Hello, welcome back to Across the Map!

Sorry I haven't been posting much lately. I haven't been doing a lot of horribly interesting stuff in Minecraft. With the holidays, (I got a Wii U for Christmas!) I have been more or less busy, but I digress. Back to today's topic!

If you haven't heard of Feed the Beast, it is a Minecraft mod pack containing a lot of technical mods. By technical, let's say it is a mod pack that adds a lot of blocks and items useful for building various machines of your own invention.  I saw Sethbling's let's play of FTB, and decided I wanted to try it. Since then, I have been playing a lot of Feed the Beast, so I decided to start doing the occasional machine showcase.

Today's machine is a bee farm for the bees from the Forestry(?) mod.

Here's a basic image of it.


All the apiaries have the same setup, so I'll use the meadow bee apiary as an example.


Anything produced by the apiary will be sucked out by that wooden pipe with the redstone engine attached. The diamond pipe will filter out any bees and send them to that loop in the back. The diamond pipe back there is only used to make the bees go into the apiary as a priority if there's room for their type. (All the bees in the pipe are drones.) When a queen dies, it will output a princess of its type, and at least one drone. The offspring will enter the loop. When a princess enters, it will almost immediately enter the apiary to mate with a drone, producing a new queen.

Back on the main pipe intersection, any combs and whatnot go right, through the golden pipe for a speed boost. In case you were wondering, the iron pipe is just to make sure that any output won't go the wrong way, and I am too lazy to set filters on the diamond pipes.

Next, any combs will enter this pipe, and then a centrifuge. The chest is just to filter any extra items out (like the sugar my valiant bees produce) and keep them from blocking the centrifuges. The extra output will enter the chest in the floor.


The chest in the back is an overflow chest for if both centrifuges are full. Items are immediately pumped back out in case a centrifuge finishes.

This is the other side of the centrifuges. Beeswax and what else combs produce go into the chest in the center of the screenshot. Honey goes to the chest behind the comb product chest to be autocrafted into honey slices.


Here's my turtle-powered wheat farm. I consider the whole setup I'm showcasing a honey slice factory. Gee, I sure wish I had more efficient bees. I'll start cross-breeding soon. Maybe I'll get some.
The turtle is programed to run back and forth planting wheat, grow it with bone meal, and  harvest it.
It deposits it in a chest. Then, the wheat and extra seeds will be transferred to the comb products chest. When there is enough wheat, the first autocrafting table (furthest to the left) will turn it into bread. It then goes to the second autocrafting table's chest to await being turned into honey slices.


Hey, guys! What time is it? You have five seconds.






It's time for the impromptu random bonus screenshot of the day!

This is screenshot Fire_Cat2000 took of a chicken getting burned by a thermal discouragement beam from the Portal Gun mod.


My caption: Here, seen for the first time is the Aperture Science Discouraged Chicken! 

Anyway, almost at the end of this post. I wanted to show you guys my new skin! It is a Magma cube skin. It's not permanent. Think of it as an alternative skin of mine.


Wanna try it? Here's the skin file. To grab it, right click it and select "save image as".
Pro tip: You can grab anyone's skin with this link. www.minecraft.net/skin/(player name).png








Well, that's all for today! As always, feedback/comments are appreciated, and thanks for stopping by my blog!
See you all next post. Until then!

Hello, welcome back to Across the Map!
Today, I decided to do a server recap with Cheffoo (You may see him in some screenshots), because oh, how time flies. We have a fair amount to show you today! Let's go!

First, I thought I'd introduce the cats of Bluesun village.

This is the newest cat in the village, Brewing Buddy. He is Mintz9's new cat.



Random caption that wasn't supposed to be added: HARDCORE cats sleep in baskets of stone! :D
(By the way, like my new FreshCraft slab texture?)



Here's Lgamerross' cat, Rusty. Yes, his name is a reference to the book series, Warriors. Lgamer and I sure went on quite an adventure to get him, but I'd say he was worth the effort.



