This post is talking a bit about the behind the scenes elements of the first video in my new series, Carved in Stone, named after the book I’ve been working on for the last several years. I highly recommend watching the video first, if you haven’t already, as this post assumes you’ve seen the video, and contains MAJOR spoilers!
This entire series is the most complex I’ve ever done, and it’s several years in the making if we count time spent working on the book. Ages ago, I was chatting with Brian Tyrell (writer and co-project-manager for the book) about adapting the book into various storytelling media, and we wondered if I could bring the Picts into Minecraft. I started to consider what was possible in Minecraft, as this was before we knew about the Copper Age update. Ultimately, I decided that modding the game was the best way to go. I could bring Scottish plants into the game, and take advantage of quite a few mods that bring Minecraft gameplay closer to reality, like Charcoal Pit 4.
That led me down an entire rabbit hole of learning to code for KubeJS specifically, as I don’t trust myself to make a full mod yet. I’ve got a lot of things in the game so far, but there is so much left to add or change! So I’m going to be adding/refining things as this series goes. I’m hoping to have a finished modpack at some point, but part of this series is me learning how to do all of that. In other words, it might be a while before this modpack is available for folks to play around with!
This first episode, I spawned in a village intentionally. Pictish life is frequently reliant on those around you, even in smaller settlements, so starting in the middle of nowhere wasn’t ideal. This is actually the third world I started for this series – the first one I was in a snowy village that had all of two buildings, one of which was mostly deleted from worldgen. The second world I didn’t spawn in a village, probably due to a conflicting mod! But I quite like this spawn. There’s an interesting cave/rock situation, the surrounding swamp is something I haven’t really contended with before in Minecraft (but I have Pictish plans for it), and there’s a good amount of villagers!
One concern I had was the lack of hills, but that mostly means that this settlement is more crop- and fish-focused rather than livestock. We still need livestock! But it’s not the main thing this settlement does.
The BIG problem I ran into in this episode is my current lack of iron! I have a mod that will occasionally let me find nuggets when I’m just mining stone, but that’s infrequent and could be any of the nuggets (or even gems), not just iron. It’s not super reliable!
But to light a fire in Minecraft, you usually need a flint and steel, and that requires iron. In reality, you can use friction to start a fire with some sticks, or even a bow drill. But I hadn’t coded that into the game, because I hadn’t even thought about how I’d soft-locked myself out of a flint and steel.
Charcoal Pit 4 is a great mod for many reasons, but a big one is that it forces you to make iron using methods that are closer to reality. You need to craft a bloomery and some bellows, turn your iron into a bloom, then place that in the world and work it with a pickaxe before you can get iron.
Of course, I’m quadruple checking that with the mod’s page as I write this and realising that it has a recipe for a flint and steel that only needs raw iron! 🙃
So I could have just done that… I didn’t even think to check for alternative recipes! Goodness, lesson learned.
Obviously, I didn’t realise that was an option when making this episode! There’s a lot of footage from that recording session that I edited out, because it’s boring, but I spent a LONG while trying to figure out what to do. There was a while where I worried that the entire episode was a bust, because I couldn’t get any charcoal!
And then I remembered the lava pit. I seriously need to wall it off from the villagers (I still haven’t). Originally I was going to get rid of it, but now that it was so pivotal for fire/charcoal, I’d be sad to lose it!
You have to be quick, making charcoal from lava. The log piles will burn straight through if you don’t cover them quickly, leaving you with nothing. Since you don’t know when the piles will catch, reaction times are slower. Juggling two charcoal pits with two log piles each wasn’t 100% successful, and I only tried juggling three pits once before deciding that was a net loss!
What I enjoy most about this series is that it’s forcing me to approach Minecraft in a whole new way. I’ve never thought about making charcoal from lava before, and the main time I see anyone starting fires from lava intentionally, it’s to make or light nether portals. I’ve already filmed Episode 2, and that also has a new set of things to consider – though they are significantly less flammable! I’m really excited to see what else this series throws at me, and what new Minecraft puzzles it forces me to solve.
ArchaeoPlays 