June 1 Date Leaks as possible Burning Crusade Classic Launch Date

Somebody at Blizzard made an error earlier when, for a brief period of time, the Battle.net launcher indicated that June 1st might very well be the target date for the launch of Burning Crusade Classic.

Image from MMO Champion

Blizzard focused news sites such as MMO Champion , Icy Veins, and WoW Head immediately began reporting on the slip as multiple people posted images of the short lived promo on the web.

The assumption is that this is the launch date for the expansion, which would line up about right with the rumored pre-patch date of May 18th.  But, given the word of issues with the raid testing in the beta, it might be the pre-patch date.

Either way, it is an indication, along with Blizzards highlight in the WoW Classic character select page, which I noted last week, that Burning Crusade Classic may be on us pretty soon.

I had better get to work on leveling up my paladin if I want him to be ready to go when the expansion hits.

43 Weeks of World War Bee

The week saw an uptick in clashes in Delve as PAPI, after having announced last week that anybody waiting for a huge capital fight over the O-EIMK constellation was going to be disappointed, kept to their word about assailing the systems with subcaps.  With no Keepstars left to shoot, they launched their subcaps at the Imperium.  I put together a campaign report to try and capture a general sense of how much destruction went on over the course of the week.

Delve Campaign in Week 43

The PAPI side is an incomplete list because I haven’t the energy to add all 100+ alliances in the coalition, but I put in the major players that were active. (Also, I missed Siberian Squads on the Imperium side, but they add just 13 ships to the total.  Next time.)  The Imperium losses are padded out a bit by a few final structure losses, but is mostly ships.

If you change the campaign dates to the week before, the ISK value is a little more, largely due to the final two Keepstars, but the total ships destroyed is about half.  That feels like a serious boost in activity in Delve to me.

Delve

I think I can forego the full Delve map for now as the sovereignty situation outside of the O-EIMK constellation seems unlikely to change so long as the PAPI assault continues. (And the metaliminal storm has moved off into Querious.)  Instead, I’ll put up a map focusing on the primary PAPI objective.

O-EIMK Constellation – May 2, 2021

While the bulk of both forces sit facing each other in the adjacent systems of 1DQ1-A and T5ZI-S, most of the fighting has been taking place in 3-DMQT.  1DQ1-A is a tough nut to crack and the easiest for the Imperium to defend, as we can just undock and join the fight.  The other systems in the constellation are cyno jammed and have no connection to systems held by PAPI.  That has left 3-DMQT as the most viable target to attack.

PAPI has set up an Ansiblex jump gate connection between their staging system and 3-DMQT, as the Imperium has between 1DQ1-A and 3-DMQT.  In order to gain a foothold in the system, much of the PAPI effort has been expended in attempting to bring down the Imperium Ansiblex in 3-DMQT.

The Imperium guarding the 3-D Ansiblex

PAPI has managed to reinforce the Ansiblex there several times, including during a large brawl on Saturday.  However, even when they succeed with that, the system is not cut off from 1DQ.  Imperium command simply drops the cyno jammer in 3-D and uses titan bridges to throw forces into the system.

Watching another repair cycle

The battles over the system will no doubt carry on until PAPI either takes the system or tires of the effort.  However, that effort is really only putting off the inevitable.  If you look at the constellation map, there are only two systems they can get directly into before they have to setup and fight in 1DQ1-A itself.

And they still have to turn the ihubs in those two systems in order to follow through on their usual plan of setting up jump gates and cyno jammers in order to kill the Keepstars.  The sovereignty battle won’t be easy.  They cannot jump or gate directly into the rest of the constellation and the ADMs are high enough that they have to spend most of an hour on each node in an entosis contest, while we will be able to pop nodes in a few minutes.

O-EIMK constellation ADMs

This feels like a clash that is going to carry on until one side or the other gets tired of it.  Combat alone won’t likely won’t resolve the struggle, some persistence is going to be required.  We shall see.

