Squiggles' Terrafirmacraft Playthrough!

[SkieSquiggles]

Hey there freakboards! I've been wanting to make a lets play on this forum for a while now, ever since I realized that was a thing a person could do. The only issue was: what game would I play? This question puzzled me for ages, but yesterday I had the idea of making a let's play about my newest Terrafirmacraft world. So here we are!

What is Terrafirmacraft?
"Squiggles what the hell is a terrafirmacraft?", I hear you asking. Well, dear freakboards member, allow me to tell you!

Terrafirmacraft is a total-conversion mod for the game Minecraft, with the goal of expanding the game's survival mode to be more realistic, challenging, and involved. World generation has been completely changed, ore is found in large veins that are far apart and difficult to find. Crops only grow in certain conditions, and there's a system of nutrition that you have to balance in order to maintain your health. Metalworking is a long and tedious process, requiring you to melt ore in ceramic vessels in the early game, and eventually leading to genuine hammer-and-anvil smithing. These are just some examples of the plethora of changes made to the vanilla game.

Now for the most part I really like base Terrafirmacraft, there's something about the mod that draws me in. However I won't be just playing with TFC, I'm playing a Modpack: Autoterrafirmacraft. It's a pack that released pretty recently, and it adds compatibility between the mods Terrafirmacraft and Create. (Here's a quick preview of Create if you don't know what it is. ). But that's not all, I'll be playing with a slightly modified version of this pack, I've added the mods FirmaLife, TFC water flasks, TFC horse carts, TFC Tweaks, and Lucent. Firmalife changes some things about food production and preservation, and Lucent adds dynamic lights. The other three are pretty self explanatory.

Okay, now we're in it!
Okay now that we got all of that out of the way, let's get started! I spawned in a plains biome, and I was immediately struck by how incredibly lush the world looked. There's a wild amount of new plants in the game, and they make bodies of water look especially good.

The very first stages of terrafirmacraft are simple, but they're pretty different than your usual minecraft start. In tfc you won't be able to break any logs with your bare hands, so you'll need to make some tools first; you gather rocks and sticks that are littered all over the ground, then you click in the air while holding at least two rocks to open up the knapping interface, which is how you make stone tool heads. You then craft the tool heads with a stick in the crafting window, and BAM! You got tools!



Now that I had some tools, I needed to find clay. Clay is especially important because it's used for pottery, which is the only way of getting storage in the early game. In tfc, clay generates in a couple of ways; if the region gets enough annual rainfall clay will spawn in random patches on the ground, otherwise it only generates on the banks of rivers, lakes, and the like. Clay also has the special property of looking exactly like a grass block from the top, meaning the best way to find it is by memorizing the plants that grow nearby. The mod is full of things like this.

So I set off to find clay. I was ready to walk for thousands of blocks if I had to, ready to brave the harshest temperatures and battle the toughest of wild animals. I would have to stay sharp, the clay would be easy to miss and would be exceedingly rare. It would be a hard journey, but it was necissa- Oh there's some right there!



With clay found I decided to go looking for a place to call home. I wanted it to be near the banks of some fresh water, a river would be ideal but a lake would be fine too. I also wanted to be near trees, lumber was an essential component of mod progression. Eventually I found the perfect place: It was a little hill on the banks of a small lake, or I guess a pond more accurately. It was on the edge of a grove of Ash trees, the wood of which is a *really* nice red color.



With a location selected I got to work building my shelter. My main building block of choice was wattle and daub, a new building material in this version of the mod. Wattle and daub is special in that it's constructed in stages. You place the wattle block first, then you click on it with at least four sticks in your hand to make it a solid block, then you click on it with the daub item. The components are easy to gather and all available in the earliest stages of the game, which makes it a great material to build a starting home with.



