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Shiphty

Shiphty's Shiftless Slog (A photo journal)

43 posts in this topic

I leave the garden crops in the ground as long as possible.  I know that where I'm living the pond water starts freezing around the beginning of January and if the plants are still in soil they go to seed.

 

I really should start pickling things.

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Pickling is fun. There's something really satisfying in having seventeen barrels of vinegar.

 

I'm on year 1001 in the game and I'm seriously considering not planting crops next year, because all my food is preserved very well - I still have veggies from my first ever harvest! I think when my preserving house is finished and hopefully most of the food is kept in vinegar, I will be able to leave the area for a good in-game year and not bother about decay at all xD

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You've just encouraged me to start pickling ASAP.  The problem is that this really isn't a single player game.  There's so much to do that if you play alone you're almost always running around in circles with two dozen projects half finished.

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I like finishing at least one project before I post any updates.  I've been working on a blast furnace for forever.  Remember all that iron ore?  It wasn't enough.  I haven't used iron for any tools, weapons, or armor.  I made a bloomery to process it, made an iron anvil, and have been making blooms ever since, just saving up for enough to make a blast furnace.

 

Yeah, I know I could make a small one but I hate doing things half way.

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Yeah - the BF takes a stupid amount of iron to make...

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Well, folks, I'm finally sitting down to give an update on the build.  I saw the transition from bronze to iron and the one from iron to steel as one big hill instead of two separate climbs.  I never made an iron too.  Come to think of it, I never made a copper tool either.  I didn't want to waste copper that could be made into bronze, similarly I didn't want to waste iron that could be made into steel.

 

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Enough bronze for a bloomery?  I think so.

 

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Gonna need more wood.

 

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That's better.  The charcoal chamber is full.

 

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Only thing left to do is plug this doorway with sand and drop a torch in through the top.

 

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This image captures one of those moments when I feel like I've really accomplished something.

 

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Ding!  Charcoal is done!

 

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I just dropped right down.  It's dark but trust me, there's a lot of charcoal here.

 

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So much charcoal!

 

I did the math and there was something like 36,288 logs in the chamber which produced around 3,124 pieces of charcoal.

I guess I won't need to make any more any time soon.

 

A side note, charcoal is necessary for making iron and steel.  It's better to use raw coal for everything else unless you like chopping down trees and making charcoal.  I never use charcoal in my forge.

 

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After a great amount of labor I built my bloomery.  The only thing left to do at this point was test it.

 

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And it worked.  Of course I wasted no time in beginning to labor toward an iron anvil and then a blast furnace.

 

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I had stumbled upon kaolinite in my travels but fortunately while mining in my first iron mine I discovered a cavern with kaolinite on my own land!

 

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I did have to run and grab graphite from a cliff next to my first (and only) tetrahedrite mine.  I didn't realize that I'd need graphite for the fire bricks so I only mined a little from the cliff face.

 

Two crucibles, one for the blast furnace body and one to put under it.

 

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I remember thinking that it was a lot of work to make a bloomery and an iron anvil.  Remember, up till this point I'd reaped no reward for my labors.

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Of course I needed a great deal more graphite for a full-sized blast furnace chimney, those fire bricks sure don't grow on trees!

 

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To the right you'll see the hill which I hollowed out looking for tetrahedrite, to the left is its twin which was graphite laden and in which I made an identical mine.

 

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Fortunately there was a fresh water pond nearby to keep me hydrated.

 

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I ended up borrowing a tunnel directly to the pond from the tetrahedrite mine's inner levels.

 

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Shoddy work, that's what.

 

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These mounds ended up almost completely hollow, a little bit of gun powder and they'd be craters.

 

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Of course I didn't have enough iron to plate the blast furnace chimney so I started a second magnetite mine a little closer to my house.  There was a large vein of the stuff but unfortunately it was of poor quality.  Even so, all that poor ore adds up.

 

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While waiting for the bloomery to process all that ore I sometimes paused and gased out at my unkempt lawn.

 

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The coal field I discovered out back seemed to be an astonishingly large vein.  Those markers trace its border.  I will never want for coal.

 

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Of course I will eventually cover up all these mine entrances and link them to the mineshaft in the house but for now this will do.

 

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I haven't even scratched the surface of the coal vein and I've got tons of the stuff.

 

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It's tough being a blacksmith.  Your work is so involved, what with gathering and processing ore into metal, shaping the metal into something useful... all that's involved is painstaking and time-consuming.  It must be nice to live in a village where others will make sure you have enough to eat and drink, perhaps even an assistant.  As it stands, I must attend to everything myself.

