I finished six more songs today; that brought me up to rank 30.

I'm at rank 30 with 10,620,581 points

An improvement of 548,496 points over last week, or 91,416 per song: smaller improvements than I’d been making last week, but still enough for a boost of 8 ranks. Hopefully I’ll make it into the 20s next week, though that isn’t guaranteed, given that I only have one song left and that other people are improving as well; even if I do, I don’t expect to stay there for very long, but hopefully I’ve got a good enough cushion over 100th place (or even 50th place) to stay pretty high up on the leaderboard for a while.

As one might expect, the songs are definitely getting harder. I was surprised at how easy Bohemian Rhapsody was this time, but the songs after that (e.g. Llama) were tricky, and I occasionally even failed out. Also, my leaderboard scores weren’t as high as I’m used to (I think I only made it into the 30s once today): I get the impression that there are several people who have put a good effort into these songs but who haven’t bothered to go through the easier ones. The songs are generally still fun: Bohemian Rhapsody is remarkable in its own way, and I quite enjoyed playing Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.

My big accomplishment this week, though, was that I finally made it through Antibodies on Expert without no-fail turned on! I wasn’t too optimistic when I first tried it: I failed out at around 15%, and training mode didn’t help much. But then I went through the whole song on with no-fail turned on, and that got the rhythm into my fingers. (It helps a lot that the second half of the song is pretty easy: there are two quite tricky bits at the start, but once you make it past those, it’s almost all smooth sailing, while still having a rhythm that helps you when replaying the first part.) So after a couple of no-fail runs, the second of which was rather good, I turned failure back on; and I did fail a few times, but eventually I made it all the way through the song.

I still don’t like the song, and it’s the one that I’m by far the worst at: I’m not even in the top 1% of players. I’m pretty sure that, if all I cared about was my rank on the leaderboard, my best strategy would be to try to go for 100% on Medium but (despite this series of posts) I’m not so focused on my score as that: I want to play the pieces well, and playing on Medium is incompatible with that. (Hmm, actually, looking through the leaderboard, maybe Medium wouldn’t be good enough to bump up my score much. And my rank is 268th place, which isn’t a complete embarrassment, at least.)

Anyways, that means that I have one song left! That last song is Roundabout, and I expect it to take a fair amount of work to go through: it’s a lot more musical than Antibodies, but my memory (bolstered by looking at the sheet music) is that there are some fast repeated arpeggios that will take some amount of luck for me to hit well, and the less repetitive bits are quite a bit trickier than in any other song on the disc. Still, it’s only one song, and a song that I won’t resent while playing it over and over again, so I expect that I’ll finish it next week.

And then I’ll be done! At least with the on-disc content: there’s DLC that I could play. I’ll certainly try to learn the Billy Joel pack better than I have so far: my first impression of that one was that it was fun but hard enough that I dipped down to Hard on a few of the songs. I have some Doors DLC lying around; I’ll give those more of a try, and if I like them I guess I’ll download the rest of the Doors DLC. And Modern Love is super fun, I’ll give that a few more tries. After that, I’ll give a scan for other keyboard DLC that could be interesting; anybody have any recommendations? In general, though, I expect I’ll be putting in most of my Rock Band time working on Pro Guitar.

Playdom’s other big city builder was City of Wonder. It was built on a modified version of the Social City engine, so you’ll see the same isometric view and the same sort of charming animations as in that game. And I played it quite a bit last year, and rather enjoyed it.

Its main difference is that it throws in Civilization-style elements: a tech tree and light combat. I liked the former, and didn’t care much for the latter, but fortunately the combat was entirely optional, so it didn’t end up affecting how I played the game. The tech tree did mean, however, that I couldn’t grow my city in the same way that I did in Social City: the buildings from the different eras had a noticeably different art style, so it didn’t make sense to either intermingle them or to keep the very oldest buildings in the center of the city. What I ended up doing was playing for a while, then doing a huge reorganization where I moved the oldest buildings out to the fringe: this meant that the ages represented a rural-to-urban transition from the fringe to the core of my city, which I rather liked!

Now, some pictures of the various bits:

The oldest stone-age huts, along with some farms and mines

The stone age culture buildings, along with farms

Here are some of the oldest buildings. You can see the dirt road, transitioning to gravel. I also put most of my production buildings out here.

Bronze age, moving into the classical age

Now the buildings and roads are getting decidedly less primitive.

