I didn’t take enough pictures in September to be worth a post, but here are the (belated!) October pictures.

I spent quite a while wandering around old spots, taking pictures. First, a few photos along a long underground path near the spawn point:

A pink path through a natural cavern

A mine in a cavern the path meets, with water going through it

A zombie cave

Looking out from lava

The exit at the end of the path

Then I headed back to town overland.

Sunset over a swamp

A house of glass

And some pictures from structures in the lake next to the town.

Inside the sunken ship

The edge of the water near the ship

Looking out from a tower

Looking up at the top of the tower

Snow, ice, and rail

A duck getting rained on

Pat was building a floating island with a few buildings on it.

A house in the sky

Looking along the house to the tower

Inside the house

The house’s builder at sunset

Looking up at the balcony

Looking down from the balcony

Balcony furnishings

A door and ladder

The tower at night

Inside the tower

A floating platform off to the side

Looking up at the floating buildings from the ground

Miranda was working on hollowing out an underground shaft.

Looking down the shaft

Near the bottom

Digging away at the bottom

We’ve hit a gusher

There’s a cave behind that water

The cave is actually pretty cool

The top view from outside

A side view of the entrance island

The island next door

I didn’t do any building in either the July or August VGHVI Minecraft sessions, and neither did anybody else; I wandered about a bit, and took a few pictures, but not many. (And no pictures of anything new.)

A village near the main city

Pinetown in the rain

Flowers, melons, and pumpkins

A stable in that building

The side room off of the library

At the end of the May Minecraft session, the main idea I had for my cave was to put in a stained-glass window, so I decided to work on that in June. But first, I had to make sure that my fence wasn’t on fire!

The fence remains; hopefully that’s not just because of the rain…

Here’s some experimentation about the stained-glass window:

This is where the stained glass will go

Starting off with purple glass

The glass needs to be larger

Adding a second color

Trying out red and yellow

Green and yellow

A different shade of green

Maybe put the yellow in the outside?

Going back to red and yellow

I’m not particularly happy with how this turned out; I don’t have a better idea for what to do there, though.

After that, I wandered around the cave and Pinetown taking pictures:

A nighttime view slanting down into the cave

Daytime, from higher up; the blue and black is the cave entrance

The view towards oaktown

Oaktown at night

A guardian remains

Pat was building a floating island; here are pictures of that.

The temple on the top of the floating island

The bottom of the island

The island’s shadow on the ground

Another view up, with the tips of the ice forest treetops in view

A side view

I think this is the old cottage inside the ice forest? I’m not 100% sure, though…

At the end of the April Minecraft session, I had a few ideas about where to improve the cave next; for May I decided to dig up and out through the cave on the left.

That grey area is a graphics glitch, not the sky

So I started by wandering around, seeing where I thought it would come out, repeating the survey from April. There’s a pretty high snowy hill that I think goes pretty much straight back from the cave; I think if I went up at a 45 degree angle, I’d come out in the middle of that, but I’m not completely sure.

This is behind and above the cave

Here’s the view from the outside back towards the cave

The entire view from the cave to the castle

That seemed non-ideal but workable, and maybe something interesting would come out of the shape of the hill, so I decided to go forward with my plan and start building stairs up and out of the back of the cave. But I ran into a surprise when I did that: not only was there a passage right behind the back wall of that cave, but it was lit by torches. So I’d been there before, I just didn’t realize it.

A surprise visible through the wall

I wandered around; I found some areas of cave that were new (there are a lot of caves and passages here), some that I’d been to before and some that were new, and eventually I managed to make it back to the furnished area of the cave by following through the passages. I still don’t have a complete view of things, but basically there seems to more or less be a ring of cave passages around the large central cave, though it’s twisty enough that it’s hard to put together a mental picture.

Here’s a pit I fell down

Light through a crack

An underground waterfall

A cave with mushrooms

I recognize that stair

At any rate, I kept on going back, and ran into a second set of caves; there was a passage that was going up and to the left, so I followed it for a while, but eventually it turned too much so I decided to just build my stairs out in the appropriate direction, and I didn’t run into any more surprises.

The exit to the surface

Lava right ahead of me

A pond and a duck past the lava

Let’s build a hot springs

It turns out that, because of the jog to the left from following the existing passage, I came out just barely to the side of the hill that I thought I would be up: the exit is in a really nice position, actually. Nice not only in terms of coming out right at the edge of the hill, but also nice because there was a lava and a pool right there, so I decided to treat the pool as a hot spring.