As you may be able to tell, he has been doing a bit of redstone recently.

These are Fire_Cat2000's cats. They aren't new, but I haven't introduced them to Across the Map yet. The black and white kitty is Paper. She is Fire_Cat's first cat on the server. We got her quite a while back, on the same expedition I tamed Splash, my pet cat. The tabby is Shreddie, the more recently tamed one.



Now that I've introduced the cats, let's take a look at some of the new buildings.

Here's club Mintleaf. It was mostly built by Mintz9. I like to chill here sometimes.



Inside.
(If you ask why the furnaces are different here, it is because this was done in two sessions. I made those textures in between said sessions. Cheffoo wasn't there for the second, actually.)


Mintz9's new house!


He also converted his forest, Zapper Tone forest into a parkour course called Mine Jump. It's a pretty fun course!




Okay, the last build of Mintz9's recent projects is the Christmas hub. I don't think it's finished, though.



Last but not least, we have one of the most notable additions to the server. It's the Nether hub! It serves the same purposes as the one on the Mindcrack server. Here are some screenshots of it.


That big tower thing is the staircase leading up to it. 


Here we are at the entrance!


Kitchen.

The Nether wart farm



The melon farm.


The "rail room".



All the different rails.


Mine


Inside


The railway itself



The other end





 
Fire_Cat2000




Mintz9
(Hey there, Minty! Nice boots!)


Lgamerross' red room of redness


So, yeah. That's the Nether hub! As you can see, none of our rails are actually finished (You just didn't see the parts of my track with no blue wool), due to the fact that the hub is relatively new, most of us are adventurous types, and don't  have a ton of free time.


That's it for today! As always, comments are appreciated, and thanks for stopping by my blog!
See you all next post. Until then!

Hello, welcome back to  Across the Map!

Today, I am going to show you an average village.


You may ask: N8than, what are you up to? Is this just another seed review?
If so, I say keep guessing. If you already know what I'm up to, you are either Fire_Cat2000 or Cheffoo.

Next, I'm gonna show you a mountain.


If you know what I'm up to at this point, you've been on a world of the same seed, and you've been on with me.


Here's another nearby mountain.


If your name is Fire_Cat2000, my favorite Minecraft companion, and you haven't guessed what I'm up to today, here's a hint: you know this view better than you think.



Okay, if you don't recognize anything, here's a clearing behind a natural archway.


If you've recognized this, you are an Across the Map fan from a bit after this blog started.

If you haven't recognized anything, I am out of screenshots, except this...
IMPROMPTU BONUS SCREENSHOT OF  THE DAY!!! :) 

Here we see Mintz9 caught in a waterfall in the mines on the server.


My caption: When they say go with the flow, I don't think this is what they mean.

If you haven't guessed where I am, go look through my older posts.











































So, this is what I've been up to. This morning, I made a custom potion. I decided to go into another world with an extreme hills biome to test it out. I went in with MCEdit, added the kit that contained said potion, went in-game, and looked around. It turned out that it wasn't the world I thought it was. After about a minute, I realized which world I was in: the SERVER WORLD.

Allow me to explain. The world that our server uses was not the first to have that seed. The first was the one I was in. I generated it because I wanted a world that I could do random testing in. I like monsters, but superflat had too many slimes (which slime spawning wasn`t nerfed  in superflat at the time) and custom superflat worlds were not  a feature. I didn`t have MCEdit at the time, either. Therefore, my best option was to generate a default world, and hope I got some flat space. At the time, I was still trying to decide which world I wanted to run on the server. I discovered that the world I generated was cool enough to go on the server, so I generated another world with the same seed, and we used it on the server. The rest is another story.

Now, let`s look at the same camera angles, but on the present-day server world!



That mountain is now home to our no-so abandoned hide-y hole, sky resources and Fire_Cat2000`s orchard.


This hill hasn`t changed much. It more or less marks part of the current boundaries of Bluesun Village.

