After a long wait our Terrafirmacraft let's-play returns! Before we get into it, I did add some more mods, to nobody's surprise. These mods are:
TFC Ambiential,
Spyglass Improvements, and
Chalk plus
a chalk compatibility recipe datapack. I tried using a compatibility mod for Macaw's Furniture for decoration purposes but it wasn't functional enough to keep.
But enough preamble, now is the time for
We jump back in on February 5th in the year 1001, ready to build my house. I am immediately distracted by my desire to make a wool bed. The sheep and goats are fully familiarized at this point, but I still need a pair of shears to harvest the wool. This poses a bit of difficulty for me, because I need to get into basic smithing to make shears, which is a thing I would rather not get into quite yet. With this in mind, I promptly become distracted by a different thing entirely: I noticed that my beets from last year were getting close to rotting, so in order to not waste them I boiled them down into sugar. The process is the same as making a soup, but rather than using fresh water as a base, you need salt water.
water and salt in a barrel makes salt water
beets into sugar recipe
After finishing up with the beets I finally started on the actual house build. I got through almost one layer of bricks before realizing I was going to need a lot more of them. While placing the floor down I realized I was also short on blackwood. During all this I was making frequent trips to collect firewood to fuel my brick needs, during these trips I would find and take home strawberry bushes pretty frequently, and eventually I crafted up a drying bed to preserve the fruits I was getting. The single pumpkin I planted last fall was putting in work, and I had a lot more fresh pumpkin chunks than I knew what to do with really.
After collecting more bricks and finishing the floor I decided it was time to build my oven. The oven is a freeform-ish multiblock from the FirmaLife addon, it allows for things like baking bread, pies, and pizzas. It's fairly fuel efficient and it's honestly one of my favorite parts of the addon, though those facts are unrelated. Making the oven is easy enough, each one requires a few things: at least one top oven, at least one bottom oven, a chimney, and insulation blocks. The oven is made by placing a top oven on top of a bottom oven, with chimneys placed behind them in a vertical line (like a chimney). The top and bottom oven need all sides except for the front and top to be covered by an insulation block, usually bricks. You can have more than one oven stack in a row, and the oven I built has three spaces for cooking.
my freshly placed oven, curing
Once you've placed your uncured oven parts in the world, you will have to light the oven and keep it above 600° for 80 seconds, which is actually pretty easy. This cures the oven block and any oven parts connected to it, including chimneys. Your oven is now ready to use!
my oven, cured. sorry for the nighttime picture, I'm a fool
After completing these steps for my own oven, I realized I would have to make a charcoal forge to craft the shears I needed. Then, I realized I would need a bellows to actually use the charcoal forge effectively. So I spent a lot of time building those things. But before you can make a charcoal forge you need charcoal, which is itself made by placing a bunch of logs in a pit and lighting it on fire.
process of making the tiniest charcoal pit possible
The bellows are made with two pieces of leather, which I was a little short on so I had to do all the work that entails while waiting on the charcoal, and my ever growing brick empire. The charcoal sits on the ground in layers like snow does, and all you need to make a charcoal forge is one less than a full block of layers. You light that on fire and you've got yourself a charcoal forge.
a finished forge
I made the mistake of placing my forge too close to my mud-and-sticks abode, and it caught on fire. I was able to put the fire out before anything important was destroyed, but I did spend a little time repairing the damage. It was clear to me at this point that I was going to need to finish my house quickly, before something terrible and funny happened to my current one.
***
Well dear freakboards reader, we have now come to the time where I have to explain how crafting shears works. All in all it's fairly simple: In TFC shears are crafted by welding a pair of knife blades together, this is done by heating two knife blades up in a coal forge until the tooltip says "can weld" and then very quickly transferring them to an anvil with flux in it. Then you shift-right-click on the top of the anvil with your hammer, and they're welded.
the process of making shears from knife blades
You also need to occasionally weld ingots together into double ingots (for making sheets), and sheets into double sheets. Some armor pieces also require welding some parts together for the final craft. Once we get pretty far into the Create stuff I'll actually be able to use machinery to make the welding process much easier.
the welding recipe for a double ingot
the welding recipe for a steel helmet
This is, at the end of the day, not an overly complex process. Unfortunately, at many times I have the attention span of a salmon, which meant this process took me over an hour in between a dozen other little things I was trying to do at the same time. I accidentally fully lost an entire ingot of copper because I melted it in the forge, I failed repeatedly to get the knives hot enough to get them on the anvil and weld them before they became too cold, it was miserable. I was in shear hell. I truly don't know how I fucked it up as bad as I did but it was awful, and though I
did eventually craft the shears I was covered in a mixture of blood, forge induced sweat, and tears by the time it was done.
***
After my shears adventure, I was finally able to fully focus on the building. I finished the ground floor of my house, only to realize I actually wanted to change my original design completely, and instead I wanted to do something that would require a whole lot more bricks. This meant more clay, and so I had to go back out into the northern clay reaches. In preparation for this clay gathering trip I decided to craft a compass. I don't remember my reasoning for this, but my best guess is that I wanted to rely less on the mapping mod and rely more on landmarks and orientation, which I recognize is nuts but to be fair I
am playing Terrafirmacraft. Once I had the compass though I realize it was a re-skinned vanilla compass, and pointed towards spawn rather than north. To remedy this, I installed the
northern compass mod.
After that detour I returned home with my haul of clay and logs from up north, ready to make so many more bricks. I decided to try using the forge to fire them, since I thought it might be quicker and more fuel efficient, and oh boy was I right. I was easily making 4 or 5 bricks per charcoal, where with the pit kiln I had to use 8 logs for every 4. With my new brick making technology I was able to easily finish the ground floor of my home.
the finished bottom floor of the house
I went around checking on the various things around my homestead during all this, feeding/shearing/milking the animals and harvesting the crops that were ready. I also noted that my olive tree had grown, I'm excited to harvest it in the coming fall. By that point I had collected enough wool from the sheep for a bed, though I waited to place it until after the house was ready.
I finished the upper floor of the house, without the roof. I opted for a rustic design, using stripped logs as visible framing between the bricks and planks. I spent a long time tweaking the design, playing with a variety of shapes and material combinations. Eventually, I settled on something I liked well enough. I decided to put my bed down in the top floor and enjoyed my first real night of sleep in Terrafirmacraft, roofless but comfortable, wrapped in the blankets made of my sheep's wool. That next day I noticed that all my brick breaking and placing had done a real number on my pickaxe, so I dutifully got sidetracked from my main goal to replace it. I did it the simple way, through casting molten metal into a mold. Eventually I'm sure I'll default to forging, but for now I'm sticking to the (currently) easier path. With my new pickaxe in hand I began to work on the roof. Pretty quickly I realized I would need more chert for the design I wanted, so I put a dent in the new pick and collected extra just in case I'd need it. I spent a long time working on the roof design, though eventually I did settle on something fairly simple.
the finished upper floor
the finished house from the outside
And that's a wrap! It was a very long time coming but I'm glad I stuck it out and finished this part up. I'm still going though! I haven't given up on this playthrough, don't expect it to be like. updating frequently but I do still like this pack and I'm really into the idea of doing these posts for as long as I'm still committed. I'm not fully sure what the next segment is going to focus on but I have a feeling it's going to be about furnishing my new house, and possibly (finally) getting into some kinetics and Create stuff. Until then, though, have a good one!