[cycl0pse]

to see the other maps, go to the right of the screen and a tab will pop out. select the map of choice and have fun.

All the maps were rendered yesterday EXCEPT the surface map for Twilight. And the end map has not rendered because we haven't been there yet. It just shows there by default.

[cycl0pse]

Originally Posted by Jawbone54 

...so, apparently quicksand is a thing?

yup. almost got me for the first time last night.

All kinds of new ways to die out there. Be careful!

[andi*pandi]

That's what I said. "Ooh, what's this mud over here?" Schloooop.

edit: new work pastime: watching jawbone on the map. go jawbone go! almost to a village!

[BLAZE_MkIV]

The Jawbone Show (C)

[Jawbone54]

Ha... I had my iPad open beside me, watching my avatar move across the map.

I ran into quicksand again while watching the map, but managed to shoved my way out that time. That map is awesome.

[cycl0pse]

the server's been updated, so feel free to update the client.

[sek929]

So I logged in to see a stack of Imperial Drones in each of my auto-apiaries, figured I had made enough royal jelly for the forseeable future so I turned off the gates and let them run out. I'm also nearing an Industrious Queen, which will be the next species to occupy the auto-apiaries, but of course I'll need 6 of those first.

I'm going to be away for most of the weekend down in Connecticut for a wedding, which is the other reason I stopped the auto bees. If anyone wants to use the auto machines to cycle another breed endlessly over the weekend feel free, but leave the bees in the Industrious area for me when I get back.

[The Final Dakar]

Originally Posted by sek929 

Just so you know, this modpack is pretty damn cool, and I think you should come join us.....jerkface.

I just logged in and the launcher found an update for our modpack, going to decline until cyclopse updates the server side.

I miss you guys. But I'm rails deep into SimCity 4.

[cycl0pse]

Server: Web maps are now updated. I just can't bring myself to turn on 'auto render' so we need to come up with a fair rendering schedule. My proposal is to update the 'flat' map roughly once a day (it renders relatively fast) with the 'surface' getting updated once a week (or when something cool is done). The 'caves' won't be rendered often at all.

Server: additionally, if anyone gets a cool Mystcraft world, let me know and I'll start rendering it. Otherwise I'll stick to the main 3 (overworld, nether, and Twilight).


thought from everyone?
cycl0pse

[sek929]

Originally Posted by The Final Dakar 

I miss you guys. But I'm rails deep into SimCity 4.

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Originally Posted by cycl0pse 

Server: Web maps are now updated. I just can't bring myself to turn on 'auto render' so we need to come up with a fair rendering schedule. My proposal is to update the 'flat' map roughly once a day (it renders relatively fast) with the 'surface' getting updated once a week (or when something cool is done). The 'caves' won't be rendered often at all.

Server: additionally, if anyone gets a cool Mystcraft world, let me know and I'll start rendering it. Otherwise I'll stick to the main 3 (overworld, nether, and Twilight).


thought from everyone?
cycl0pse

Have you tested auto render now that a full render has been done? It should only be re-rendering chunks that have changed. It probably wouldn't be too bad except we have Carmen Sekdeago. Is auto render an all or nothing option? Could you just auto-render the flat-maps? As for a schedule I'd run them in the late morning weekdays and early morning weekends. Priority to the over-world and twilight flat-map and completely disable the isometric nether map. Is there a caves option for the nether?

[cycl0pse]

The sheer amount of customization available is scary, so odds are a cave map of the nether is a possibility. As for the auto-render, sadly it's an all or nothing kinda thing, at least for anything useful. You can set it to re-render when blocks are broken, or created, or when something flows. You can also set it to re-render when a chunk is visited, when a new chunk loads, or when a chunk has 'light' hit it. (the last 3 are NOT suggested unless the server is doubling your home electricity bill and can act as a space heater in the winter!)

When it was on and someone was doing their "Around the world in 80 days" reenactment, the processors pegged over 90%. It averages about 50% when we have a full load on it. More disturbing, the RAM pegged and never cleared out until I stopped/restarted the server. It's the RAM runaway that has me most concerned. (that seems to be a known issue with dynmap as a lot of other people reported it as well)

(as a side-note to EVERYONE! -> if something like, say, a nuclear reactor will react badly to a server reboot, I need to know about it AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, preferably with 'how to turn it off safely so I can reboot the server' instructions. We will not be recreating any SimCity 2000 disasters if we can avoid it...)