Other Theaters

Feythabolis continued to see contests over ihubs as The Bastion. Red Alliance, and other allies pushed into the region.

Feythabolis – May 2, 2021

Likewise, the push and pull continues in Esoteria, which connects to Feythabolis, as The Bastion and allies continue to vie with Army of Mango and Evictus.

Esoteria – May 2, 2021

Last week also saw The Initiative move on from the torched regions of Catch, Immensea, and Impass to open up an new front in the enemy backfield.  This time the target is Etherium Reach in the dronelands, where PandaFam and their associates live.

Etherium Reach – May 2, 2021

The particular target, according to Fountain Frank on the Meta Show, is Solyaris Chtonium, generally referred to by their ticket, Slyce, though Pandemic Horde holds a stretch of systems there as well.

My Participation

I managed to get into the first big fight in 3-DMQT at the start of the week, which I covered in a post.  I declared it the start of the PAPI assault based on just that first fight, so am happy enough to have been vindicated in that statement by the ongoing fighting since.  I have been through the Ansiblex into fights more than a few times… and in via a titan bridge as well.

The Ansiblex in 1DQ1-A

My lucky streak ended in a fight when Tom Flood who, in this age of “kitey bullshit,” still loves to take his fleet in close to brawl, managed to get his whole logi wing destroyed, including me in a Scimitar.  So I will add that to the loss list for the war.  My revenge was quick in coming as I managed this epic kill.  Fear the corvette plague.

My losses for the war are now:

• Ares interceptor – 17
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Drake battle cruiser – 4
• Purifier stealth bomber – 3
• Guardian logi – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

EVE Online has been nominated for a Webby award for the Project Discovery work and CCP would very much like it if you could go cast a vote to support that.

CCP dropped the second part of their industry update, which added new components to all battleship and larger hulls.  This has caused uncertainty and price jumps for those hulls, as well as further mineral price increases as people scrambled to get builds in before the change, so that when I checked Jita earlier, Rokh hulls are now selling for more than what I paid for a fully fitted Rokh on contract about a month ago.  Manufactured T1 battleship hulls look to be 350 million ISK and up.  It might be a good time to try a Praxis, which appear to be much cheaper.

CCP also introduced a new set of packs, complete with game time, SKINs, and skill points.  But selling skill points for cash has already been normalized, so whatever.

The validity of the MER and its consumer price index, which includes non-player produced items like skill injectors, was both a topic of discussion at The Nosy Gamer and on The Meta Show.

And, on the peak concurrent user front, numbers remained about the same this week this week despite all the activity over the O-EIMK constellation.

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165
• Week 12 – 36,671
• Week 13 – 35,618
• Week 14 – 39,681
• Week 15 – 40,359
• Week 16 – 36,642
• Week 17 – 37,695
• Week 18 – 36,632
• Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
• Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
• Week 21 – 34,888
• Week 22 – 33,264
• Week 23 – 33,149
• Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
• Week 25 – 31,611
• Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
• Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
• Week 28 – 34,713
• Week 29 – 35,996
• Week 30 – 38,323
• Week 31 – 38,167
• Week 32 – 37,259
• Week 33 – 35,886 (Saturday)
• Week 34 – 35,626
• Week 35 – 35,379
• Week 36 – 35,085
• Week 37 – 34,394
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 43
• INN – Pandemic Horde’s April Townhall
• INN – PAPI Repelled in 3-DMQT
• INN – PAPI’s Final War Plans
• INN – Imperium Last Stand 2.0
• INN – Headline: Snoozefest Upcoming! (reality: no snoozefest at all)

Where is the Scenario Mod for This?

Due to the absolutely staggering lack of leadership currently at the federal level, regional groupings have begun to form in an effort to coordinate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.  The internet being what it is, people are tracking and mapping these groupings.

Regional Groupings

There are even people working on flag variations for things like the Western States Pact. (Though, now that there are five states in it, the flag needs a re-think.)