Embassy row

You have embassies representing your friends who also play the game; like most people, I clustered those together, because otherwise they’d look out of place. Eventually this got out of hand for people who really liked the game, so they provided a way to combine multiple friends’ embassies into a single building, but I never did that.

The main square, with classical and enlightened age buildings

This was going to be the center part of town, though I never played much into the modern age, so my buildings ended up mostly ending here. Note that the streets are versatile enough that you can construct a nice plaza out of street tiles if you want: I did so, trying to ring it with some of the more impressive buildings I had.

The aqueduct and the magic corner

I built an aqueduct into town, though I didn’t end up doing as much with it as I liked. (Though it did provide a good location for my Colossus, if nothing else.) Also, you can see above that my buildings from the “Age of Alchemy”: one way in which the game tried to expand was by offering a couple of technology trees that you could only get by premium currency. I did the first of those, but not the second. More recently, they’ve added a sea colony, which I’ll show below.

Pyramids in the desert

You can build various wonders in the game; one of them, the Pyramids, I had a hard time fitting into my decor, until I realized that I could surround it with dirt roads that looked enough like sand to be a plausible match. (And then it proved to be a suitable location for an oil rig, too.) The “sand” still functioned as roads, however, which rather amused me when I had a parade (complete with sousaphone) marching through the desert at some point in the game. (That’s why there’s a cow wandering through the desert in this picture.)

The whole city

Here’s how it looks when you put it all together.

My sea colony

And here’s the sea colony that’s recently been introduced. I haven’t done much with it, but I rather like the idea of having separate land and water tiles with their own distinct sets of buildings (or ships or octopi) that you can place on them. And you can convert land tiles into water or vice-versa, so it doesn’t have to stay as blocky as the default, I’ve just been lazy so far.

I was planning to hold off on Rock Band 3 Pro Guitar until I was done with my Pro Keys playthrough. But then the guitar arrived, so of course I had to take it out of the box, tune it up, and do the ceremonial picking out of Alice’s Restaurant. And then the MIDI adapter arrived, and I read a few reports from people saying how much their left hand hurts when they’re starting out on Pro Guitar; that suggests that, when I do dive into it, I won’t be able to spend hours at a stretch on it. And, conveniently, it’s your left hand that hurts, while when playing Pro Keys, I only use my right hand. So I can work on them both at once! (Well, not literally both at once. But both in the same afternoon.)

Some background: I have played guitar a bit in the past. Specifically, I spent the summer after my sophomore year at college at a math research program, and I brought along a guitar. I learned a few chords, and two or three songs (the only one of which that has stuck being the aforementioned Alice’s Restaurant), but I didn’t get at all good at the instrument, and I haven’t picked it up much in the intervening two decades. There are even basic mechanics that I didn’t learn back then: e.g. I used my fingers instead of a pick, and I was really awful at barre chords. So, while I’m not coming at this completely from scratch, I’m coming at it from a quite different position than I was with Pro Keys. (And I’m fairly sure that Pro Guitar is quite a bit more realistic than Pro Keys, too, so it will be harder in that way as well!)

Anyways, I fired it up late this morning. (And I was pleased that the game noticed that I’d plugged in a real guitar for the first time, and offered to send me over to the appropriate tutorial!) I went through the first lesson, and started the second one; my hand started to hurt pretty badly when I was doing the part that involved sliding up and down the neck while holding down a string, though, so I stopped. (I might want to adjust the neck of the guitar so I don’t have to press down quite as far.) As the game suggested, I also played The Hardest Button to Button on Easy—thinking back, this may actually literally be the first time I’ve ever played something in Rock Band on Easy (I know I did some of the songs on Easy way back on the original Guitar Hero, but since then I think I’ve always started on Medium even when learning a new instrument), but yeah, that’s the right difficulty level for me right now.

I went through all the Warmup songs on Easy. Mostly went pretty well, I even managed to hit 100% on one of them on my first try, but it’s also clearly just the start of a long learning curve. It will be a while before I can even reliably play an arbitrary string without looking down at my right hand—that’s one way in which playing with a pick feels really different to me from playing with my fingers. And my left hand has quite a bit more room to get lost in! (Actually, my left hand was doing better than I feared it would, given the range of frets that you have to hit. But it’s still doing quite badly.) The whole experience has given me renewed appreciation for all those piano and harpsichord lessons I took: I can’t really imagine what it would be like to try Pro Keys on Hard or Expert without your hand just knowing what a 1-3-5 chord or a 1-4-6 chord feels like.

