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…

In our December Minecraft session, I got back to building out my cave. There were some natural rooms in the back that weren’t really connected to other parts of the cave; I decided to tackle those.

First, I looked at the top room. If I’m remembering correctly, it connected on the inside to the room on the right of the cave; I decided to also connect it to the outside, by building some long stairs up and to the outside. That turned out to lead to an outside room where I had put some workbenches.

Stairs leading up and out on the right side

There’s a lower room in the back as well, though. I decided to connect it first to the upper room, and then to the first room that I had finished on the left side:

A view of the two rooms in the back of the cave

A new door leading to stairs to the bottom back room

Here’s the top of those stairs

Then I squared out that room, added railings and a floor, and put real stairs in the passage instead of blocks.

The room is enlarged and squared out a bit more

Adding a floor

I moved the stairs back, to have room for real stairs instead of blocks

Inside the stairs

While this was going on, Pat (I think, it might have been Dan?) built a path in the air extending out perpendicularly from Dan’s path. Partway along there, Miranda found a village, and decided to improve it.

Village in the rain

The side of one of the houses

The center of the village at night

One of the gardens, with a path next to it

Miranda worked on the paths and on making the heights sensible. And then there was one house that was actually completely inaccessible: if I’m remembering correctly, it had a door, but the door opened up into dirt? It ended up making sense to put a tunnel where the door was, with a path above it at the same level as other parts of the village.

More garden / path improvement

A house and garden

Inside one of the houses

Making the buried house accessible

People had been trapped in the house

The tunnel entrance outside

The village well

Pat, meanwhile, while building the path, found an area that he thought would work well for a lighthouse.

The finished state of the castle he built the prior month

A sandy peninsula

Working on the lighthouse

The base of the lighthouse

Inside the lighthouse

The lighthouse at dusk

Meanwhile, Dan spent time widening some of the tunnels in his path.

Widening out the tunnel

A tunnel through a forest

Hello, chicken

After doing this, I did a render of the whole world, you can see some of these features there.

In the previous version of my Spark Agency deck, I get much benefit out of Team Sponsorship; that was partially my fault, I suspect, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I was feeling Turtlebacks, but a draw, an install, and two credits means that I have to install four more servers for one to break even, and while my deck is horizontal, it’s not that horizontal.

So that gave me five slots and five influence to play around with. Cyberdex had been useful, so I added a second one; I’d seen some games where City Surveillance had been quite annoying, so I threw in a couple of those; and I added two more ads and used up my influence with an Adonis Campaign and an Eve Campaign.

City Surveillance cost too much to rez and to protect, though, and I’m really not built around tags, so I got rid of those, adding in a third Jackson and a second Product Placement.

Here’s the result:

Spark Agency, v. 2

Spark Agency: Worldswide Reach

Agenda (10)

• 3x AstroScript Pilot Program
• 1x Global Food Initiative •
• 2x NAPD Contract
• 3x Project Beale
• 1x 15 Minutes

Asset (10)

• 1x Adonis Campaign ••
• 2x Daily Business Show
• 1x Eve Campaign •••
• 3x Jackson Howard
• 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 Eli 1.0 •
• 2x Wraparound

Code Gate (7)

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

Sentry (3)

• 2x Assassin
• 1x Turnpike

Other (3)

• 3x Special Offer

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

It went 2 and 2 at the tournament this month; that’s not awesome, and there were too many situations where my ice in particular didn’t feel right. I’m starting to get comfortable playing without much ice if I’m doing fast advance; but I’m not really playing that deck like fast advance much of the time. Also, Turnpike makes absolutely no sense in this deck.

So: changes ahead! And I have nine cards on the Most Wanted List to deal with. Which could be bad, but the Adonis Campaign and Eve Campaign aren’t really doing me much good; that’s half the difference, at least.

I want to stick with Sunny for a while: I’m not in the habit of getting to know a deck, and I figured my Data & Destiny decks are as good choices as any. But the prior version of my Sunny deck didn’t feel like it was just a tweak or two away from being great, so I figured I would look more broadly.

