge. Lil' ole me won't be able to take down a grizzly bear for a long time.
I happen to spawn into a temperate forest situated on rolling hills. On the mini-map I spotted some badlands that are an excellent source of sand that'll be useful for glass and mortar later on (yes, we need mortar for bricks. This ain't your regular modpack :p).
What I also spot is a pack of wolves that's right on top of my spawn. Thankfully they're asleep, but they can be dangerous; They don't shy away from throwing themselves at a defenseless player such as myself.
Day in the life of a caveman
Immediate goals that I'm thinking about here are a set of tools and some food. The land is very generous, giving me many different choices of foods. Keeping myself sustained won't be much of an issue in the spring, but the mere thoughts of how winter will be keeps me on my toes.
An issue that's much more immediate is the need to quench my thirst; There's plenty of water to drink from around me but that water is tainted! Tainted with nasty bacteria that has random side effects ranging from feeling lethargic, nausea, poisoning to being infected with the zombie virus... Either way, I need to take care of clean drinking water ASAP...! Right after I find a suitable place to hunker down that is.
To get clean water I'll need to boil water (I'm a little too poor for filtered water at the moment). That requires a campfire and a clay pot I can put on top of it. This can also be used for cooking later on.
Tools are acquired by knapping stone and clay can be found abundantly around (but has to be identified by the plants growing on top of it.. thankfully this isn't my first rodeo :3)
Next: Chopping a tree! Takes an eternity with a flimsy stone axe unfortunately :(
I manage to find some water in a cave which is one of the cleanest water available, albeit still can give me the nasty effects listed above.. but since I'm parched I'll have to sustain the nausea.
After shaping a vessel for storage I utilize some revolutionary technology to harden the clay into a usable material... the pot kiln! The pot kiln requires 8 pieces of straw and 8 logs of lumber which makes it quite costly but it's the only source of extreme heat that's available until later on, so this will have to do for now.
I dig a one block hole, place my vessel, cover it with straw and logs, light it up and... huzzah!!
We have ourselves a pot kiln! Just in time to finish off quite an eventful day one.
Wouldn't be a caveman without their cave, right?
Next 2 days are taken up by exploration. I'm looking for either an accessible river (many are under sheer cliffs on each side which would make it quite inaccessible to say the least) or a lake to call my own. Having some ore deposits close-by will be a big plus as well but knowing the nature of TerraFirmaCraft I won't be granted such a luxury.
I make 2 new pot kilns to fire up another vessel alongside some other useful knick-knacks: a pot, jug, pan and a small vessel (this one used for smelting metals that'll be handy later). Large vessels, that I have two of now, alongside being early game storage is also used for increasing the shelf life of food, making food rot at half the speed (yes, there are food perishing mechanics here too :3 told you its realistic!).
After finding some ore I couldn't identify alongside a villager's hut I finally found my lake (more like a pond..) to call my own. Being surrounded by hills and caves makes it a bit more difficult but since I am a cave man right now taking a cave for shelter seemed appropriate.
With placing a campfire and boiling some water I have claimed this land as mine! No one else is welcome here, not on my watch..
Start of my cozy farm simulator
Now that I'm nice and settled down I take some time to make a farm with all of the seeds I've been collecting so far. I need to be wary of the hydration of the soil, since every plant has it's own range of hydration it tolerates. If not respected the plant will whittle away and die before it grows, which would be devastating.
I can also enrich the ground with nutrients: Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium that help crops grow faster and give a larger yield on harvest. I haven't played with this mechanic yet but considering how slow crops grow in this mod I'd love to take a look into it. Crops don't need nutrients to grow thankfully so I don't worry about it so far.
While doing some.. cave-keeping I come to find out there is a large, scary ravine close-by. I'll have to watch my step as of now.. keeping the cave lit and safe is something I'll have to keep in mind.