I built the house around a firepit, it was 5 blocks by 4 blocks on the inside, with windows on either end. I made the roof out of thatch, and I left the doorway empty. In the corners I placed stripped ash logs. All in all it wasn't a bad little house, it would be enough room to keep my bed and campfire in, as well as a small amount of storage.



With my house built and clay located I was ready to get started with pottery. Pottery is similar to stone knapping, but you need at least 5 clay balls in your hand in order to do it. You can make all kinds of useful things with clay, such as large and small vessels to store items inside of, jugs for carrying water in, pots for cooking soup and processing materials, and molds for casting metal. But before we can use our wonderful clay creations we have to fire them in a pit kiln.

A pit kiln is a nifty way of heating things up to really high temperatures. You place the thing you want to heat up with "v", and then you right-click it with 8 straw, then 8 logs. After that you light the whole thing ablaze and wait roughly 8 hours for it to burn. Once it's done, you'll have finished pottery to do all kinds of stuff with. The pit kiln will also be used later once I get into metalworking.



Here's a picture of the inside of the house, complete with the large vessel I'm using to store seeds. I ended up moving the campfire down one block because I was worried about the walls and roof catching fire.



I noticed a sheep and a horse living nearby, so I started the process of familiarizing them with some grain I had gathered in my earlier travels.



I decided to lead the sheep closer to my house so that it was within easier reach. Eventually I'll have to build an animal pasture, but I don't feel like doing that quite yet.



After that I went looking around my immediate area to see what I could find. I happened upon a huge patch of sandy loam mud, which I spend some time collecting. I plan on using the mud later on to make mud bricks. I also gathered several stacks of straw here.



At this point I was getting tired, so I decided I would do one last thing before I called it a day: I wanted to finish out my house with a straw bed. Straw beds don't let you sleep through the night, but they do set your spawnpoint. In order to make one you need a large hide, which drops from large animals like cows and bears. I hadn't yet seen a cow in my world, so I would have to find one.

I headed south from my home, keeping my eyes peeled for anything with a large enough hide to become my bed. I couldn't remember if horses dropped large hides or medium ones, but after killing one I found that they were apparently medium sized. I continued walking. I noticed that the shallow little caves that dotted the landscape often contained fresh water. I continued walking. I found an olive tree, and an apple tree. I got saplings from them, and continued walking. I walked for 4000 blocks in a straight line, I did not see a cow or a bear for the entire journey.


I did, however, see a lion for about a fraction of a second. It was sprinting towards me through the grass that I couldn't see through, and tore through my supple, defenseless body faster than I could react.



By the time that had happened it was very late, and I was very tired. Seeing as one of the mods in the pack was a gravestone mod, my things weren't in any danger of de-spawning. I decided to call it a night.

So that's my first post in what I hope to be a long-running thread! I don't plan on releasing these on any sort of schedule, I play this mod in short bursts with long breaks in between, but I do plan on continuing to post whenever I make progress in the world. Whether that's acquiring new technologies or building new structures. Let me know what you think of this idea, and if you wanna see me tackle anything in particular I'll decide whether or not I want to and proceed accordingly!
Until next time!

[SkieSquiggles]

IT'S TIME FOR
Hello again freakboards! Got a pretty short one for you today. I had some valuable stuff when I was killed by that lion last time, so I thought I would start off by going back that way and collecting my grave. I went straight south from my home, a slightly different route than last time. I ended up finding a badlands, which is going to be useful later when I'll want to make a lot of glass. Unfortunately about halfway to the place where I died last time I was killed by a pack of wolves. It's a tough world out here I guess.



After my wolf encounter I decided walking 4000 blocks through dangerous wilderness wasn't worth the effort, and that I might as well stick to the general area of my house. On my way back from spawn I gathered another small fortune of sticks and rocks, and luckily I already had a bunch of seeds in my large vessel at home. My first order of business was to make a farm. I chose a small section of land on the edge of the water and tilled away.



