My Minecraft experience: an ongoing thread

During the last couple of days I built farms for witches and trees. As I'm done excavating for now, witches are the only source of redstone and until my auto-smelter is ready, it's an easier source of glass bottles for my honey farm than processing sand.

As the cow farm caused a bit of lag and I realized I didn't need a lot of leather and steak after all, I demolished it. (The chicken farm may soon undergo the same faith for similar reasons.) That means I also don't need a lot of wheat, so I placed some composters underneath to turn it into a bonemeal farm as input for my wood farm. I'm not sure it produces enough for that, so that too may be replaced by a more efficient version in the future.

Next up: a storage system with automatic item sorting and then finally the smelter, which needs a good fuel source. I reconsidered the bamboo farm on top as a fuel source as 1 bamboo only smelts 0.75 item, meaning the pace at which I can spread that across the furnaces would be the bottleneck rather than how fast I can spread resources to smelt, which is not good.

I'm still considering a couple of alternative fuel sources that can be farmed:
- Lava buckets provide the most power by far, but require a bigger queue being non-stackable and come with the risk of creating lava streams instead of putting them into the fuel chest.
- Wood and kelp are easy to farm, but require smelting (and crafting for kelp) to turn them into the second most efficient fuel (dried kelp blocks and charcoal).

I'm thinking of setting up a kelp farm leading into its own temporary powered smelter to produce dried kelp, then looping the loot back into that to replenish the fuel to create more dried kelp and craft the excess into dried kelp blocks manually to fuel the main smelter.

I got bored of playing alone because all other members of my server were in different timezones, so I started working on plugins again.

My goal is to create admin shops with well balanced prices. Surprisingly it isn't too hard on memory and processing power to index all blocks and items present in the world, so the rarity of items could be a good base for item prices.

To start the indexing and other features, I created a command structure with subcommands that works well for server operators, but not for regular players. There seems to be a problem with registering permissions and their hierarchy.

I could easily solve that by giving players all general permissions needed to perform a detailed command, but I prefer the detailed permission to include all permissions for more general commands. That's still a work in progress.

After excavating some more, I plan to build an ultra smelter. That is not to be confused with a super smelter that spreads items and fuel across a row of furnaces using constantly moving minecarts and collects output through a hopper line as shown in several tutorials.

I want mine to use loaders that fill minecarts completely before sending them off so the carts don't waste time riding across all furnaces empty, and to automatically supply fuel by building a bamboo farm on top. For the collection of the output I also want to use a minecart to collect from more furnaces more quickly. Maybe also a system to dynamically use more or fewer furnace lines based an the number of only items? 🤔

The last few days I made a little sidestep and created farms for cooked chicken & feathers, steak & leather (that needs more cows to reach maximum capacity), wheat (that still needs to be automated) and drip stone.

Next are a lava farm, obsidian generator, nether portal, a bunch of mining there, a tree farm, the auto smelter, storage system, moving my old storage into that, probably an auto brewer, faster cobblestone generator, moving my bee farm downstairs... I'm sure I'll come up with more in the process, but this should keep me busy for a few weeks at least. 😅

So far I made:

- Admin shops to buy enchanted books and spawn eggs, and sell mostly processed mining loot.

- A green house to grow trees, with limited height so they can be cut without scaffolding, and a collection system for saplings from naturally decaying leaves to replant them.

- A honey farm, though that doesn't work yet. It still needs a few thousand glass bottles and about 30 bees.

- Two slime farms with a location for a third mostly excavated.

- An infinite cobblestone generator.

**Builds random stuff all over your server** 😈

With obtaining a beacon set to Haste II, the excavation of my base's basement is making good progress. Clearing a 5x5 chunk to 11 blocks above world bottom is almost finished, so tomorrow I can hopefully start working on several underground farms and processors.

When do you usually play?