For now, I'm going to render the flat maps daily and see about modifying the auto render. Looks like a server reboot is in the future...

cycl0pse

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Oh the nuclear reactor has a nice big off switch out were everyone can see it. It's not fueled at the moment. It also has a thermal cutoff even though I plan on a Type I setup. Just to go crazy it's in 2 layers of reinforced stone, 20 blocks down. If it explodes the worse that should happen outside that box is hunger effects in the area above it. I don't have anything else that would react catastrophically to a reboot.

[The Final Dakar]

Originally Posted by sek929 

I need motivation. For motivation I need inspiration. For inspiration I need to understand the mod set. And to understand the mode set I need to watch the videos. And I just don't have the interest anymore. I'm Minecrafted out. Much like you are Battlefielded out.

But please, keep posting images of your works. I do like seeing what you guys do personally. I think you are the bees knees /ducks

[andi*pandi]

sek, I tried innoculating with rainy, but didn't notice an effect. I've been dumping a lot of my boring drones into the dna soup.

I have a prehistoric princess though. And a supernatural. Blaze, I suspect she'd produce more interesting stuff in a magickal world...

cyclopse, like what you've done with the courtyard.

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Well I started the reactor up. And it proceeded to burn up several of the cooling components. So much for a Type I setup. Also yeah for a thermal cutoff.

[andi*pandi]

can we expect nuclear bees any time soon?

[BLAZE_MkIV]

I think there are bees that make uranium. I don't think putting a be in the reactor is how you get them

[sek929]

Originally Posted by andi*pandi 

sek, I tried innoculating with rainy, but didn't notice an effect. I've been dumping a lot of my boring drones into the dna soup..

Unless the bee "drops out" of the slot is it getting inoculated in it hasn't accepted the trait. For example, it took nearly 8 cycles to inoculate one princess with rainy the other day. Best way is to have a fully charged serum, drop the bee in, and come back later.

[andi*pandi]

Tried again, it worked. I moved into your bee rig, and moved your imperials to the gold chest.

Supernatural queen is producing magickal stuffs. At night too.

The prehistoric doesn't seem to have much purpose in continuing breeding, there seems no advantage.

next: gem bees. or fireworks. Although it is tempting to go for the Doctoral Bee, just for jelly babies, it seems like a PITA.

[cycl0pse]

Server: System Backup performed.

Server: Auto rendering for the map has been on all weekend. Settings were adjusted a couple times and should be stable now. If anyone was experiencing server lag (block lag and similar) please let me know.

Server: I've ordered a memory upgrade for the server. It should arrive this week. Once it arrives I'll be posting a 24hr notice for a server shutdown. Actual shutdown time will be about 1-2 hours (install memory, test, and do maintenance) and should help with the rendering lag.

cycl0pse

[cycl0pse]

In other news:
Looking for suggestions on how to use the two giant towers at the keep. Original plans were to put Mystrcaft in one and Thaum in the other. That plan seems to be dead as Blaze found that the village was not good for Thaum and we already have a nice home for the Mystcraft items in the nether. So that means those two giant structures are just sitting there being eye candy. Thoughts?

The next item up for me is to finish getting steel production working. Sadly I'm not as tech-advanced as Sek and Blaze so expect the setup to be a bit crude when it starts out, but I plan on having an ender chest to feed the coal or wood to the coke ovens and accept the steel when it's created. Any good use for the creosote oil it generates?

And once I have steel, then completely unnecessary but rather fun to setup rail lines will make an appearance

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Once we're rich enough for a link modifier the stuff in the nether will come back topside. Unfortunately besides the books the mod doesn't provide much be the way of blocks. Though being able to set the pages out is nice.

[cycl0pse]

how streamlined can we make the process of compressing coal dust to diamonds? (just random speculation) Are diamonds useful enough to :
(place coal here) -> (rube goldberg process of machines) = diamonds

(meaning a dedicated diamond making machine/warehouse/whatever)

worth it? or waste of resources?

[andi*pandi]

I have no idea. This looks complicated, but not horrible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN_i7tTRd_4 It needs to be automated more with crafting tables. With turtles, obsidian is no big deal. I'm sure blaze can make a flint machine pretty easily too. (turtle on bottom harvesting stack of gravel, then goes and stacks it up again?) Can we use charcoal instead of coal? we have enough trees...

The diamond bee solution is... complicated, but possibly worth trying for.

The two giant towers, unless we can find a use for them, are a little out of place so close to the village/industrial/commercial area. No self-respecting evil wizard wants to be next to the bee garden.

If a moving tool were possible, imposing twin towers might be nice up on the red hill right behind it, looking down on the village and cackling wildly.

[sek929]

A nice shot of our second lava harvesting area.



I finally got my Distilled bees, and have put in place a system to convert their oily combs into fuel in my large storage tank. Now I'm just inoculating 6 princesses and 6 drones for night, rain, and fast productivity.