Tragically, all my long distance walking had wasted so much time that it was already autumn. This means that likely none of the crops I had just planted would survive very long. (Although thinking back on that now I might be in a climate that allows for a much longer growing season, it's hard to say at this time)

While I was futzing around the base I found this blueberry bush that had started producing berries.



I also built a little shed to house a small amount of future animals



At this point I was starting to worry about my food stores. Starvation in terrafirmacraft is a very real danger, food takes a long time to grow and most of it rots quickly. I decided to try heading north this time, to forage in the face of the coming winter. But before that, I wanted to make some soup.

TFC has a sort of food-pyramid style system that it tracks. The levels you have in each category directly ties to your health, giving you the maximum possible health when all of the categories are all the way filled. Individual foods usually only have one or sometimes two food groups associated with them, which can make it hard to balance.



To provide a solution for this, terrafirmacraft has three new food types you can make: Salads, Soups, and Sandwiches. These are sort of modular food types that have special crafting methods which allow you to combine foods together, thus combining the food groups they provide.

The process for making soup is thus: make a cooking pot, place it on a campfire, fill it with water using a jug or bucket, place up to five ingredients inside, light the campfire, wait for the water to boil, and voila! Three servings worth of soup is yours!



(I'll talk about salads and sandwiches in a later post)

Now armed with my delicious soup, I set off to the north. The climate almost immediately became more humid, supporting a wider variety of wild animals and crops. There were a couple of close calls with wolves, but luckily I was a little more aware of my surroundings this time around.



Luckily this northern area had enough rainfall for those random ground patches of clay, I gathered a couple of stacks of the stuff and there should be plenty more to gather when I need more. While traveling I also found an olive tree and took a sapling from it, replacing the olive sapling I had lost on my earlier southern expedition. Also on my list of northern discoveries: enough surface deposits of malachite to make my first copper tool!



I'll go into more depth about how ores and mining works in the next post but I think it only makes sense to give a brief explanation here. Basically, the ores in TFC spawn in large veins deep underground, and different ores spawn in different types of stone. The way you find these ores is by looking on the ground for surface deposits, which are little clumps of the ore that sit on the surface in much the same way as rocks or twigs. These surface deposits can be picked up like rocks or sticks, and they're worth 10 units of liquid metal each, out of the 100 units needed to make a tool or ingot.



By this point I was having trouble staying focused on the game so I decided to head back to base and call it a day. My journey back was uneventful, and before closing the game for the day I made three more large vessels to store all my goodies in.

And that's all there is for this installment of the series! Definitely got less done this time around, but that's how it is sometimes. Let me know what you think here in the thread and be sure to tell all your friends!

[SkieSquiggles]

Oh boy freakboards do I have some fun stuff for you today! I made some really good progress on some stuff that I've been really excited to show you all. Things like Metallurgy, Animal Handling, and some small base upgrades. So without any further adieu, let's get into:


My big plan for this part was to get into the early game metalworking. In order to do that, I needed to get a pickaxe so that I could start mining the ores that I would need to make Bronze which is sort of the first real alloy you can make.

Making your first metal tool is pretty simple; you'll need 100 units of metal, a small vessel, and the clay mold for whichever tool head you want to make. You put the metal in the vessel, then put it in a pit kiln to melt the metal inside. You'll want to make sure you're around when the pit kiln finishes, because the metal cools quickly and it'll have to be re-melted if it solidifies (I made this mistake a couple of times just for this pickaxe lol).

Once it's good and melted, you shift-right-click the vessel full of metal and it opens up a gui with a slot to put the mold in. Once the mold is full it needs to cool off before the tool head is ready to use, throwing the item in water (or putting it in a barrel full of water) will speed this up. And there you go! You can take the tool head out by shift-right-clicking it and then craft it with a stick to get your brand-new tool.



On the day that I did this I was a little spacey, so I kind of just starting digging up a boulder with my new pickaxe. I'm not really sure why I did this! I did not need to. Regardless, I was able to gather up a large amount of rocks and raw stone, which will be important later on.