Cleaning out the inside of the pool

Finishing up the back

Maybe dark brown stairs would work better?

Or grey stairs?

Nah, let’s stick with light oak

That’s the inside; looking at it from the outside, there were some safety problems, so I added railings.

People could fall in!

Attempt one at a railing

That was too overwhelming, light oak is better

The first attempt at a fence around the lava didn’t work so well

A nether stone fence seems better, though we’ll see if it’s still intact this month

The view back towards the floating castle

I also tidied up the route from the cave to the hot springs, adding signs and proper stairs.

Improving the route out, now that I know what it’s doing

Here’s the cave entrance

The next place I decided to work on was the upper room in the back. First I tried a podium, but that didn’t look so great, so I decided to use a couch and bookshelves, similar to the room beneath it.

Here’s the experiment with the podium

Nah, let’s stick with a couch

Front view of the couch and decor

Here’s the whole room

Once that was done, I decided to work on the stairs up from that room, to the back exit. And there, too, I ran into a surprise: when I replaced blocks with stairs, I again ran into the cave passage ring. I ended up splitting the steps into two: one up to the back exit, and one back down into the cave passage ring.

The hole I hit in when building stairs

Splitting the stairs into up and down

The other side of the split

Here are the stairs continuing up

The current view of the central cave

I’m not sure what to do next. Maybe I’ll work on that flat area above the upper room? Maybe I’ll investigate that ring passage? Maybe I’ll start connecting this cave to Pinetown? Pretty sure I’ll continue in that area, at any rate.

Miranda was also there for some of the time, she was working on a desert castle.

Teleporting to the desert castle

A full view of the castle

Looking through the portcullis

The top level of the castle

Inside the corner towers

The lower passages

The surrounding scenery

Another view of the surroundings

For the April Minecraft session, I wanted to play extend the “band of wood floors” aesthetic that I decided made sense in my cave the previous month.

But first I wanted to work on accent colors: the floors are light oak, but other wood should be darker. And, in fact, I noticed that I was already (somewhat accidentally) using dark oak for railings. I decided to start by working on a table in the big room that I’d experimented with the previous time: it didn’t seem right, but I think that was because I tried putting in light oak, so I wanted to try again with something darker.

Here’s the room without a table at all

A dark oak table is actually still too light

Going still darker with spruce is right

It was too far back, move the back end forward

Here’s the top view of the final position and color

At this point, I thought I had the rules: floors are light oak, railings are dark oak, furniture is spruce. So I went to fix other areas of the cave to match those rules.

Put a wood floor in that upper room

Extend the floor out to the sides, and add in a railing

There’s some stone down there that should be wood

While walking down there, I noticed that the room behind the waterfall had the wrong colors

Here are the right colors

The exit behind the waterfall needs to get turned to wood

There’s wood up through the end of the finished area; the part behind that is (largely) unfinished, I’m marking that by leaving it with stone

Here’s that same view from higher up, now with wood in place

That seemed to work pretty well, now I went around again taking a closer look.

This couch is too dark

For this couch, dark oak actually works better than spruce

A stone floor hidden behind a door

Let’s extend the wood a bit further

This couch is too light

Dark oak works well here, too

A top view showing four levels of wood floors

I like that last picture; the next question is what to do next. That upper room clearly needs more stuff in it, I should fix that. There’s also a passage above it leading to a tiny room (not visible in that picture), maybe I should do something with that? There’s a cave passage on the left (on the level with the balcony all around). And there’s the unfinished area near the door at the bottom of the waterfall that I mentioned before. So those all seem like possible areas for refinement.

Here’s the entrance to that cave passage I mentioned

This is where the passage dead-ends

I thought about building a door out to the surface there; the question, then, is how far down are we? If I’m remembering correctly, I counted and it was somewhere around 25 blocks beneath the surface, so I’d have to go up a fair amount; I decided to go outside and take a look to see where it would come out.

Here’s the view from above towards the back: the railing that you can see down in the cave is right in front of the entrance to the passage in question, which stretches back towards the floating castle

Here’s the back side

The main takeaway there is that, if I dig back and up at a 45 degree angle, then I’ll have to go more than 25 blocks, because there’s this hill up there that is above and behind it. I think that’s still what I want to do, but I might do more surgery there: maybe I’ll hollow out a big area under the cave, like I did with the train station in my first Minecraft world? I’m not completely sure yet, but I like how a big structure there would link my cave to Pat’s floating castle.