I’d been ignoring Security Chip; given that there are so few in-faction cards, I figured I should try them all out! I also poked around NetrunnerDB for other Sunny decks; Sunny Taps Out was one I looked at, and in particular it suggested that Career Fair could get Data Folding working in a way it didn’t in the zeroth version of my deck. I also hadn’t thought of using Rabbit Hole to get Power Tap working.

I tried that for a bit, and then I saw another deck (I think it was a Kate deck, actually?) that had The Supplier; I decided to work with that instead of Career Fair.

Here’s the current version:

Sunny Lebeau, v. 2

Sunny Lebeau: Security Specialist

Event (8)

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

Hardware (10)

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

Resource (26)

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

Icebreaker (6)

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

Program (2)

• 2x Datasucker • •

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

This deck has been hilarious against my coworkers. It’s very slow to get started, but once it gets going, the amount of money it generates is unbelievable. And if my coworkers aren’t thinking and have tracer ice out there, it’s just absurd: e.g. I remember one game where there were two copies of Viper in front of R&D, and I could start my turn making a click-free run that netted me 8 credits (I only had two of my Power Taps) in profit plus a Datasucker token.

Like I said, though: it’s slow to get started. I spend quite a while doing very little in the way of offense, just building up my rig, and against a fast advance opponent that’s enough time to win the game. Then there are maybe two turns where it feels like a normal deck, and then a switch flips and I have more money than I’ve ever seen and can break into anything. So if I can make it that long, I’ll win; if I can’t, I’ll lose. That means that, against my coworkers, I win, but when I took it to a tournament, I went 2-2 with it (with one win on time), and I felt lucky that it had gone that well.

I’m going to stick with it and see what I can do to improve it: get rid of the two extra cards, try to get in a little bit more draw, see if there’s anything I can do to give me early options. And just learn how to play it better: I do, for example, need to start running a little bit more at the start just to force my opponent to rez cards, and to at least pretend a bit that I’m not just going to sit back for turn after turn.

Miranda had been asking for a while for me to generate a map of the whole world, so I finally got around to doing that; I found a tool called Mapcrafter that does a fine job. I unfortunately don’t have quite enough disk space on this server to store the rendered files, but here are some portions of it:

That’s the entire map. The path up and to the left is, of course, due to Dan.

Here’s the end of Dan’s path.

The home area.

We’ve gotten some fun rendering transitions over the years.

The home base is in the lower left, Pinetown in the upper right.

Pinetown plus the mountains containing the cave I’ve been building in, though because of the rendering angle, you can’t see the cave at all…

A strange disconnected region of the map.

There’s a mushroom island on the disconnected region. And somebody built some pipes…

A house with a lava pool in an ice forest. (And, if I’m remembering correctly, a quite neat cave in a grotto behind it.)

A fork off of Dan’s path.

A village in the hills.

A lighthouse on a spit of sand.

In our November Minecraft session, I wanted to figure out what to do add next to the cave. I’d been tentatively thinking I’d add more rooms around the central area, maybe even some walkways, but I also wanted to see if there were nice room-shaped spaces below.

I ended up wandering around the whole time, though, not really coming to a conclusion. First, I looked at the main body of the cave:

The cave entrance

Looking down from the entrance

And then I wandered around a lot below the area I’d been working on in October. And, I will say: those are some good caves there. They don’t necessarily show up well in pictures, but they’re impressive when I’m wandering around, and also seeing the lava rivers so early made me realize just how deep the main cave went.

A lava river

Water and lava meet

A mineshaft in the distance

A second exit

That cross-shaped exit was already familiar to me: it’s on the other side of the river of the cave, about halfway between the cave and Pinetown. So yeah, the whole area is riddled with caves; I certainly didn’t end up exploring the whole thing.

None of that suggested an obvious place to build, so I went up to the main cave to see if there were other room possibilities that I missed. And I did notice some rooms high up on the back wall, maybe I can do something with those? I’m really not sure…

Two alcoves on the back wall

A view of the lower alcove where you can see it in comparison to the first room

The view from the lower alcove

The view from the higher alcove.

After that, I wandered over to see what Pat was doing: he was building on top of an overhang a few hills away. (There really is a lot of neat terrain in this area!)

A castle on an overhang

Working on a gazebo in the middle

Inside the tower

A view from the other side at sunset