And, because I am what I am, my thoughts immediately go towards a mod or scenario or whatever to reflect this, if not break up, then regional grouping of these re-United States.  Civilization or Crusader Kings or Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis, in one or all of these somebody has to be brewing up a scenario.   Who has one?

Body Blow to Blizzard Margins

Oddly enough, I had a sense that things were off.  I picked up Candy Crush Saga again… I know, I said I was done there, but another post on that later… a couple months back and noticed over the last few weeks that they had added a ways to earn boosters by watching video ads.  You can get an extra booster every level for watching a video, an extra spin at the booster wheel for watching a video, and so on.

When this showed up my first thought was, “Somebody is looking for a way to boost Q2 earnings.”

And then the Activision Blizzard Q1 2019 financial report showed up yesterday.

You can find all the data they have shared, plus a replay of the analyst call on the investor relations site, but let me just summarize by saying it isn’t pretty, at least for Blizzard.

Overall it wasn’t so bad I guess.  The bottom line exceeded the guidance they gave, and that counts for a lot.  Activision gave us a warning last quarter and laid off 8% of its workforce in anticipation of tighter times.  The over payed executive staff didn’t share any of that pain, but they never do.  It is hard to look bad when you spend money on share buy backs to support the stock price.  From the report:

Two-year $1.5B stock repurchase authorization, started Feb 14, 2019

But expectations were set that things would be slowing down for the company.  On the Activision side of the house you only get one Call of Duty release a year, so you only expect one big quarter a year out of them.  They’ll be back in Q4 with big numbers.

But Blizzard and King, they are the reliable revenue generators, or so it usually goes.

Activision Blizzard Q1 2019 Financial Results Presentation – Slide 10

King looks to about on par.  They are down some from Q4 but are hanging tough on the margins front and align pretty well with Q1 2018.  Down a bit, but not much.

Activision is way off but, again, no Call of Duty release this quarter.  Margins are a bit dicey compared to Q1 2018, though revenue was actually up just a bit.

And then there is Blizzard.

It is tough to compare them against Q1 2018 because they had the Battle for Azeroth pre-order going, which boosted sales.  And, of course, in Q4 the game was still on its Battle for Azeroth high, with some people dumping in some extra cash for the 6 month subscription for an exclusive mount.  Well, it was exclusive.  You can buy it straight up ala carte now in the cash shop.  I suspect, again, something to goose earnings a bit for Q2.

The operating margin for Blizzard though… 16% is abysmal for a software company.  And that is noted as having been offset by “lower costs.”  They laid people off and likely cut back on something.  We might be seeing a reason here why Blizzard isn’t going to Gamescom this summer as well as looking for ways to offset more of the cost of BlizzCon this year with higher prices and special big spender packages.  Conventions like BlizzCon, despite what you might think, are not money makers.  Blizz is just trying to limit the bleed.

And what does this say about Blizzard games?  I see people say regularly that nobody plays WoW now, though that is patently false.  The servers are more lightly loaded, certainly, but things still seem to be buzzing and I run into other players everywhere.  However, those people who bought in on the free mount deal got to skip paying Blizz any money in Q1, having paid for six months up front.  That certainly might have left a hole in the income column.

And the Blizzard MAU for Q1 2019 was 32 million, which is down from 38 million last year, but still pretty high.  And when you have other games, free or non-subscription games, mixed into that number, it is meaningless unless you can get further details.  But clearly fewer people are spending money on Blizzard games.  SuperData was saying that there was burnout on the Hearthstone front and Overwatch has been reported as sagging since last summer.

And what else does Blizzard have?  Diablo III is in its forever seasonal holding pattern.  StarCraft II is kicking around without anything to sell people.  Heroes of the Storm is now a hobby as much as anything, its professional league having be shut down.  It makes me wonder how much Blizzard made via GoG.com with Diablo and Warcraft.

But more damning is perhaps what the presentation said about Blizzard, which wasn’t much at all.  Aside from a mention of the Overwatch League season, the Blizzard was pretty much left out.