Obviously, the clearing is now the main part of Bluesun Village. The spawn was moved to the other side of the archway long ago.

Over the course of time, this village has suffered some player takeover, and more recently (*ahem*) some stripping and population loss. If anyone knows anything about this, I`d like to know, thank you very much.
 >:(



Well, that's it for today! As always, comments are appreciated, and thanks for stopping by!
See you all next post. Until then!

Hello, welcome back to Across the Map!
Just yesterday, I have finished a gadget I call "Meat Rain". In a nutshell, it is a flaming animal launcher. Here it is:




Oh, yes. I will be using FreshCraft today, because it won the poll!

The main launcher will be way up in the air, but this is where the player can trigger it from. Just in case they wanted to see the display of flaming animals in the sky from a certain angle, there are wooden buttons to trigger it from a distance via bow and arrow.


Yes, it does use the same technology as the Vexian Anti-bridging bomb, also some from Vechs' Cluckster bomb.

Hold the phone. I think I just discovered that you can climb invisible ladders!


Next, let's head over to where I have some ready to launch. This is my first launcher, so let's use the others.

WOO! Super speed!

Here we are! Let's launch this one!
I just emptied my inventory (Except for these random jump boost potions and my porkhammer) to see how much loot we get.

LAUNCH!


Here is the first of the two phases! Cows and pigs like a streak across the sky!

My favorite: the chickens! They look like meteors to me.


The launch is over! Here's what I found:



So anyways, Coming soon to downloads: Meat Rain!
Oh, yeah. It's time for the random bonus screenshot of the day!

I caught this photo when I was terrorizing my pet cat on the server, Splash. (Don't worry. I only threw a snowball at him, which is completely harmless.)


My caption: I never knew that my pet cat, Splash could jump using his butt, and turn red at will.



Well, that's it for today! As always, comments are appreciated, and thanks for stopping by!
See you all next post. Until then!

Hello, welcome back to Across The Map!

A while ago, I started work on a texture pack I called FreshCraft. Just recently, I've done some work, and decided it was worthy of being shown off here, at Across The Map. The current version (as of this post) is 0.1.7. It is unfinished, so sorry, no download available yet. This post contains screenshots comparing FreshCraft to the default game textures.


First, a small house.


Default



FreshCraft

 My aim with this texture pack is to make the textures look smooth, close to the defaults, and vibrant.
I hope the jungle wood planks aren't too pink for you guys. This was the best shade I could find, which is actually darker than what it used to be. I made it darker because the color was obnoxiously bright.

All the different trees currently in the game.
As of right now, the saplings use the default texture.

Default

FreshCraft



This was my glowstone texture test. Not much to see here, but it looks cool.

Default




FreshCraft

At least I have an excuse about why I made glowstone look the way it does, now.
The first time I'd ever seen glowstone was in Paulsoaresjr's Minecraft Alpha tutorial about the Nether. When he looked up at the ceiling, there were some glowstone stalactites hanging. I remember thinking: wow. That stuff is amazing! The YouTube video was kinda low-quality, so I never got a good look. Until I'd seen it up close, this is how I imagined it to look. Personally, I think they look supremely glow-rified in my texture pack.. ;)

By the way, here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YhBkVfQ5jE&feature=context-shows&list=SL
(Note: these tutorials are very old. Some things taught no longer work, and there is a lot that is not covered. (Some are so old, there are no biomes!) If you need a tutorial, follow seasons 2 and above.)


Moving on, here's a dungeon and some mobs I spawned. (Actually, I built this one.)

Default

FreshCraft


Typical Minecraft terrain. Just in case you wanted to see.

Default

  FreshCraft


Last but not least, ze Nethah!

Default


FreshCraft

Well, that's it for today! I hope you liked seeing my texture pack. Oh, yes. I'll be putting up a poll asking whether or not I should use FreshCraft in my screenshots. As always, comments are appreciated, and thanks for stopping by!
See you all next post. Until then!