A mostly blank space above the upper room

This is the other area that I was thinking about: if you look closely, you’ll see a small opening above the upper room, but, as-is, it’s not really great for a room. But it’s also so high up that I’m not sure a room there on its own is the best idea, and also having something relatively flat and shallow would work better with the way the wall starts curving in there. So instead, I’m thinking that I might take some inspiration from train stations or cathedrals and think of that as the place where either a big clock or a stained-glass window would go? I’ll experiment.

For the March Minecraft session I wanted to think about how the long balcony I’d added in February affected the cave I was working on. So at first I wandered around a bit:

I have no idea where this is from; probably not even that same cave, maybe it’s the ravine in the ice forest?

Another view of that persistent glitch

The top of a waterfall in a cave

The bottom of the waterfall in the cave

I remember looking in the glitch cave, and deciding that it didn’t actually go all the way through to the outside. Which is a potential area for further change: maybe I could dig out from there and turn it into a third entrance to the cave? I’ll think about that this week.

At any rate, the main area that I settled on was the lower room in the back: it’s too shallow. So I deepened and furnished it, so it could start to stand on its own.

This room is too shallow

I hit a hole in the ceiling when extending it further back

Now the depth looks right, and there’s floor covering

A bookshelf on the right wall

And a sofa on the back wall

Once I had that looking nice, I got to thinking about the first large room I’d finished: I liked its sides, but there’s too much space in the middle. So I decided to build a table there:

Too much space in the middle

A back view of the table

A front view of the table

My memory when building that was that I thought it might be too big and/or not a great design. When I look at it in those pictures, though, it seems fine from a space point of view, but clearly the wrong color: I don’t want the table to blend into the floor! So I’ll change that this month.

Here’s the view of the back of the central area

Arches when looking up in the back

The upper room could use some work

I don’t have a good picture representing all of this, but my current hypothesis is that it’s starting to point me at a coherent aesthetic that wasn’t there four months ago: the band of wood from the balcony combined with using that wood as the floor for finished rooms is a nice counterpart to the stone walls elsewhere. So I want to see if I can continue that pattern while finishing off other areas.

After doing that, I did my usual flying around:

A castle foundation – I don’t know if that’s new or something old that I happened to notice now

A flow of lava in the distance

Torches in midair

Revisiting Dan’s path

Pat’s still at work

For the February Minecraft session, I knew I wanted to continue the improvements I’d made in December. I’d built some rooms in the back of my cave; the question, then, was how to extend those into a complex.

Looking at the room in the back

While wandering around, I noticed what looked like the sky poking through over on one side; I didn’t believe that that was really the sky, I thought it was probably a glitch, but when looking at that, I realized that there was not only a cave passage there in the wall that I hadn’t realized, but that passage connected to the outside.

Is this a glitch or an actual hole?

So that got me thinking about expanding laterally from the room in the back; I decided that I would build a balcony around three sides of the central cavern. The question then was exactly how that would work; I wasn’t sure if I wanted to use the existing railing and cut into the walls a bit, or if I wanted to extend out into the center. The former would cause questions about my stairs, the latter might make the balcony cast too much of a shadow beneath it.

Planning how the balcony will extend from the back room

What am I going to do with these stairs?

I think this lava is from the cave passage that I discovered, but I could be wrong; actually, thinking about it more, maybe I discovered another cave passage behind that back room, when I dug into the walls?

I eventually decided that cutting away the wall, moving the stair back, and having the stair mostly exit into the balcony instead of the back room was the right approach. And, if I’m remembering correctly, when I was moving the stair, I dug into another cave behind that room, maybe that’s where the above picture is from? At any rate, once I did that, I got the balcony working nicely on the three non-water sides of the cave.

The completed balcony on all three sides

Here’s a view from the water towards the back

That glitch is still there: it’s a persistent rendering glitch rather than a loading glitch

And the stairs ended up working okay going out into the balcony, with the help of cutting out one corner.