I think the tower can still have a Thaumcraft setup, even if it isn't going to be very functional, it can still look pretty damn cool. I've got several ideas for a design, but I need to research more to be able to build stuff.

[cycl0pse]

Well, one thought that's hit my mind has been to remove the giant towers and build something tasteful around the courtyard area. A turtle could demolish most of that in fairly short order with little user intervention (well, once I program the turtle).

(then I'd have lots of black blocks for an imposing lair over the town )

It's a thought...

A second thought is to remove one tower (the mostly incomplete one) and leave just a tower and courtyard. Then we can have a Thaum floor and Mystcraft floor. And maybe a hidden access door...

Andi, how hard would it be to put vines all over the structure? give it that 'been here awhile' look...

[andi*pandi]

not hard at all. You could even grow a tree very close/in the wall.

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Oh I can make a coal to diamond machine easily enough. The linking modifier takes 81 diamond though. And that's a stack of coal per. Charcoal won't do.

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Tesseracts stopped working. I was probably pushing the server a bit, water updates and all. But the configuration interface is blank.

[sek929]

Appears it was only the Energy Tesseract at the powerplant that got blanked, everything is working fine again.

[cycl0pse]

Server: The memory came in early. Expect the server to be down tomorrow AM for the upgrade. Figure 7-8am EST, give or take. Once it's in, I'll test and allocate more to java.

Please turn off the nuke, if you don't mind. I may not get to login before downing the box.

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Its off. I've switched to tree power. This will be a good test to see if the turtle can survive a reboot.

[sek929]

Cyclopse, is there any way you can look into the "no flying" thing on the server? I just made myself a jetpack so I can hover and build easier but the server does not like it and boots me.

[sek929]

Server down?

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Yup

[cycl0pse]

working on it. give me about 10 more minutes (say 8:45pm EST)

java was/is being a crybaby.

[cycl0pse]

back up

[cycl0pse]

OK, time for an after-action report. Or, as theater geeks like to call it: post-mortem

Server now has the memory upgrade installed, and all OS maintenance for the month has been done. Jumped from 4GB memory to 8GB. This is a good thing, since before the upgrade java was eating 3.2 GB for the server and map rendering, starving the OS for everything else. Now java lives at about 4-5GB or so, leaving plenty of system overhead. Processor utilization has been about the same.

The bad news is that somehow in all of this my java install decided to do it's best "living dead" impersonation. It was there. It was walking. It wasn't doing anything else but moaning and irritating the other living apps around it. Thus the two hour outage yesterday while I hit the zombie repeatedly in the head until it finally stopped and proceeded to reinstall. It's running smooth now, but the minecraft server GUI won't display correctly anymore. So, as a true geek, I just turned the thing off. Oh hey, lookie here, the processor load went down...

So the server is running stable. I figure from here out I'll need a maintenance cycle about once every 4-8 weeks for about an hour to keep the OS happy. Beyond that, let me know if the lag monster hits.

cycl0pse

[sek929]

Originally Posted by The Final Dakar 

I need motivation. For motivation I need inspiration. For inspiration I need to understand the mod set. And to understand the mode set I need to watch the videos. And I just don't have the interest anymore. I'm Minecrafted out. Much like you are Battlefielded out.

While I understand this, I still need to do one last sales pitch....

Forgoing the entirely OP EE2 stuff, the Direwolf20 pack is streets ahead of the Tekkit map pack. Building and design-wise not much has changed, and functionally everything technology-related is already very similar to what you already known from Tekkit.

The real meat-and-potatoes changes are the way you travel, the way personal inventory is managed, the ease of which a sorted storage system can be set up and expanded and incredibly powerful crafting tools.

Some examples:

I have three extra inventories. One is for specialized tools, one is for extra building blocks and items, and the Ender Pouch is for dumping extra items directly into our sorting system from anywhere...which is a thing of beauty. Past the three extra bags I have food, torches, and my powertool (pick,shovel,axe,crafting table, etc) in my main inventory and that's it. Never has it been easier to build something from start-to-finish, including machines, slicing blocks, wiring, etc... without a hundred trips back and forth or putting down spare chests all over the place.

You can now "craft" a regular book at any location and it becomes a linking book, craft another one at the other destination and now you can travel great distances, and between dimensions, with ease. There are portal guns as well, and several armors that do the job of the flying ring and let you move much faster than the ring did.

Storage barrels have revolutionized the way the common resources are stored, accessed, and sorted. Beautiful in their simplicity.

Fabricators (crafting table on steroids) are the bees knees, and I could not imagine life without them anymore. If you thought the automation possibilities with Tekkit were robust, ho-boy, you ain't seen nothing yet.