(the place the boulder used to be)


I used some of the rocks I mined from that boulder to fill a small vessel with stone tool heads, because I was getting frustrated with re-crafting them every time a tool broke.


I noticed a donkey roaming around the area near my base, so I led it back with some of the grain I had and started the process of familiarizing it.

I've been thinking about the future of this playthrough, and I'm not sure what style of building I want to start with in my home area! I'm thinking probably something rustic looking, I might even go so far as to make it a big log cabin. Let me know if you have any suggestions! Eventually I'll be building other bases out in the wider world and once I reach the endgame I'd like to connect them all together using trains from Create, but that'll take a long time so until then I'll be building loose roads between settlements.

Next: getting bronze. Now that I had a pickaxe I could start mining the raw ores needed for alloying, I prefer to start with normal bronze when I can because it only needs copper and tin, which tend to be pretty easy to find. I already knew where my ore veins were from all my earlier traveling, so all I had to do was get started.

I started with copper since it was farther away, I kind of eyeballed where I thought the center of the vein was based on where the surface deposits were, and I started digging a pit straight down. Now eventually I'll be making a more permanent and interesting mine but for the moment I wanted it to be as simple as possible, which means we'll get into branch mining and supports and cave-ins later. It took what felt like several hours but was probably 40 minutes at most, and I nearly gave up right before I reached the actual vein. But eventually I was able to gather up two small vessels of medium copper. This is the hole I left behind:


On the way back from my copper pit, I ran across a couple of sheep. I luckily had grain with me when I did, and I used it to lead them back home with me.


It was a much easier trip to the cassiterite vein, because the nearest one was only about 100 blocks away. I noticed that part of the vein was actually ore gravel, and I decided that it would be a great time to show off ore panning.

Panning for ores has existed in TerraFirmaCraft since the very early days of the mod, but it works slightly differently in this version of the mod. In old versions, you would click on a block of gravel or sand with your gold pan, then you would hold down right-click while looking at a block of water, and sometimes ores like copper or gold would come out. In this new version, however, you need to find the ore gravels specifically, then you click on it with the ore pan, and finally you hold down right click while standing in water. It isn't really better than regular mining, but I guess technically it's a way to get ores before your first pickaxe.



While I was panning that gravel I noticed that the bulk of the cassiterite vein was exposed in an underwater cave, I'm probably going to go back there later on to dig the rest of it up.
Finally! I had all of the required ores to start making bronze, so now I get to show off early game alloy making. Alloying is pretty simple all things considered. Basically you put your metals into a small vessel and put it in a pit kiln, then while it's still liquid you pour it into molds like I did with the pickaxe earlier.

Each alloy has a certain ratio of ingredients it needs, for example bronze requires 88-92% copper and 8-12% tin. This means that the final mix of metals has to be made up of between 88% to 92% of copper, and 8% to 12% of tin. This can be a little tricky to get right, but since it takes 100 units of metal to make an ingot it's not super hard to get the hang of.

This is the formula I ended up with to make 300 units of bronze:


Once I had the bronze in the ground I realized I had lost track of my brand new sheep and donkey, so I went and looked for them. This took entirely too long, and involved me falling into a ravine after one of my sheep, and then digging myself and the sheep out. It took so long, in fact, that once I got back to my home I realized that all my bronze had gone cold and solid in it's vessel. I reluctantly built another pit kiln and went off to chop some trees as I was very nearly out. However I lost track of time AGAIN so I had to make yet a third pit kiln and wait by it so I didn't miss when it finished.


Finally, I was able to pour the liquid bronze into the molds, and make my next three tools:

A prospector's pick, which is used to more accurately find the center of an ore vein;

A chisel, for chiseling stone blocks into stairs or slabs, and making stone bricks;

And a saw, for cutting logs into lumber, which can be made into planks. This is really important because it means I can finally make a proper crafting table, which opens up a ton of new recipes for a bunch of useful things like barrels and a bed.