The reworked stair exit

The reworking caused some steps to be visible in the ceiling

Another view of the back, where you can see the stairs a little better

I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do next; I might add a fourth side to the balcony, but I’m not convinced I can find a way to do that that will work well with the water. Maybe I’ll explore the newly discovered passage more and turn it into another official entrance into the cave, maybe I’ll build more rooms.

Pat, meanwhile, was finishing off a lighthouse he’d built, and he added a ship:

Ship and lighthouse

Steps to the lighthouse

An entrance gateway

A better view of the ship

And then he started building something more abstract in an ice forest, it’s a rather beautiful tunnel going down into a big space that he excavated with the help of some TNT. I don’t think he’s done with it, but here’s the current status:

A view from the top

The upper half of the tunnel down

The transition in the middle

The chamber at the bottom, going down to bedrock

The glass tunnel from the outside

For the third iteration of my Spark Agency deck, I mostly wanted to take the prior version (which felt pretty solid to me) and make it Most Wanted List compliant. I had three Astroscripts, two NAPDs, three SanSans, and an Eli, so obviously I had work to do.

Having said that, most of that work was pretty clear: I had an Adonis Campaign and an Eve Campaign, and I wasn’t feeling either of those, so that freed up 5 influence. Replacing the Eli with a TMI gave me one MWL influence and one regular influence, too. So that took care of the Astroscripts and the SanSans; I replaced them with Explode-A-Paloozas, and I was all set. Or at least all set for MWL compliance; Turnpike hadn’t been doing me any good, so I replaced it with a Tollbooth.

And, honestly, I like the new version better. There’s a reason why I didn’t like the expensive campaigns, TMI is good if you can rez it when the runner is broke, and while it’s nice if the runner can’t steal NAPD, the credits from Explode-A-Palooza has been extremely useful a couple of times.

Spark Agency, v. 3 (a.k.a. Deals Galore!)

Spark Agency: Worldswide Reach

Agenda (10)

• 3x AstroScript Pilot Program ☆☆☆
• 2x Explode-a-palooza
• 1x Global Food Initiative •
• 3x Project Beale
• 1x 15 Minutes

Asset (10)

• 2x Daily Business Show
• 3x Jackson Howard
• 2x Launch Campaign
• 3x PAD Campaign

Upgrade (7)

• 2x Cyberdex Virus Suite
• 2x Product Placement
• 3x SanSan City Grid ☆☆☆

Operation (6)

• 2x Biotic Labor •••• ••••
• 2x Hedge Fund
• 2x Sweeps Week

Barrier (3)

• 1x TMI
• 2x Wraparound

Code Gate (8)

• 1x Archangel
• 2x Enigma
• 3x Pop-up Window
• 2x Tollbooth

Sentry (2)

• 2x Assassin

Other (3)

• 3x Special Offer

9 influence spent (max 15-6=9)
20 agenda points (between 20 and 21)
49 cards (min 45)
Cards up to Data and Destiny

My NetrunnerDB description:

A pretty basic fast advance core, though I can’t claim to be a fast advance expert, and I probably play this deck more slowly than is wise. Spark Agency helps keep the runner poor through the card ability and their desire to trash assets; and sudden infusions of cash (Special Offer, Explode-a-palooza, etc.) mean that I can rez expensive ice more frequently than I’m used to when playing NBN, or that I can blow money advancing agendas. And the upgrades give possibilities for misrepresenting servers as holding agendas: it’s always fun to have your opponent blow a scoring window on a two-upgrade server that earns you a couple of credits.

I’m not at all sure what to do next; it seems pretty solid, I’ll bring it to a tournament this Saturday and see how it does.

I liked the second version of my Sunny deck quite a bit more than its predecessors; so my next goal was to get it down to 50 cards (from 52) and to speed up my draw.

I added a third Drug Dealer, to speed things up. I thought about adding Modded, but that’s a click and a play for three cards, which isn’t a lot of efficiency; I decided to try out Mr. Li, on hopes that he would get the key cards early. I’d been flush in economy, so I got rid of the third Modded (The Supplier takes care of Hardware, and I can afford to pay for one of my icebreakers out of pocket) and my Dr. Lovegood (early in the game I can sequence things to avoid the Drug Dealer tax, and at the end of the game I’ll have a 3-5 credit drip even without Dr. Lovegood, which is more than enough). That’s neutral on cards and influence; to slim down to 50, I got rid of one Plascrete and one Datasucker.

