casual crisis

Originally pulled together on Syfydesigns in 2019 from a blog I started in 2016 that is now gone.

I started a minecraft blog on March 6, 2016. I was the noobiest noob ever. I won't pull the entire thing over there, but I'll start here today with where I'm continuing there. It's basically about literally living in minecraft.

Where have I been?

I have been busy!!!

The last time I blogged here, I was playing on a multiplayer server under the mocreatures tag here on the blog. About 8 months after that post I was promoted to tech-moderator on that server.

Watching other players took on a whole new perspective. I'm not terribly gifted creatively, or maybe I just never made the time to develop being creative, but I'm fascinated with others creating in all their unique ways around their individual interests.

I started experimenting with singleplayers, pretty much went through world after world the way people go through racks of clothes in a store.

My real life was also changing pretty drastically, babysitting a little kiddo quite a lot. She insisted on making this one day. It looks pretty basic and very typical of the little girl unicorn genre, but I realized standing inside looking at the desert through all that pink glass that real life could have been so different for all of us in this real world if we'd been given more options. We are so standardized that it actually hurts to think about that. No wonder people flock to gaming.

After that, I really cut loose on playing around in my singleplayer worlds, realizing how much I could really control more and more situations in real life as I learned to expand and control them in game. I wanted to play survival, but default survival is so extremely frustrating that you really do have to level up your strategy skills to wizard just to stay ahead of all the fail. Which I did, by the way, and then did something very stupid and banged my head on the keyboard.

I realized I was in a horrible rut of doing the same thing over and over and not really learning anything new, so I updated and started learning new ropes, which were still fantastically frustrating. Simple basic stuff takes for-ev-er in survival. I think this was the breaking point, the huge hole over a loot chest that was actually a couple blocks over and nearly right on top of the sand. Whee, new things!

So I started bouncing in and out of creative, and after a dozen of those worlds I figured out I'm super easily bored with no frustration knocking me off track, so it boiled down to fine tuning the right mix of survival, creative, and configurations. It was like being strung out on minecraft crack, world after world after world.

I went on these crazy bipolar benders of all creative and all survival in between the fine tuning. I really did try this and I gotta say, I'm so super good now at surviving on next to nothing that I almost never die any more.

And still I kept searching for my answers.

I'd spend a couple weeks hammering out one world, slam through another, work tirelessly through still another... What was I trying to find? Why was I even doing this?

What in the world was I trying to accomplish or prove to myself? How many worlds have I left in my frenzied wake?

I was consumed. I usually don't cross the streams but I even started talking about it on multiplayer.

Don't get me wrong, I love multiplayer and all the unique stuff going on there, but sometimes even the mobs just go, Why are we here, man? Is there more out there than this?

Multiplayer keeps me extremely busy with inventory and timestamps, which I love. But some days you just wind up with a litterbox on your head.

It all started sifting out- I love both worlds. I want the mocreatures but I want the kinds of staff controls that allow me to set the environment. How can I create so that I'm not bouncing in and out of 'cheats' yet still not stifled with frustrating environments?

My heart and head are always in minecraft. I'm so consumed with it now that no matter where I am in real life, I'm in game in my head. I don't know if anyone has ever compared as such, but minecraft is like living in a high level chess game, playing all the pieces individually. The strategizing feels the same to me. I used to imagine my pawns and court pieces winning ragged battles across broken terrain for king and country, and now I'm building the entire world.

My worlds have become so intertwined that my years long anxiety levels have gone down dramatically. I'm not saying minecraft cures stress, but it's certainly helped me deal with a long list of stressors and think my way through real life problems in ways I never did before.

I used to be amazed at how well minecraft mimics the real world. Now I wonder if we are mimicking minecraft. If you go a little deep thinking about holographic universe and living in the matrix, yeah, minecraft has a lot of answers in it. I won't go there with the whole 9 thing yet, that's not really for this kind of blog, but I do think a LOT about real world science, pseudo science, esoterics, religions, physics, and especially quantum AI while I'm deep in the game.

And I waxed poetic. Lyrics.

I always needed a raison d'être, well. It's time to settle on a world.

And it needs to be flexible enough to allow me a little fun.

It needs to integrate without becoming rigid or mundane or overwhelming. I love that I can do this, but I'm not happy here.

I love the freedom, but I don't love the disappointments that come from that.

A new understanding is sifting its way into my mind about experiencing as a being, about finding ourselves and losing ourselves and having to get a grip on ourselves to find our ways back again.

My mind is part of a much bigger network of minds, which is part of a much bigger network of worlds of minds. We are layered together, incognizant that we aren't alone, a deep dive into a dark abyss by many individuals to see if we can find each other and learn to love each other even in the dark.

Some of us are realizing what is real and what is junk, what is purpose and what is distraction corrupting our purpose.

Could I really be learning this all from a game?

I was getting so chill that the frustration started melting away. Playing for the sake of just doing stuff, whatever I wanted, was finally becoming fulfilling somehow.

Hilariously, I got bot swarmed in real life, and spent two weeks feeling very ill. The cool thing about brain germs is the weird new thoughts you get.

It got pretty rough.

I stayed busy through it all, though.

Get it? Like waking up to a cat in your face.

You guessed it, I kept starting singleplayer worlds, but I felt closer to my goal, whatever that was. Something about finding myself or something.