In short, you owe it to yourself to fire up the FTB launcher and at least have a look around the server and see what sticks. If you do this one favor for me I will promise you that I will repay you at any point with a game of your choosing you insist I should be playing. Plus, no Sim City until June 11th....

[cycl0pse]

... and with the addition of the map it can even be a spectator sport! Logged on users show up on the map and move around in real time.
Minecraft Dynamic Map

[cycl0pse]

beware of a mischievous cycl0pse with a shovel.

[Jawbone54]

No witnesses.

[Jawbone54]

A few pictures from the new world...

Blaze and Fatty discussing my inevitable demise:


Andi getting her float on:


The new, improved, and hilarious XP grinder:


My outpost home:


A strangely pretty glacier biome...


Which led to a...glacier volcano? I like it.

[sek929]

So last night I set the BeeFuel™ system into my empty tank at the Boiler House and logged back in today to see just how much Fuel is being produced in a 24hr period. I will need in the ballpark of 288 buckets of refined fuel every 24hrs to maintain a fully heated boiler, I made around 200. Not bad for the first go around. I estimate I will need 10 Distilled Bee Apiaries to make this happen, which means either adding more to the Bee House, or creating a dedicated setup somewhere near my boiler, perhaps inoculating them with the cave trait so I can have the whole thing underground out-of sight.

Also, the liquid DNA and Honey tanks were nearly full, so I had to expand them. Also, also....I have way to much propolis at the moment, and if I do make a new setup I am going to Centrifuge all propolis into resin to be made into an infinite supply of rubber.

Once these minor systems are running and I am convinced the bees can keep up with the boilers demands it'll be time to fire up the beast. I've considered moving the lava powerplant underneath the boiler area, and setting up an emergency backup system just in case of a server restart and subsequent 8 hours of warm-up time for the boiler. This will free up even more space in the Warehouse for additional future storage. I was thinking another set of barrels down there for lesser-used items.

[cycl0pse]

regarding server reboots and the boiler setup.

Future server reboots will be planned as much as possible. So, in theory, we can reboot at say 10pm on a Tuesday. By 6am, the boiler is back to full power. Can we use energy storage to bridge that gap rather than a second power generator\? Also, will I need to manually restart the boiler, or can we set it up to start on it's own after a reboot?

[BLAZE_MkIV]

My math says once its up to heat you'll need a buckets of fuel every 10 minutes to keep it running. Assuming the server maintains 10t/s.
It also says you get a bucket of oil every 51 minutes so you'll need 5.05 bees to keep up. Assuming that the comb every 15.3 minutes is correct and accounts for fast worker and frames.

I think that's for an apiary too, supposedly the alveary produces even faster. I'm guessing that measuring is the only way to know.

[sek929]

Originally Posted by cycl0pse 

regarding server reboots and the boiler setup.

Future server reboots will be planned as much as possible. So, in theory, we can reboot at say 10pm on a Tuesday. By 6am, the boiler is back to full power. Can we use energy storage to bridge that gap rather than a second power generator\? Also, will I need to manually restart the boiler, or can we set it up to start on it's own after a reboot?

I plan on having quite a large amount of stored power in the form of Redstone Energy Cells, the lava engines will only turn on in a dire circumstance of complete loss of all power.

The Boiler will be completely hands-free once everything is up and running, after the server reset it will have both fuel and water and wil begin to heta up again immediately.

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Assuming you have enough fuel on hand to actually finish heat up.

[sek929]

Originally Posted by BLAZE_MkIV 

My math says once its up to heat you'll need a buckets of fuel every 10 minutes to keep it running. Assuming the server maintains 10t/s.
It also says you get a bucket of oil every 51 minutes so you'll need 5.05 bees to keep up. Assuming that the comb every 15.3 minutes is correct and accounts for fast worker and frames.

I'm not a math guy, so maybe I made a mistake somewhere along the line but...

In the FTB article on steam boilers the editor says that a 36HP (which is our boiler size) will use one bucket of Biofuel every 101 seconds. Biofuel is 3 times less powerful than our Refined Fuel so thats means one bucket of fuel will be used every 303 seconds, or 5 minutes.

Also, a Distilled Bee may produce an oily comb every 15 min, but there is only a 60% chance that will yield an Oily Propolis and eventually become oil. Hence the need for more bees to even the playing field. Technically I think I can get away with only 9 sets of bees.

Also, also....Two sets of te bees have apparently lost the nighttime trait I inoculated them with, so all the more reason to start a fresh setup and make sure all the bees can work at night, in the rain, and underground. I may have to build a second Inoculator so this doesn't take me all week to do.