Saturday, October 13, 2012

October 13th, 2012

I'm back! Guild Wars 2 is finally tiring me (along with ArenaNet's tyrannical approach to the "no farming" rule). So what's changed? Well, I'm running the game on snapshots now, the most recently updated being week 40b. So I have many more things to think about and update. Also, no texture pack. It isn't updated for the snapshots, and frankly, I've gotten used to using the default textures once more. It's kind of nostalgic in its own way.

First of all, trading is essentially extinguished from the game. The pitifully small amounts of items that you can trade before the offer becomes blocked now make trading practically worthless. Sure, I could trade away my emeralds for diamond equipment from the blacksmith, but emeralds are now insanely hard to obtain (especially in a world that does not have a lot of local extreme hills generated in the 1.3 version of the game). So I've decided to keep my emerald blocks that I did obtain, and I will use them for decoration, like I did with the lapis blocks.

Second of all, beacons are fun. They are, however, the most difficult thing to obtain in this game. The Wither fight is incredibly gear dependent (though I have that part down already), wither skeletons are not fun to farm, and each maxed beacon requires 164 blocks of iron, emerald, gold, diamond, or a mix of those. Diamond blocks are out of the question as much as emerald blocks now are, so that leaves gold and iron. Of those, iron is by far the easier material to obtain and/or make a farm for. So my world now has an iron golem farm.

















It's unwieldy, sure, but I can easily improve the looks of it later. For now, function is all that matters. Thanks to JL2579's server for this design.















In my ever-continuing quest to remove all the torches from my base, I have added even more redstone lamps to my base. These ones are a bit unique, as they are powered visibly, while not being powered by any redstone source. This is done by powering the lamp with a redstone torch or repeater, and then breaking the torch or repeater with a piston while the chunk is not loaded. Redstone signals can still be transported through unloaded chunks with the use of instant wire (which uses sticky pistons to extend a powered block and continue the redstone line). I am having a slight problem with a few of the lamps, however, as they will not remain powered no matter what I do (so for now, you can see a lever on those ones).




























The Nether hub is now finally being worked on, and it currently leads to two locations. The zombie pigman farm will be one of them, though for now it is just a work in progress. This area is perfectly safe for now (and in tomorrow's world release), but in future world releases, I will almost assuredly have made more progress in this area, meaning that the island will be very straining on your computer, and I would advise you to stay away from the area if you struggle to run the game. I can't even work on this area during the week, as my laptop will drop to about two frames per second while I am looking at the Nether portals. I need to wait until the weekends to get access to my desktop PC.















The second track at my Nether hub leads to a Nether fortress I found while exploring. This fortress is wonderful because it has a large section of it entirely over lava. I turned it into a giant spawning pad for wither skeletons, though I see a lot of blazes, pigmen, and regular skeletons as well (even the occasional magma cube). This is where I have been farming for wither skulls, so I can hopefully get lots of beacons in the future (I am going to need at least four for my base).

That's all I've got for now. Signing out!

3 comments:

  1. When's the next world download? It's been so long!

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  2. The next world download will come out as soon as I can get on a network that is not my school network (as they have Mediafire blocked here). I did not release a download in September because there was no changes in my world. I did not really play at all for the first month that Guild Wars 2 was out.

    So again sorry! I meant to get the world download out on the 14th, but I ran into timing problems. Completely my fault, but I'm almost glad of it. This has let me tweak the iron golem farm some more (I'll explain that in the next update), as well as farm 3 more Wither skulls so anyone can fight the Wither if they download my world.

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    Replies
    1. Any updates on the world? Or did you give up haha. Been 4 years, I always check back just in case.

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