I felt like I wasted too much time on this one, but I got it out of my system. It hit me maybe that's what we're doing with our lives through eternity.

And then my entire spring just went gestalt on me. The more I suffered in real life, the easier it was to see where I was going in my head. Funny how that works.

I began realizing I wanted to change the cycle I kept repeating.

Maybe it was time to think bigger. Maybe it was time to be responsible for something more than just beating survival.

And after that I stopped...

And thought about stuff...

Sometimes you just need more

Back up copy from syfydesigns from 2019. I pulled only part of the post over, I get into world creation details when you click back there.

 

One of the neato things about playing multiplayer is you get to see other people struggling with the same thing. Where am I going with this game in my life? What are my limits? Can I achieve a personal nirvana?

I play basic default, mostly because I see so many people bumping heads with modpacks that sometimes don't play well with mo creatures or sometimes require manual config just to do so. For me, it's enough that I'm playing survival. Well, I did get advice as staff on how to see without slowing down for viewing obstacles. In your .minecraft folder go to options, then to gamma. If you set it to 10000 you'll be able to see through just about anything in the dark.

Survival is actually really rough sometimes on more emotional days when I'm trying to get away from real life, but I finally figured out how to do '/gamerule keepInventory true' so I wouldn't have to grind back to where I died so hard only to see it all despawn as I arrived. Yes, I know you can change the tic countdown, but I'm just wanting easy play without having to do so much homework first. Multiplayer had the added luxury of '/gamerule mobGriefing false', but after trying that on a few singleplayer worlds, it took too much edge off for me. Survival is even more excruciating in mo creatures singleplayer since you get so many more destructive mobs than creepers and slime blocks, but it's still part of the strategy and planning that goes into block usage for more than just decor and aesthetics, plus it's a great challenge for wiki study finding out block strengths.

One of my goals is structures and layouts with enough integrity to protect and yet delight the eye without sacrificing the adrenaline of conquering and the fulfillment of accomplishing. I've seen so much overkill with cobble and torches on multiplayer that basic 'camp' almost galls me now. I'm really great at hole in the ground and rock hut survival, or super fencing, but the sheer work going into that kind of reinforcement is ridiculous. It's really not hard leveling up enough to reach glowstone or sea lantern lighting, leaving room open for more decorative torch lighting without feeling the overkill. After that, a pleasing mixture of a variety of blocks can create the distance you need from play being blasted or shredded to smithereens. It's amazing what kind of power a single stick of glass just hanging in the air at face level can do. Color it for sweet glitter effect.

Other goals are to work my way up through breeding fairy horses, making a portal staff to get to the wyvern lair, and then flying those pets around the End after I find a stronghold. Yes, I can do most of these in multiplayer just fine, but sometimes I just want to chill in a quiet place on my own without watching the chat while dying gruesome deaths and creating beautiful things against all the odds on my own time where my head can roam free.

I'm currently leveling up to a more aesthetic work area. I love the feeling of being able to look out on the world, so I am using a bit of glass now.

fite me

Grabbing a back up. Lotta little fights going on in my head last few weeks and one day a few blogs were gone *poof*, thank goodness I had already saved this on syfydesigns. 

what I really do in real life

Gathered on 6-26-19 from several blog posts over a couple of years.

That's a fire ogre.

In the meantime, between singleplayer stints, I'm still on server nearly every day. My main project this summer has been mining out underneath my player shop. Pretty sure I built over a slime chunk...

So I'm working on a slime farm. I have sold slime balls and blocks to just about every player we've ever had for nearly two years now. I've been so busy with player help, staff duties, and a list of other projects I rotate around on that I haven't been able to keep my slime in stock. Welp, that's about to change.

One of the things I watch for is contraband. This builder hammer can't be crafted, it's only available in creative mode, and we're a survival server. I guess previous staff suped up a few and used them to kick naughty players off server during bans, and I'm still finding them once in awhile in hidden stashes among non staff players. It's kind of funny where I find things sometimes.

"the ban hammer has spoken!!"

lol

Back to school fashion trends

Someone's pet horse that got thrown into solid rock coming back through a glitched nether portal, I'm guessing. I dug it out. For some reason, mo creatures horses will neigh in anguish forever and just never die, so I can only imagine the player living above the screams... Actually kinda cracks me up. I'm horrible.

And stuff like this. Chicken stacking is my favorite warn item. I have culled thousands of chickens over the last year. I don't get the whole chicken farming thing if they collect 4 double chests of eggs and never sell them, and a hundred chickens have piles of egg backlog floating around them. One guy had 3 different claims and several hundred chickens packed in tiny hopper farms on each claim. Took me half the day to clean that mess up. Then players wonder why they have lag...

One of the projects on my list was spreading out some of my very crowded piled up block storage to new expanded rooms. This is my color room. All the wools, dyed and glazed clays, and cements are arranged in rows of kind and color. I'm sharing it with another moderator who likes to build.

Caught this while doing player rounds making sure everyone was doing ok. Happy little chat with the neighbor there. Mo Creatures has all kinds of bears.

Gerald, lol.

Sometimes we do math.

One of the players throws spectacular parties every quarter.

I keep meaning to learn making fireworks, but my to-do list is just really long. I really do overextend myself, more in minecraft than I do in real life. I'm learning a lot about myself doing this.

But I see others dealing with their own personality traits playing out in game and feel ok. We're all good.

Sometimes I just sit there and laugh. Players are good for me.