Just a start, and I hope I’ll have more time this weekend to work on it. Also, one pleasant side effect of starting a new instrument in the game: there are a lot of really easy goals to pass, giving a nice boost to your fan count!

malvasia bianca 309,152,512; Academy of Dr X 307,761,072

I wasn’t sure how much time I’d have to play Rock Band this weekend, what with GDC having just ended, but it actually ended up being a really nice way to relax; so I played it a lot, going through all nine Nightmare songs and the first two Impossible songs. (It didn’t hurt that I have a Squier sitting against the wall motivating me to finish up Pro Keys.) And I’m happy to say that I’ve accomplished all of my goals, with seven songs to spare!

I'm at rank 38 with 10,072,085 points

That’s an improvement of 1,253,740 over last week, or 113,976 points per song. If I can keep that up for the remaining seven songs, I’ll end up with 10,869,917 points, which (if others’ scores don’t change) would leave me in 23rd place; who knows if that will happen (I’ve never successfully played two of the remaining songs—Antibodies and Roundabout—on Expert), but I’d be surprised if I didn’t end up somewhere in the twenties.

Playing through the Nightmare songs has been super interesting: that label is quite inappropriate! The songs are getting musically more complex rather than just throwing fast repetitive notes at me; as a result, I dipped into training mode on pretty much every song this level, but I ended up doing better on these songs than on the Challenging songs. There was only one song where I didn’t manage five stars (Fly Like an Eagle—that noodling around at the end, which practice mode labels “Trippy Part” (as opposed to three earlier sections that are labeled “Spacey Part”), is hard!), and even there, I did well enough that I’m in 31st place on the song leaderboard. (So you could make a case that the star cuttofs are calibrated wrong; but it didn’t feel like a five-star performance to me, which is corroborated by my only hitting 88% of the notes.) And I even managed gold stars on two of the songs, and on 20th Century Boy I hit 8th place on the leaderboard, which I believe is my highest rank yet. (I see that I’m already down to 9th place, though. I didn’t get gold stars on that song; again, possible calibration failure, but I only got 91% of the solo, so it didn’t feel like a gold star performance, I think people just aren’t putting in the time to learn the solo.)

In fact, there were several songs where I felt like I could hit 100%: not that it was likely that I’d do so, but that there wasn’t any group of notes in the song that I felt that I shouldn’t be able to hit most of the time. Even so, it was quite a surprise when I managed to actually do that on Cold as Ice!

I got 100% on Cold as Ice!

Despite that, though, I still haven’t gotten the Pro Keys Streak 500: that looks impossible! Hmm, this forum post suggests trying Antibodies on medium, maybe I’ll be able to manage that? I might go back and work on some of the remaining Pro Keys goals once I’ve gone through all the songs: five-starring all the songs on Expert seems like it’s just out of reach without heroic effort, but hopefully I’ll be able to five-star them all on Hard? (Heck, who knows if I’ll be able to three-star them all on Expert without turning on no fail…)

I doubt I’ll be done next week: even though I have only seven songs left, I just don’t see myself finishing both Antibodies and Roundabout next week. So probably two weeks left, potentially three weeks. (I may end up going out and buying sheet music for Roundabout, so I can practice it on the piano, albeit in a significantly different form.) My MIDI adapter should show up this week, so I’ll definitely want to jump into Pro Guitar soon; I may actually end up interleaving the two, because my fingers definitely need more toughening up before they’ll be able to handle long stretches of play on the Squier. (Just playing Alice’s Restaurant for a bit last night was enough to get my fingers aching.) Fortunately, that only affects my left hand, while I only use my right hand for keys, so switching between the two shouldn’t be a problem.

I didn’t blog about Social City so much (Playdom discouraged blogging about our games), but I played it a lot in early 2010, both alone and with Miranda. (We had a tradition where I would earn in-game coins during the week and then over the weekend we’d figure out where to place items in our city.) As the city evolved, we’d have to figure out where to place new buildings in such a way that it didn’t destroy the character of the existing city, and led to a city that we could imagine we’d want to live in.

Here’s a tour of our city.