Now that I had a saw I immediately made a crafting table, and decided to re-fit the weird little animal shed into a workshop, so I placed the crafting table down there and moved a couple of my large vessels down there too.


Through all of this I made sure to keep the donkey fed, and by this point it's familiarity has gotten to the highest it can go. I think next time I'll be able to make a saddle and start riding the donkey around. Walking on my own legs is very slow, especially because walking through any kind of grass makes you slower, and there is a lot of grass.

To close out the session I wanted to spruce up my pit kiln area, and while I was doing that I decided to make my first anvil. Anvils in tfc are tiered according to their material, stone being the lowest tier. In order to get one, you need to make yourself a hammer, and right-click with it on some raw stone. I'll get more into how anvils work once we get more into blacksmithing.



To decorate the pit kiln I just replaced the ground around and under the pits with cobblestone to make it stand out a bit more.



And that's all I've got for this one! I hope you all enjoyed it, and I hope my rambling is helpful for your own playthrough of the pack if you decide to do one! I'd like to make them a little more frequently but I'm making sure to not make it a big priority so as to not burn myself out. Let me know what you thought of this part here in the thread, and have a nice day!

[mysteryROOSTER]

Love how detailed these posts of your Let's Play are, especially the fact that you've included gifs with it. Also the flowers and other vegetation in this mod look very nice.

[SkieSquiggles]

Love how detailed these posts of your Let's Play are, especially the fact that you've included gifs with it. Also the flowers and other vegetation in this mod look very nice.

Awww thank you so much! I'm really happy with how it's going so far, and I'm glad that the gifs are appreciated lol :}. In older versions TFC foliage was pretty mediocre at best, but the most recent one REALLY steps it up in a way that I absolutely love. Thank you for reading!

[SkieSquiggles]

Another shorter one today, mostly focused on making our first leather. First off, between last episode and this one I updated the modpack and added a few new mods as well! The update added some minor bugfixes and some nice recipie changes, which won't really affect me until much later in the game. The mods I added are: Firma:Civilization, which removes vanilla boats and adds a new Canoe as well as some navigation tools; Gyres Ore-Hints, which makes it so that certain stone piles will generate on the surface over deposits of rare minerals, making them a little less annoying to find; WallJump! which allows me to climb/jump over walls that are up to three blocks tall, as well as do classic video game wall jumping. It's mostly a quality of life thing that makes it a little easier to navigate rough terrain; and BetterCombat, which changes minecraft combat in a few key ways to make it a little more engaging and visually interesting without adding a ton of bloat. It's all mostly minor stuff and it's all more for me than it is for you lol.

With that housekeeping out of the way, we can finally get back to:
The first thing I did today was make a humble barrel, which is going to be the source of many many good things down the road.



This is much more than a vanilla barrel, this is a TFC barrel. It's used to store liquids, as well as process crafting recipes that use liquids. For example: soaking jute fibers so that they can be used in further crafting:



This jute was being soaked so that I could make a lead for my donkey that kept disappearing. I have not seen the sheep in weeks, they are presumed dead.

After making a couple more barrels in preparation of my upcoming leatherworking, I had to go get one of the logs you can use to make tannin. Luckily I already knew where some chestnut trees are, and I immediately set off to collect both a stack of chestnut logs but a handful of saplings so that I could plant more closer to home.

As I was on my way there I found some pumpkins that crashed my game when I tried to open them up and eat them. I tried it a couple of different ways just to see if I was just doing it wrong but each time I did it would freeze up and crash. I later realized this was because I hadn't updated firmalife yet, doing that fixed the problem. Always update your relevant mods!