But then, what else do they have to talk about on the Blizzard front?

WoW Classic is still out at some unspecified date in the summer.  The only new title on the horizon is Diablo Immortal, the mobile game that got such a bad reception at BlizzCon last year that I have to wonder if Blizzard is sitting on it until they have some other Diablo franchise news to report.  And that is about it.  There will be no announcements and Gamescom and BlizzCon doesn’t hit until November 1, 2019.  If it wasn’t for WoW Classic they would have nothing coming up.

And so it goes.

Exchanging Citadel Kills in the North

In the north the Guardians of the Galaxy and their allies and their newly hired mercenaries Black Legion…, and no, that isn’t an ellipses, their name on DOTLAN actually has three dots after it because they lost the old alliance after it broke up some time back.  A dot after an alliance or corp name is supposed to indicate a PvP focused organization, so three dots says they are really, really a PvP organization… or that they lost their old name.  I’ll just refer to them as Black Legion however so I can end a sentence with their name without causing confusion.

Also I’m still not sure what to make of this after action report that starts with everybody there to shoot one of our citadels in DO6H-Q and ends up with Black Legion shooting GotG after which PL dropped supers on them.

The upshot of all of this is that the locals and their mercenaries are starting to show up for timers in force again.

We found this out last night when they showed up with nearly 200 pilots to take out an Astrahus of ours in ROIR-Y.

Astrahus getting hit

GotG showed up in ROIR in with their Eagle fleet doctrine, a Monitor FC ship leading the parade again.

Monitor out front

We, on the other hand, had about 50 people to hand so were not going to be able to defend the Astrahus in a straight up fight.  Asher had us form up bombers instead to see if we could wear them down or at least make them pay a price for showing up.

Bomber lurking cloaked, waiting for a warp in

Unfortunately as we were forming up on a perch before the fight one of the pilots warped directly to the the cloaked up bombers while trying to cloak up themselves in warp and managed to uncloak the whole fleet as one of their scouts was on grid with us, pretty much declaring aloud our plan of action.

That meant when the Eagle fleet showed up they had their interdictors start bubbling up the fleet as they shot the citadel.  That would catch bombers on their runs, allowing them to pop any bomber that decloaked to bomb.  Still, Asher had us give it a try, throwing us into range a few times to see what we could kill.

It did not go as well as planned.  I managed to launch my bomb on the first run but was inside a bubble for subsequent runs until I ended up getting decloaked in a bubble and blown up.  That fate befell many of us, but in the end the battle report said we didn’t do too bad.

Battle Report Header

We lost more ships, plus the objective, but extracted a bit more in ISK from them than we lost, Astrahus included.

While that was going on another group was out shooting citadels the locals has sitting around, popping a couple of those while they were away.  And after they were done and stood down we formed up again and went to kill yet another Astrahus of theirs.

Astrahus right on a planet

I had not seen a citadel quite so close to a planet before.  The picture doesn’t do justice to the enormity of the planet relative to our tiny ships and the equally tiny citadel.

Seeing the planet’s atmospheric layer

Then again, we might have been a bit too close to the planet as the texture on it was pretty rough at that distance.  Not quite 1999 EverQuest quality, but it did look awkward.

Astrahus going up

We blew the Astrahus.  It was Pandemic Horde owned, but it was a spot where they could have tethered and repaired or docked up.  Now it is gone.

On the way out we also sent an Athanor into reinforcement, setting up a follow up later.

The Athanor was setting up a frack

None of this was interrupted in any way by the locals.  And so it goes.

Meanwhile the TNT deployment has started doing some entosis work on Pure Blind and has captured a few systems.  We’re not going to hold them I am sure, we’re just here to blow stuff up and make life rough.  But given that the final details for the faction citadel conversion has been announced, taking and holding some stations until that is done might very well be part of the plan.

Who is Backing Ashes of Creation?