The starter area of the city

The game starts you off with a factory, a few houses, and a nascent town square; this is what that starter area eventually turned into.

Our main residential area

We expanded those houses into a residential area. We tried to avoid putting single-family houses right next to factories, but they’re not too far away, with a little bit of buffering provided by larger buildings.

The industrial part of town

We put all the factories together: smog central. Other industrial buildings went there as well, e.g. the radio tower and the water tank.

The town square

The town square is the heart of the city. I really liked it when they released the brick road: I thought it worked well as an accent around the square. The early government buildings and parks went here.

The main shopping district

We wanted to find a place for every non-premium building somewhere in town. In my mind, I divided retail buildings into upscale and downscale, and put the more upscale ones over here, next to the town square on the opposite side from the factories.

Second shopping district

The other retail buildings went south of the town square, near where the factories were located; aside from expressing elitism and class structure, this also was done for the pragmatic reason that they were generally more enclosed: you can put a movie theatre or a megamart next to a factory without ruining the experience.

Government and other imposing buildings

As we leveled up, we unlocked more impressive government buildings; these we put in an area southwest of the town square, along with similarly constructed buildings such as large banks.

School and dirt road

On the edge of the residential area we put the school; also, to represent the transition from town, we added a dirt road leading to a wooded area.

Large animal row

From the beginning, large animals were available as gifts. I would have been happy to have not placed these in the city at all—I wouldn’t want to live in a city with giant animal statues!—but Miranda overruled me. So, as a compromise, we put them in a row, forming a border between the factory district and a recreation area.

Recreation area

Here’s the recreation area: it’s also next to the residential district, on the other side from the schools. Lots of parks, lots of sports fields, one of only two places in town where I broke down and put parking lots.

A river and rocky trees

When the game was launched, it didn’t have water, so people ended up using blue flowers to represent rivers. So we placed that as a border on the southeast side of town, near the recreation area; on the far side of the river, we put trees and rock outcroppings.

Japanese district

Once they’d fleshed out standard building types, the game team started releasing various themed gift sets. The first one of those (and the only one that I placed in my main city) was the Japanese theme, and I really liked it: nice architecture, I like the cherry blossoms lining the paths.

The entire city

And here’s what it looks like when you put it all together!

The static pictures above don’t really do the game justice: a lot of its charm comes from its animations. (Both for individual buildings and for vehicles and pedestrians roaming the streams.) Here’s a tour through some of them; my apologies for the bad cropping, I’ll find a better way to do screencasts if I start to make a habit of them. (Anybody have screencast software for the Mac that they recommend?)

I didn’t have a lot of time this week to play Rock Band, but I did manage to finish off the last six Challenging songs. Which, it turns out, was enough to give me a nice boost: I’m rank 65 now.

I'm at rank 65 with 8,818,345 points

That’s an improvement of 535,479 points compared to last week, or almost 90,000 per song. Which is particularly surprising since there was one song (Break on Through (To the Other Side)) that I actually didn’t improve my score on at all: for whatever reason, my fingers really weren’t feeling it during the last part of that song today. Actually, there were several songs where I was worried about my performance, but on most of them things clicked eventually and I managed to do a decent job. Still, we’re far past where I can come close to hitting 100% of the notes; in fact, I didn’t get gold stars on any of the songs today, and didn’t manage five stars on all of them. (I am not alone in this; I’m still happy with my per-song ranks, and I managed to hit 23rd place on Portions for Foxes today.)

Right now, 50th place is 9,259,776 points; even allowing for other people improving, I should be at the very least close to hitting that rank at my next session, and may pass it. (Assuming I don’t take time off after GDC craziness.) I have 18 songs left; if I can average 90,000 point improvements on the remaining ones, then that will put me at about 10.4 million points. Which may be a bit optimistic, but probably not too much so: as the songs get harder, they generally contain more points, so there’s more room for improvement, and that seems to be making up for me missing more of the notes. (And it’s not like I did a spectacular job on my first run through the songs, either, the counterexample mentioned above aside: most of them I’ve played through successfully once on hard and once on expert.) So even if today was a bit of an exception, hitting 10 million points looks very doable now.

Though not everything is going well for me in the Rock Band leaderboard watch: Jonathan is now 18,088,640 fans ahead of me. And that gap will get wider before it gets smaller: working on my pro keys skills is great, but it doesn’t actually end up netting me any in-game goals. So my fan count will stay close to where it is until I get done with my current project and start working on another instrument, and who knows how many fans he’ll have by then.