After that confusion I was able to get to the chestnut grove and collect some trees, I tried to get saplings but at this point in the year all of the leaves on the trees are brown and red, so I think that they're dead or something and don't drop saplings. I was able to get a full stack of 32 logs (stack sizes are different in tfc I forgot to mention that earlier) and get home safely. I put some of the logs in a barrel full of water and prepared for the next step: getting flux.



Flux is important for a couple of reasons: you use it to make limewater, and you use it to weld ingots and sheets together (we'll get to it eventually I promise). Flux can be a little annoying to get, however. The two sources of it are limestone, chalk, dolomite, and marble rocks; or shellfish. I wasn't able to find any shellfish around my home, so I had to find one of those rock types. Luckily, I had marked marble I had come across earlier, so it was a simple walk 2000 blocks south to collect some of it.

Before I left I noticed that my jute fibers were done soaking, so I grabbed them and used them to make a lead and tied the donkey up in a little fenced in pen.



Halfway to my destination I encountered a pack of wolves, who promptly killed me despite all my wild knife-swinging. Luckily the run back to my grave was mostly uneventful, and once I got there I found that the wolves were asleep, meaning I could collect my things without any real trouble. I did try to kill them while they were sleeping, but once I realized they did a full half of my healthbar with one bite, I decided to instead run away as quickly as I could. I arrived to the marble deposit without further incident. It was an interesting little natural formation, and upon closer inspection I realized it must be a dried up hotspring, a neat little structure that's always made out of a different stone type than the ground around it.



I collected a stack of marble cobblestone, and promptly went back home to avoid further trouble. On my way back I gathered some wild tomatoes and sugarcane.

Once I arrived back home I crushed up some marble into flux with my hammer, and used it to make a barrel full of limewater. Finally, I was able to start the process of making leather by soaking some of my small hides in the limewater.



Then, I took the hides out at placed them on top of a horizontal log, and used a knife to scrape all over it. Breaking this gives me a scraped hide, which I put in the barrel of tannin for a final soaking.

While I was waiting on my leather to finish soaking some of the crops became ready to harvest. I got a full amount of wheat, rye, and garlic, but unfortunately all of the other crops died as the temperatures got colder. The pumpkin hasn't died yet though so we might still get something out of it.

I also did some thinking about long-term goals. My next project was to build a more permanent home, somewhere I could store all of my early-game things and put my various tools and machines that I would soon be building. One of my friends suggested I build in a rustic sort of log-cabin style, so I cleared out some land for a future ground floor. I plan on building a big brick oven for making bread, among other oven related things. I'm especially excited to get some cows and start making cheese.

an oven and some spinning cheese
Once the leather is done soaking, it's done! Just right click it with a knife in your inventory and it'll open up the same menu that you use for rock knapping and clay shaping. I made a saddle with one of my new leathers and put it on the donkey, thus completing the goal I had set out for myself in the beginning of this episode.



That's all for now, the next one is to come soon enough! I'm excited to start working on the new house in earnest, I have some ideas that I think will be fun. Having this donkey ridable is going to be a huge help as far as gathering materials. You know the drill: post in the thread if you've got something to say and share it to all your friends! Also have a good day.

[SkieSquiggles]

Realized I forgot to link the mods I added in the last post so I figured instead of editing it I'd just put them in a different post:

• Firma:Civilization

• Gyres ore hints

• Wall jump

• Better Combat

[ROBBYDUDE]

this thread owns, keep it up

[SkieSquiggles]

I plan on it! I still have to start writing the next part but so far the process of making this thread has been a lot of fun. Thanks for reading it

[SkieSquiggles]

I'm gonna start out this with the mods that I added before this session. they're mostly for quality of life horse/donkey behavior: callable horses, horse combat controls, and enhanced visuals (with the pixelated resource pack).