Here’s the result:

Sun Supply (a.k.a. Sunny, v. 3)

Sunny Lebeau: Security Specialist

Event (7)

• 2x Dirty Laundry
• 2x Modded •• ••
• 3x Sure Gamble

Hardware (9)

• 1x Plascrete Carapace
• 3x Rabbit Hole • • •
• 2x Security Chip
• 3x Security Nexus

Resource (27)

• 1x Adjusted Chronotype ••
• 3x Daily Casts
• 3x Data Folding
• 3x Drug Dealer • • •
• 3x Earthrise Hotel
• 2x Globalsec Security Clearance
• 2x Jak Sinclair
• 1x Mr. Li ••
• 3x Power Tap • • •
• 3x The Supplier •• •• ••
• 3x Underworld Contact

Icebreaker (6)

• 2x GS Sherman M3
• 2x GS Shrike M2
• 2x GS Striker M1

Program (1)

• 1x Datasucker •

24 influence spent (max 25)
50 cards (min 50)
Cards up to Data and Destiny

One of my coworkers had the bright idea that we should start playing each others’ decks; and I like this deck and have learned enough about how to play it that I figured I should write up notes on it. I’ve put them on NetrunnerDB, but I’ll put them here as well:

This deck takes a while to set up, but once it gets going, it’s almost unstoppable: once set up, it’s common to be able to break into any server while making a profit over the course of the turn. I haven’t taken it in its current form to any tournaments, but my guess is that it’s still a little too slow to deal with a good fast advance, but it’s a lot of fun.

You want to get out The Supplier as quickly as possible; mulligan if you don’t either get The Supplier or Drug Dealer, and install Drug Dealer as soon as possible as well. (Usually just pay the credit instead of putting it on The Supplier.) Then you want to get as many cards drawn as possible and installed with the help of The Supplier; Earthrise Hotel is your friend (but don’t install it before you have The Supplier), and of course drip economy is good. Also, get out Rabbit Hole when you see it, both to thin out your deck (install all three copies at once, hopefully with a two-credit discount from The Supplier), to reduce the chance of traces landing, and to set up the Security Nexus / Power Tap combo.

During this phase, pay attention to the timing of your beginning-of-turn actions: you’ll be running poor, but the advantage is, many turns, you’ll be able to sequence your actions to not have to pay the Drug Dealer tax. Do only as much running as is necessary to keep the corp honest on remote servers and to make them rez a bit of ice; also, as Modded shows up, you can start getting your breakers out. And definitely get Security Nexus installed, don’t forget that you can use The Supplier for hardware as well. Make sure you use The Supplier every turn; if you have too much stuff stacked up there, consider just installing cheap resources (e.g. Underworld Contact) directly.

Once you’ve got your console, and some money, you can start running a bit more; depending on what parts of your rig, you may use Globalsec to snipe some assets, or you may get free Datasucker tokens off of Jak Sinclair. Also, if you have Power Tap installed, you might be able make a profit during those runs, by forcing traces with your console where you have 6 link.

And then, once the full rig is out, money will be flowing in, Power Tap is even more of a profit center, and you can break into anything. For a fully iced-up server, you’ll need Security Chip; don’t be afraid to use them, just pick your spots.

There’s no recursion, so try to avoid throwing away your extra copies of your icebreakers; you should generally have room in your hand anyways.

I think I’ll take it to the tournament next week in this form. Right now, the two cards I’m most dubious about are Mr. Li and Adjusted Chronotype: I almost never use the former (though it may still be useful when dealing with particularly bad draws?), and the latter is really there more out of loss aversion than anything else, buy the time I’m leaning on Globalsec I can generally live without the extra click.

I’m not entirely sure what to put in its place, though. Something to let me put a little more pressure in the early-middle game, maybe Special Order or Inside Job? Tag defense? Add back in that second Datasucker? Add in a third Security Chip, and don’t be afraid to use it earlier? Multithreader, to let me afford to make runs earlier even with expensive icebreakers? Hard to say…

I didn’t end up getting any good pictures during the January Minecraft session: I spent most of my time traveling (we’re too spread out now, and the server was acting oddly so I traveled slowly, I guess I should have just teleported to the coordinates), and when I got back to where I’d been building, I didn’t have much in the way of inspiration. Hopefully I’ll have more pictures next month, we’ll see; it is a bit of a shame that we’re so spread out now, though…