I’d started a mine last time; it was fairly successful, but I certainly wanted more iron. And I actually rather enjoyed the process of mining; yay for repetitive clicking. So I went back and mined some more, this time branching off of the left side of my central passage.

Starting work on the left side of the central corridor

It was uneventful but reasonably successful at the start: here’s some coal, some iron, and some diamond, and I also found quite a bit of redstone.

Coal and iron

Diamond

But then it got more interesting from an environmental point of view. This picture looks innocuous enough,

Light around a bend

except that I didn’t create that bend to the right, and I didn’t put a light source there, either. And, if you go around the bend, here’s what you find:

A small pool of lava

That’s in the direction where I’d be digging my next branch, so I had to deal with that lava pool on a couple of subsequent branches; here’s a view of the same pool from a later branch.

Looking down at that lava pool from a later branch

Also, at some point around here I started to hear water. At first, it wasn’t too loud, but eventually it got loud enough that I felt that I should be sloshing around in it. So I stopped my normal digging and started digging towards the source of the water; it took me a surprisingly long time, but eventually I dug through a block that resulted in this:

Water streaming down through the ceiling

I’d been sensible and set up things so the water wouldn’t flood my mine corridor; still, I had a reasonable little river there.

The bottom of the waterfall, a fair bit further down

And even that wasn’t the end of my excitement: in my next branch, I ran into what I thought was a small bit of lava:

Another bit of lava

but when I started digging my way around it, it just got bigger and bigger. I guess this is the sort of thing that happens when you’re digging right above the lava level; it was a pleasant change of pace, I guess.

It's a lava lake

Finally dug a gallery all around the lake

But I wasn’t going to let a little thing like a lake of lava interrupt my plans, so I continued with my branch. Which meant that, of course, I ran into my waterfall again. But it was worth it, I found a good haul of iron soon after making my way around that.

Waterfall, we meet again

Finally a good amount of iron

If it hadn’t been for the last couple of iron lodes, I would have been annoyed at the iron in this session session; as is, I’m fairly sure that I ran into as many redstone blocks as iron blocks this time. Here’s my haul at the end of the mining session:

Loot from this mining session

On my way up, I took a detour to explore all the various chests that I had scattered around; I’m glad I did, because I found quite a bit of iron inside of them. So combining that will all of my previous loot, here’s what I have now:

My current stash

That’s enough for 592 minecart tracks, which should carry me a decent distance. Of course, I’ll have to use some for carts, and, as I discovered in this week’s VGHVI session, I’ll also have to save some for boosters.

I’ll leave you with one last sheep picture:

Sheep on the balcony

We had another one of our more-or-less monthly VGHVI Minecraft sessions last week; here are the pictures.

Roger and Miranda continued their work on the temple from last time. Miranda had some ideas for how to finish off the roof, and it looked great. Here are some views from inside:

Finishing off the roof of the temple

And now the roof of the temple is done

The sheep approve

And here’s the outside of the temple roof:

The outside of the temple at night

A top view of the temple roof

Miranda also built a fire pit near the temple:

Fire pit outside the temple

Don't fall in!

I’d been curious about how mine carts work, so I did some track building, with Jonathan and David Sahlin doing much of the work. Definitely an educational experience, it pointed at some ways in which my naive ideas for track building on my main world won’t work, and I clearly need to look into boosters. (Incidentally, for people who were complaining about lag: apparently circular boosters can cause lag in multiplayer servers, so that might have been what was going on. I’ll replace them with something else the next time we play.)

Near the start of the minecart tracks

Looking back along the minecart tracks

Looking back along the second segment of minecart tracks

The sheep approve of the boosters, too

The tracks end near the temple

Minecarts litter the ground

At some point, Jonathan commented that it had been a few sessions since he’d done something evil; the next thing I knew, he was giving himself lots of fire, and we had a lot fewer trees growing nearby than had been the case.

Trees on fire

A closeup view of one of the many conflagrations

The arsonist in action

He then gave himself a bunch of arrows, and started work on a huge tower, looming over (threatening?) the temple. I’m still not sure what he intended do do there, and eventually he demolished it, but I got some pictures in the mean time.