What makes the Hottentot so hot?
What puts the “ape” in ape-ricot?
Whatta they got that I ain’t got?

-C. Lion

The Ashes of Creation Kickstarter seems to be a rousing success so far.

The ask was $750,000 and, with nearly a month left to go until the June 2 end date, they have already passed a million dollars and are talking about stretch goals and the like.  Op success.

One million dollars and change so far

And this didn’t happen by magic or anything.  Intrepid Studios went by the numbers for this success with a long build up over time and clear advance notice that the Kickstarter campaign was coming so fans of the title were ready to go.

You can go over to Massively OP and search on “Ashes of Creation” and see the series of articles that they posted about the game, like stepping stones leading to this day.

This is the way it is supposed to be done.  That whole, “Hey, surprise!  We have a Kickstarter!” thing is generally a bust.  Amateurs run out half cocked, professionals lay the groundwork so that the success which follows isn’t really a surprise.

And the team at Intrepid Studios has industry experience, even if they seem a bit young.  If you show me a dozen people and say something like, “There’s over 40 years of MMO experience here in this office…” I am going to point at a co-worker of mine and tell you the pair of us are past 50 years experience in our industry combined.  But youth can mean vigor and the desire to tackle problems and older hand might just dismiss with, “we tried that before, it didn’t work.”

The experience of the team seems to be a bit focused on SOE/Daybreak, which is probably why some of what they are talking about has an air of EverQuest Next about it.  Again, not necessarily a bad thing.  EQN certainly got many people excited back in the day.  And the whole “node system” also seems to have a bit of EVE Online null sec in its mix as well.

All of this adds up to an enticing package and ought to spark the embers of hope that maybe there will be something new under the sun when it comes to the Fantasy MMORPG genre.

So why am I not excited about this?  Why isn’t this helping me shake off the MMO malaise?

I have been watching that march of articles at Massively OP for a while now, yet the fact that the Kickstarter was on and doing well really didn’t hit me until Bhagpuss posted about it.  Maybe I just pay more attention to him than Massively OP? (Also, not many of the bloggers I follow have weighed in on the Kickstarter.  What does that say?)

Meanwhile, I think I may have had my enthusiasm for Kickstarter projects weighed down by past projects.  I need to do another summary post about my experiences with Kickstarter.  That might actually be a good one for next Wednesday due to the timing of a particular campaign.  It won’t be a tale of all sunshine and lollipops as some of the projects in my post from two years back are still not done, with MMORPG projects being the most likely not to have wrapped up.

Complex software projects are complex.  It is known.  So any dates given… and in the case of Ashes of Creation, December 2018 is being bandied about… are automatically suspect in my book.

And then there is my capacity for enthusiasm over long periods of time, which is essentially zero.  As I noted in a comment on Syp’s post about backing or not backing the project, I lack the wherewithal to pay close attention to/care about such a project as it winds its way through development, alpha, early access, beta, pre-release, and whatever other gyrations the creation cycle takes.  (Cue footage of me collapsing from feigned exhaustion at the idea of a project that has an “Alpha 3.0” target some six years into the development cycle.)

From my investment in the genre about a decade back to now I have regressed to the point where I really just want to exchange money for some entertainment.  Keep your development laundry to yourself.  I can’t even bring myself to pay much attention to expansions for games I follow,   You have to have something really, really, and I mean really, special to get me to jump on the pre-release bandwagon at this point.

But I am jaded and cynical and in that state of malaise I keep talking about, all of which tends to add up to a hammer of an emotion which makes every new MMORPG project look like a bent,  mis-aligned, and somewhat rusty nail.

So what is the fresh and enthusiastic perspective here?  Am I missing something special?  If you are backing this, what is the selling point for you?

Minecraft Rail Plans

Quite a while back I had a post about my Great Northern Road project on our Minecraft server.  I wanted to lay down a horse compatible path… meaning any tunnel had to be at least two blocks wide and three blocks tall… from our populated area around the spawn point for our world up to the Mesa biome that had been discovered quite a ways north of us.