Callable horses by default lets you make your horse teleport to your location from anywhere, but there's an option in the config file that allows you to change the distance you can call them from, so I changed it to 64 blocks. I also made it so the horse never teleports, only walks. Horse combat controls is just a small change to the way horses control which feels more natural to me, and enhanced visuals makes some screen effects appear when certain things happen, like extreme hunger, thirst, and when you take damage. The base textures for enhanced visuals look like dogshit though so I use the pixelated texture pack which still looks bad but is at least not in hd. * * * editing note: when recording the gifs in this post I was testing out FirstPersonMod and TFC:Ambiental. I didn't have these two installed while I was actually playing in the world, and unfortunately firstpersonmod is incompatible with bettercombat, so I think I'm going to remove it for now, at least until I'm able to fix the incompatibility. * * * I am probably going to continue to add a handful of mods every post or two, this is how I tend to play modded minecraft. Eventually, I'll be completely satisfied with my playing experience; or I won't and I'll keep adding mods. I'll be sure to note down everything I add, so you can play along if you want to get the true and full experience.

Alright, now we're ready to get into the meat of today's episode of:




Okay, so this is gonna be mostly about the process of resource gathering for my upcoming house build. I started out making a bunch of bricks in my newly refurbished pit kiln area. The brick recipe is changed from vanilla, now you have to make unfired bricks through clay knapping, then you cure them in a pit kiln. Annoyingly, it takes 5 bricks to make a brick block but each pit kiln can only cook 4 at a time.



In between periodically refilling the pit kilns with unfired bricks I made a quern, which is a pretty simple grindstone that opens up some useful recipes. You have to craft it in two parts: the base and the handstone. The handstone has durability, so you have to replace it every once and awhile. In this case I made it to grind some of my grain down into flour, to turn it into alcohol. While that fermented I loaded up the pit kilns again and took my fresh new donkey up north to collect more clay and logs; I was running low on both.

The trip was uneventful, really. The donkey certainly isn't the fastest mount but it's definitely faster than going on foot, and since I added the callable horses mod I've been able to hop off whenever I want and call it back when it's time to go. I was never really a fan of the old tango of dismounting from a horse and immediately tying it to a fencepost every time I wanted to stop. I got a few stacks of clay and collected two new types of wood, Rosewood and Blackwood, only really collecting a stack or so of both along with a few stacks of the usual ash wood.

After I got home, I reset the kilns again and got distracted looking at crafting recipes. This lead to me making a handful of glue, and using that glue to make a wooden shield (which is the vanilla shield), I don't think it's very good in tfc but I like to have a shield on me. Eventually it'll be replaced by a metal shield, but I think that can wait until I have iron.

More bricks in the pits. The damn things only stack to 16 so it's more annoying to bulk craft them than something else might be. I went south to a sort-of-nearby badlands to collect sand. I needed it to make mortar (for brick blocks) and for glass.
* * * A quick aside: I think that making glass should be at least a little bit more difficult than it is in terrafirmacraft. As it stands all you have to do is put some sand in a pit kiln, and I think that's lame! Even just like, one extra step would make me feel better about it. Make it an alloying style recipe where you put sand and wood ash in a small vessel before cooking it or something. I'm sure that's not a commonly shared sentiment but I'm sure you're all already aware that I'm a bit of a weirdo.
* * * On January 3rd it began to snow. I hadn't expected snow, especially so late into the winter season. The whiskey was done brewing on the same day, and I threw in some fruit to get it to start turning into vinegar. I also put some of my sand into my barrel of limewater to turn it into mortar.



At this point I started thinking about how to use rosewood and blackwood. They're both extremely strong colors, rosewood being a very dark red and blackwood being a very dark black. They're sort of difficult to use in regular building because of that, I think I'm going to use the blackwood for flooring, and the rosewood for furniture (things like chests and doors and such).



After deciding this, I crafted a chest for the donkey out of rosewood and put it on him. I had forgotten that you could do this with donkeys, or I would have done it way earlier. It's not a ton of storage, but it's enough that it'll help a lot until I'm able to make a horse cart. The only real obstacle to getting a horse cart is brass, which requires zinc, which I haven't found yet. Eventually I'll just have to go out into the world to find it.