Jonathan starting work on the tower

The top of the tower, in process of deconstruction

Towards the end of the session, Miranda and Roger built a dirt house near the temple. I also took a picture of a pool at some point around here; I’m not sure of the context, but I like it, so I’ll throw it in.

Outside of dirt house

Inside of dirt house

Pool

Another first-time participant was Pat Holleman. He helped with a lot of this, but then he went off and built some sort of super tree structure. (I forget the term he used: basically, you use wood blocks to build a huge trunk, and then plant trees high up along it.) Here are some pictures:

Super tree from a distance

Inside the trunk of the super tree

One of the platforms on the outside of the super tree

A great time; we do this about once a month (though with the GDC interruption, the next session might not be until the first half of April), anybody is welcome to join us!

I think I want to build some minecart tracks at some point, which means that I need a lot more iron. So far, I’d been haphazardly gathering resources while exploring caverns; I had access to vast amounts of coal, of course, and I also had more redstone and gold than I knew what to do with (I really should come up with a plan to use that redstone), but not nearly as much iron as I wanted. (Is coal really only twice as common as iron on lower levels? It sure seems a lot more common to me…)

Miranda had been talking about branch mining, so I decided to investigate that. This stackexchange thread led to this explanation of mining strategies; after reading them through, I decided to go with tunnels with the following cross-section. starting right above the lava layer:

The cross-section of the mine that I'm using

Basically, first you dig a long tunnel that’s the central core of your mine. (That’s not shown in the picture.) Then, you dig another long tunnel going off of it at right angles. (Two high, that’s the hole in the picture on the bottom slightly to the right. Go back to your original tunnel, move three to the left and dig up two squares, and dig another tunnel. (That’s the hole in the upper left.) Go back to the original tunnel, move three more to the left and back down to the original level, dig another tunnel. Repeat until you’re bored. You’ll dig out the holes in the picture directly, and you’ll see most of the yellow squares in that picture (all of them if you tile the region completely, continuing to go up); also, if there is ore in the blue squares, then hopefully it’s part of a cluster that will stick out into one of the yellow squares. That might not be the case, so you might miss a bit of ore, but you’ll get quite a lot of ore for your effort, more so than if you compulsively made sure you could see every single ore block.

So, with that in mind, I needed to start digging! But where? I wanted to be close to home, but also far down; fortunately, my ravine nicely satisfied both of those criteria. I could get there quickly, I already had steep steps down in place, so all I had to do was go down there and find a low point that I could quickly access from the entrance, and that’s where I’d start digging down to my new mine.

Going down to the ravine entrance and making a couple of turns gave me an obvious location to start digging my new stairs down. But, as soon as I did that, I found another cave system: this whole area is riddled with caves! Fortunately, the sides of the cave were fairly steep, so they actually worked very well as stairs down, saving me the time it would take to carve them out myself. Before going too far down, I explored the new set of caves, where I found my second monster spawner, this time complete with a music disc in one of the chests.

There was a record in one of those chests

After exploring half of the new caves, I wanted to head back to the main stairs out of the ravine, so I could find a good location for continuing to dig down. And I got completely lost while doing so: I got to familiar areas of the ravine, but I kept on going in circles, missing the key turn back up. After a few minutes, I finally found the main stairs, but clearly I needed to add some signs; so I decided to go back up to my house and build some.

Armed with the signs, I descended down into the ravine, and put the signs at various turns, giving directions both to home and to where I wanted to put my new mine. I also put in stairs in a few locations, to give another clue as to the main route.

Sign pointing to the main stairs out of the ravine

More signs marking the route between home and mine

I didn’t actually have to do much digging during this point: the cavern system did a good job of going down at an appropriate slope for quick traversal of vertical distances. Eventually, I hit a lava pool; based on my reading, this probably meant that I was at level 10, and at a good level for mining.

Lava pool near bottom of mine

I dug a bit into one of the walls there (either to get at minerals or because I thought I might start a mine there, I can’t remember: to my surprise, after digging just one or two blocks in I ran into the following:

That's one of my old lava galleries!

It was one of the galleries around the lava that I’d dug out the last time I was down here! I had no idea that I was so close to that region; that also served to confirm that I was on the lava level (it was at the same height as the other pool), and it also suggested that I should build my mine in a different direction, because I knew there was more lava where that came from.

So I went over to a wall away from that lava, and started digging. First, I dug down to bedrock, just to confirm that I was at about the height I thought I was, then went back up until I was just above the lava level and started digging the central corridor of my mine.