The whole thing involved digging tunnels, burning forests, leveling terrain, and building three bridges to cross some wide stretches of water along the way.

Mesa Biome Channel Bridge

They “why” of it all can only be answered with “because,” as we already had a nether portal up in the Mesa biome which provided a considerably shorter path for those wanting to collect hardened clay of various colors for construction projects.  The “why” of Minecraft itself only has the answer “because” when it comes down to it.

Having built it, I decided to create some attractions along the road.  One of them developed into a base that I started living out of most of the time, with a town nearby.  Of course, traveling up and down the road to build things became a chore, so I started laying rails.  Then I linked those rails up to my base at the southern end of the road.  With that done, I started pushing the rails north to the Mesa biome.

That ended up being quite a stretch of rails, which used up a lot of my stored up iron.  Of all the things we have automated, iron collection turns out to be the one I use the least and is the one I need the most.  I have gold in excess, enough redstone to build a castle out of redstone blocks, and I use diamond tools to avoid wasting iron.  Still, I had enough to finish that and then start building south.

South was a bit easier.  I put up a rail line from my base at the south end of the road to hook up to my previous base.  That base already had a rail line that ran out to the spawn point, so I was able to hook those up.  And, at the south side of the spawn point was another rail line that ran down to Skronk and Enaldi’s Firenze, which I also hooked into the line.

Once complete, you could get in a minecart at the Mesa biome terminus…

Mesa biome

…travel south down the line past my then current base…

Where I build up my supplies

…down the line past Aaron and Xydd’s bases…

You can see Aaron’s charged creeper grid

…past the spawn point and down south through Skronkholm and into the station under Firenze.

Firenze continues to grow

The run ended up being just about 10km in game and takes a full day/night cycle to complete.

In order to accommodate travel between points along the line, I decided I needed to build stations along the way.  I looked into a few different designs, but opted for simplicity.  If somebody wants a more complicated station at their stop, they can build it.  Mine just stops the minecart at each point and sends you on your way with the push of a button.

Simple station

I also put an override switch on most of the stations so that they could be flagged to simply pass people through.  That became useful when moving between distant stations regularly.

So there we had it, the Great Northern Road turned into the Great Northern Railroad.  I finished that up a couple of months back, at which point I was out of iron and most other supplies and ready for a bit of a break.  I meant to do a post about it back then, but never quite got around to it.

I didn’t stop playing Minecraft, but I spent a while pottering around, improving things, building small things, and moving the server to a new host.

As an aside, for general performance, Minecraft Realms has been a big improvement over MC Pro Hosting.  The downside is lack of ability to tweak some server settings I was able to previously and the idle timeout, which means no more over night automated harvesting for some of us.

As I did that, I also started building up my supplies again, especially iron.

Even with automation, I still mine a lot in Minecraft.  There is a certain peacefulness to it, a regularity in driving a shaft down to level 12, setting up a central open area, and then mining off of it at every third block, and digging to see what you will find.  I can do that and listen to podcasts or audio books and relax.

As my iron supplies built up again, I started building more track.  I also started seeking out abandoned mine shafts underground to strip them of all the track they contained.  I had found quite a few of them previously, but now went back to strip them bare.  I decided that I was not yet done with my rail project.

I had noticed on the map… as I mentioned in a previous post, I occasionally create a map of our world using a utility called Minecraft Overviewer, which takes the world data and renders it into Google Maps format… that on the western side of our explored world there were a few nether portals hanging about on their own.  They were left over from some early explorations done by Xydd, where he would go to some point in the nether and build a portal just to see where it came up.

I decided that those portals would be good anchor points for an expansion of the rail line.  I wanted to bring the line around through the unsettled and largely unexplored western reaches of the map and then turn right at some point and link back up at the Mesa biome to create a large loop.  So I moved a bunch of supplies to Firenze and started building a roadbed and laying track west from there.