I got my mortar and my bricks and I turned some of it into brick blocks. I don't want to use just brick, though, at least not in this build. There's an item from firmalife called brick finish that you can use on bricks (and brick ovens) to change their texture. The tile version caught my eye so I've decided to use it as a foundation block. Thankfully, the tile brick looks good with stripped ash logs, so that's two main building materials basically set.



I finally went and lured that baby ram from nearby into the animal pen, along with an adult sheep and two goats, a male and a female. Gonna be able to start getting wool and milk pretty soon!



I also found a nickel vein while chopping trees, I'm not sure what it'll be useful for but I'm sure I'll find out eventually.

I tried planting some cold weather crops: cabbage, rye, and garlic to name some. I'm hoping they make it through to the other side of winter.



Over the course of this session of play I realized that my current hovel occasionally catches on fire. I'm planning on building a proper fireplace in the new house to avoid this. I think it'll look nice with the tile bricks. I was also starting to really think about what I would make my roof out of. I could use Rosewood, it's a nice color and I can get a lot of it since it's just wood. I could also use Chestnut, it has a dark color but it's a little warmer than Blackwood. I wasn't really into the idea of using wood for the roof, though, so I looked into my other options.

As I'm sure you can guess my options are pretty slim at this stage of the game. I could make stone bricks, but I don't like the brick texture on a roof. There's a special dyeable block called Alabaster, but I'd need to find a vein of Gypsum and I really don't want to do that right now. I could do mud bricks, but that's basically more work than regular bricks are, and again I don't like that brick style texture. Eventually I noticed that the raw chert (which is a stone type) texture looks kind of like shingles, and after some back and forth waffling I decided that was the option I liked best.



Now the issue with using raw stone as a building block is that it's a pain in the ass to get. To get full blocks of raw stone you have to break every block touching it directly, which makes it drop as an item. That may not sound so bad but it gets repetitive quick, not to mention that you have to waste a bunch of stone by breaking the blocks around your target. Luckily, as long as I keep my roof simple (which I plan to), I'll only need raw chert stairs to make it. That's where that bronze chisel becomes useful. The chisel has two main uses: as a tool in a recipe such as turning rocks into rock bricks, or to turn blocks in the world into slabs and stairs. You can break a raw stair just fine with a pickaxe, so all I really needed to do was bring my chisel along and pre-chisel the stairs I would need.



I took my donkey down to where the chert was and spent roughly 30 or 40 minutes chiseling and collecting chert stairs for my roof. I figured I might as well get extra if I could, it was a nice roof block and I would probably want to use it again in the future. Once I got home I noticed my vinegar was finished. I don't have much I can do with it right now, but it'll be useful for storing vegetables like cabbage and peppers for long periods of time. It can also be used to prepare meat for smoking!

I had at least gathered a small amount of all my basic building blocks, so I decided to make a block palette to showcase my thought process. This is vaguely the colors that the build is going to be working with. Tile brick as a foundation and first floor wall, ash planks as the second floor walls, blackwood flooring, rosewood furniture, and stripped ash crossbeams and supports. I put a chert stair along with chestnut and rosewood just for comparison's sake.



This part took a while to make, mostly because a lot of my time was taken up by helping a friend of mine build a bathroom. It was exhausting but kind of fun! I liked laying tile. I'm not too worried about making these posts consistently, but because of the way I'm doing it I don't play in the world until I finish working on a part. I'm excited to get back to it a little bit! I've been looking forward to building this house for a while lol.

That's gonna be it for now! Next time I'll at least have my house started. If it goes quickly enough I may also start with beekeeping. I'd like to get a cellar and a greenhouse as soon as possible, but I need beehives before I can do that so it'll have to wait a little bit. Thank you for reading along, tell your friends, and have a lovely day!