Next on the agenda.. early dip into metal! Not literally, I'd rather not lose my foot :p
The Copper Age
Panning through gravel can yield small copper chunks, 60 of which will be enough for a set of new and shiny copper tools! I put all of the metal into the small vessel alongside some other clay molds into a pit kiln, wait 8 minutes and then quickly pour the molten copper into 3 molds: a pickaxe mold, saw head mold and a prospector pick head mold. These three tools will be paramount into taking me straight into the Copper Age, yay! Making quick progress here.
The saw is the most important tool early game for it lets me access (as you could surmise by now) planks. Planks are one of the most versatile items in the whole game, letting me craft many new things that will be extremely handy, including tool racks, crafting tables and barrels for making many things ranging from mortar, alcohol and tannin for leather production later on. But the most important craft for me is the chest, letting me store way more items than the large vessels can. Still less than the vanilla chest, giving me one row less.
The pickaxe and prospector pick will be used for mining out metals out of the ground (You didn't think panning for copper will be our only way of obtaining it, did you?). But for that I'll have to actually find it which is a herculean task of it's own.
Small intermission to celebrate my 4th heart!! ^_^ Anyway...
You see, ore in this mod doesn't spawn sporadically in caves as in vanilla. This is the "hyper realistic" pack that every YouTube video on TFC advertises it as. Ores spawn in ore veins, each at it's own elevation and, most importantly, in it's own type of stone as well.
For a quick lesson in geology, we have 3 types of stone: Sedimentary, Metamorphic and Igneous (which splits into Extrusive and Intrusive). Each type hosts a variety of stone, e.g. Sedimentary rocks include Shale, Claystone, Limestone, Cherk etc. etc.
Every ore has different preferences of stone it spawns in, e.g. Native Copper only appears in Igneous Extrusive rocks. Thankfully we can spot the ores by small deposits of it on the surface above where the vein is located and the prospector pickaxe helps identify the ore in the area where it's struck.
The exploration age...
But finding these ores require exploration!! I take the entirety of week two of the playthrough so far on exploring alone, looking for interesting terrain around me alongside each ore deposit scattered about.
Another thing I'm looking for is flux stone. Flux stone is very important, because it's namesake is required in working with anvils later on and, more urgently, used to make limewater that's necessary for making mortar. I want mortar for making pretty bricks to make a pretty base >:( And I'll do anything to get it.
Which was the main reason for this exploration journey. It took me all around my world and got me killed by local wildlife ~5-6 times... I stopped counting :( But it made me very happy I turned keep inventory on.
I was unable to find any spot of land with flux stone. Flux stones are limestone, marble, chalk and dolomite. Take a look at my geology map and look at which stones are absent from it. What I did manage to find was a big boulder of chalk situated in a sea of an unrelated rock entirely. Obviously I took what I could without complaining and got it home safely.
On the way I found many useful ores, including but not limited to: Cassiterite, Native Copper, Tetrahedtire, Limonite, Magnetite, Native Gold, Halite, Bismuthinite, Garniterite, Sphalerite, Kaolinite, Bituminous Coal and Sylvite. Too bad I don't have many that are a short treck from my base :( Oh well.
Home safe
For next time I'll continue my progression into the copper age alongside getting more comfortable in my humble cave. Caves are not as big of an asset as it turns out. When unlit it managed to spawn a spear-wielding skeleton and a Creeper that were the end of me :( If I'm ambitious enough I might strive for a copper anvil and leather!! Stay tuned :3
This concludes my first entry in the series!! :D I hope you enjoyed reading it beacuse I enjoyed writing it!! Feel free to say anything you'd like to see in the future blog entries and in the playthrough itself :D
For my parting question for next time.. help me name my home pond! Maybe will make it into a rad fishing spot in the future...
Comments
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Ooble D. Man
You should take a random animal and leave it stranded on a 1x1 island in the center of your pond and leave it there for the rest of the series (its me) (im gonna be the creature)
HEHEHE I vow to do it for you ooble >:D
by Annerose; ; Report