Digging down to bedrock

Central corridor of the mine

After which, I started branch corridors off to the side at various appropriate distances and heights. Which was very successful: here’s a picture of the only diamond lode I found, but I found several iron supplies (not as much as I’d like, but better than I’d been doing before), a couple of bits of gold, and more redstone than I know what to do with.

Diamond and iron blocks in the mine

I also found something that I didn’t want, namely water: one of my corridors flooded as I dug into it.

Flooded mine corridor

I ran back, but the water followed me; eventually, it petered out, so while I did place a block to stop it, the block really wasn’t necessary at that point. That was quite startling, but at least it was only water: if it had been lava, I probably would have died and lost all of my stuff. (Which I had a lot of by then!)

I need a better plan for dealing with that (anybody have good suggestions?), but in the meantime I decided that I should build a workroom at my mine entrance. That way, I could leave my valuables in a chest there, so if I got incinerated by lava, I would’t loose too much stuff.

This is how much I was carrying when I ran into that water

The storage room off the entrance of the mine

That was enough excitement for one time: rather than use the storage room, I decided to head back up to my house and deposit goods there. So I went up there, started the iron smelting, and went out and harvested trees so that I could make more charcoal, torches, and signs. (At this point, actually, it’s not so clear that I should be making charcoal out of wood: I have access to enough coal that maybe I should do all my smelting using coal instead. Though I’ve got a pretty good tree farm nearby, too.)

My main storage chest

Here’s all the loot I have collected so far. (Or at least most of it: I should look through other chests to make sure I don’t have anything valuable in them.) 184 pieces of redstone that are crying out for me to come up with a plan to use them; 105 iron ingots, which should be enough to make 272 segments of minecart tracks. (Is that a lot? I should count off that distance above ground: my hope is that it will make it comfortably over the desert to the south, but I’m not convinced that it will go much beyond that. Though, looking at those pictures, I think I won’t quite need 100 tracks to cross that desert, so maybe it actually is a good start.) I should build a jukebox, too, to use that record!

But I’ll probably stick with mining for a little while: it’s strangely soothing, and I actually really like traveling through the ravine to get there.

Now that I’m done exploring the ravine, I decided to explore slightly further afield. I’d already gone north; when I bumped up the draw distance after getting the new computer, I saw some interesting scenery south from my spawn point, so I decided to go in that direction this time.

The view south from my home mountain

The view south from ground level, near the spawn point

Actually, I had another reason why I was curious: if I’m going to turn my home mountain into a train station, then the natural direction for the first line would be south, so I’d like to see what I’ll reach if I do that. When I stand on top of my home mountain, it looks like there’s ocean not very far in the distance, but I was hoping that’s an artifact of how the drawing algorithm handles distance rather than a sign of what’s actually happening with the terrain. And indeed, once I made it down from the mountain, I could already see terrain features that were in that blue area, so that guess seems to have been correct.

So, I walked south. Through desert initially, but I reached grass soon enough. (With a cute little cave tucked away.)

A cave hiding under the grass

And then mountains, built of both dirt and sand; I climbed up on the grassy side.

The mountains at the edge of the desert

Mountains with grass, trees, flowers

That wasn’t the last of the sand, though; here’s another big bowl of sand, and a view of the tree-covered valley (complete with odd overhang) next to it.

Bowl of sand, with water and trees on edge

Tree-covered valley next to sand

Closer view of that odd overhang

I can’t remember how densely I took photographs; the next one after that is what I assume is a lake. (I don’t know if that’s an island in the distance or the shore jutting out.) I also ran into a lovely little meadow dotted with red flowers.

Lake ringed by beaches and trees

Meadow with red flowers

Eventually, I ran into my first region of snow. And not too far beyond that, a large body of water; I don’t know if it’s the ocean or not, but if it’s a lake, it’s a big one.

My first snow

Is this ocean?

At that point, I turned back: I wasn’t planning to go on a huge expedition, I just wanted to get a sense for what the terrain was like to the south. And the answer was: interesting and pleasantly varied, I’d certainly be happy to expand further in that direction.

But first some mining, I think: I need more iron. And I should explore east and west as well: I’ve gone some amount east underground, but I should go farther aboveground. It looks like I’ll hit ocean fairly soon if I go west, but I could be wrong about that.