Supply is probably the biggest challenge.  Inventory management comes into play, as it always does, in that you can only carry so much stuff with you.  That means you either have to go back to your supply depot when you run out or setup a new base and start building up supplies there.  The further you get from your current supply base, the more time you spend moving back and forth between that base and where you are working.

This is exacerbated by day night cycle, which can seem both cruelly short and extremely long depending on what you are up to.  With the Minecraft 1.9 combat changes, it has become much more difficult for me to deal with the spawns at night, in part because you can no longer just swing wildly and chop all those zombies and skeletons to pieces and also because the spawn rates at night seem to have been notched up noticeably.  Creepers especially seem to boom in abundance now and have blown up a lot of my track.

While finally getting the infinity arrow enchant on a bow has been a boon… I spent a lot of time trying for that… because I can hand back and murder stuff at range, I still have to get to shelter at night to sleep and start the day fresh.  The distance between the work site at the supply base makes that take up time.  And even if I build little overnight shelters, I still end up having to travel back and forth for more supplies.  So, even if I had infinite resources, there is a bunch of work to be done.

And I did not have infinite resources.  And it isn’t just rail I run out of in the field.  If I have to bridge some gap I need cobblestone.  It my tools wear out I need fresh ones… or I need to go back and repair the ones I have.  I need torches to light the way.  And I need food.  A stack of 64 baked potatoes seems like it should last a long time, and then you get caught out at night and have to fight, then eat to keep your healing up, and then fight some more.

So at some point I get far enough down the line that I have to build a base with all the amenities.  In my quest to finish the western run of the rail line, I am on my third base.

The world map currently

As with most of the screen shots in this post, this one is from Minecraft Overviewer, though zoomed out to give a sense of where the rail line has run so far.  You probably need to click on it and view it full size to be able to see any of the detail.

Mesa to Firenze was the original 10km rail line.  Supply Base A was chosen because of its proximity to one of Xydd’s portals.

Supply Base A

I built a mine there, sent up a bit of farming, got an auto-furnace setup to smelt, and put in a bunch of chests to hold things.  That base didn’t end up too big because it wasn’t all that far from Firenze and I was still pretty flush with supplies when I got there.  I barely mined at all, though I did find two abandoned mines in the area, which helped build up my track supply.

Supply Base B ended up being more complete.  By the time I got there I was having supply problems, not to mention being far from home.  It was also the location of another Xydd nether portal, but not one he had built a road to in the nether, so I had to mine some to get some cobblestone in order to pave a path down in the nether so I could find my way there and back if I needed to.

At this point supplies were dwindling, but both Aaron and Skronk donated to the cause and I was able to drive north to what is my current supply base.  Supply Base C is where I have sat for over a week now.

Supply Base C

I stopped here because it was a town, so there was already shelter and a food supply.  I used some of my cobblestone stockpile to wall it off, built a mine, and started hording supplies.

I also went down to the nether, to our transport hub in the roof of the nether, and dug a tunnel from there to a point where I could build a portal that would come up in the town.  I miscalculated by a bit and the portal ended up on the roof of the town well.  At least it wasn’t deep under ground I suppose.

One of the advantages of this town was that a whole family of horses had spawned in the area, so I was able to tame one to use for exploration.  And I needed to explore, because the other reason I stopped here was I was beginning to reach the point where I couldn’t just head north.  I have to find a path to route the rail line to get back to the Mesa biome.

So that is where I sit, at the far end of a long rail line, scouting for a way forward and building up my supplies for my push to close the circle.

I will say that without rendered maps of the world, this would be a lot more difficult.  I could plot a route with the F3 option open so I could see coordinates to note down a possible path, but it is a lot easier to head out and explore for a while, then download the world, render it, and see what the lay of the land really is.

It just takes a bit to do that some time.  Our world is now over 1GB in size in its raw form, it takes about 45 minutes to render, and the output is about 12GB in size.