Diary 2019-11-04

By Max Woerner Chase

I did some writing today; wrote part of a rough draft of one idea, a basic outline of another, and some notes on the story I've been working on for a while, which by the way has the working title "Absolutely Nobody: Magic:".

Besides that, so much GregBlock. I'll try to explain that some because I don't want to do any more writing right now. GregBlock is a skyblock pack for Minecraft (that is, the intended experience of play is that the player spawns on a small island floating in empty space, with nothing but a tree, and has to build up to, usually, something crazy) based around GregTech, or rather a mod for 1.12 which is inspired by GregTech.

I first encountered GregTech years ago, and I didn't have a good experience with it, and my inclination is to put the blame for that somewhat on pack authors taking kind of a kitchen sink approach. GregTech would pretty aggressively rework recipes for other mods in an effort to put power levels under control and have a deeper tech tree. For me, the most obvious manifestation of this was "You can't get at any of these cool toys, because the basically trivial recipe in the wiki doesn't match up with what the game says you need, which is, like, iridium chunks or whatever."

In any case, I haven't gotten too far in GregBlock; I've basically just done most of the beginning quests, and started making steam-powered machines. Of the mods I was familiar with beforehand, the only one that I noticed crafting differences from the last time I played with it is Applied Energistics 2, which, yeah no kidding.

The early game is a little tough (without a saw, a log is worth 2 sticks instead of 8), but it doesn't take much to ramp up. Now I just need to figure out what to focus on next in the context of "Now I can make basic machines."

Anyway, I can't write any more, so I'm done.

Good night.