 

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I did it!  I made a full-sized blast furnace!  Processing poor ore, this baby can pump out three whole ingots at a time.  With regular ore I think it's something like five ingots and seven with rich ore, I've only processed poor iron yet.

 

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I'm glad I had the foresight to designate the room above my smithy as a part of the smithy.  All I needed to do was clear away some of the floor boards really.

 

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This is an early screen shot of the top, I had to tweak it a little.

 

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It still feels a bit primitive running up and down the loading ladder but it's a darn sight quicker than using a bloomery.  Not to mention the fact that bloomeries don't give you steel.

 

I placed some oak boards across the top to prevent me from accidentally slipping down the chute but they hindered my ability to load the furnace properly so I eventually tore them down.

 

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Look at that beautiful glow.

 

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And look at that beautiful anvil.

 

I wasn't sure I would complete the anvil before my first tuyere wore out.  That was a dilemma.  Fortunately I had a few bronze bars laying around and I quickly formed them into a backup.  It was good that I did, the iron one I was using did wear out before I was done with the anvil.  Now I have a steel one.

 

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Steel ingots!  Steel ingots!

Also note that I am holding a steel pick and a steel axe as well.  I am finally making the transition from using stone tools.  I may keep a stone hammer for chiseling since the hammer doesn't actually matter.

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It is appealing that I make my flux from the dolomite which I mine through.  In a sense my pick shares a kinship with the stone and so the stone seems to cooperate with it much more than it would otherwise.  I would also like to add that STEEL IS WORTH ALL THAT TROUBLE!  I love steel.

 

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I located limonite nuggets to the east of my land.  The site was far enough that I saw prudence in tunneling there from my mineshaft rather than going overland.

 

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The top layers were sparse with limonite but the ore was rich so I was careful to find every bit of it.

 

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Can anyone say LIM-O-NITE?!

 

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Some of you miners, in your moments of boredom, may have discovered that an empty clay jug can be used to make music if you blow across the opening (right click) but did you know that you can raise or lower the pitch of the sound by looking up and down?

 

I found nearly a double chest full of rich limonite ore.  I think I will go back and look for the last little bit I missed but I suspect I won't be needing any more iron ore for a while.

 

I keep putting off working on preserving food.  I'm still just keeping my food in jars, in chests, in a dark room.  I go and cut the rot off every once in a while.  This will not do.  I think updating my food storage methods is especially overdue since my garden is producing more than twice the amount of food I can eat in a year.  I have been loathe to sit down and preserve food simply because I wanted to be a master chef first so I could narrow down my tastes and focus on growing and preserving the best kinds of food but I think preserving the food changes the taste to it so that won't work.

 

Anyone know of a solid method to figure out what kind of sandwich is tastiest?

 

To do list:

-Smoke whatever can be smoked.

-Brine whatever can be brined.

-Pickle whatever can be pickled (is brining and pickling the same thing?)

-Store everything possible in vinegar.

-Make cheese.

-Figure out how to alter flavors by cooking, using different woods to cook, adding food to cheese, et cetera.

 

I think I'm also going to fight a bunch of zombies in order to raise my level.

 

And then there's the wall I've been meaning to construct.

 

And of course I need to fill in all the different pits and holes in my lawn... and replace stone and gravel with dirt.

 

And maybe I should fill the charcoal chamber with logs again rather than wait till I'm out of charcoal.

 

And I haven't done anything with breeding my animals... and there are those pigs I never caught.

 

I should also fix the dang orchard so that non-fruit trees stop growing up in it.

 

Lots of domestic stuff.

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I believe pickling and brining are the same thing, could be wrong though

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Soaking in brine = brining

Soaking in vinegar *after*  brining = picklingStoring in vinegar only helps if the thing is pickled in the first place. (oh yes - you *can* pickle cheese)

Edited by ChunkHunter
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Holy smokes, that's a lot of iron sheets! I'm only now starting to get into metalworking and I don't have much patience for ore gathering and smithing. And I've been lucky with the qualities! It's hard to imagine how much work you put into the blast furnace.

 

Also, that's one large charcoal pit! 9x9x9, or am I wrong? I heard larger pits can cause lag in your world, have you had any trouble with that? (By the way, I am that person who likes chopping trees and making charcoal. Though I think you can't melt bronze with regular coal, and I keep melting my sheets in the forge...)

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Drooling in anticipation of the next installment. :P

P.S. I have never even gotten past bismuth bronze. ^-^;

Edited by Mathias Ademar
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Holy smokes, that's a lot of iron sheets! I'm only now starting to get into metalworking and I don't have much patience for ore gathering and smithing. And I've been lucky with the qualities! It's hard to imagine how much work you put into the blast furnace.

 

Also, that's one large charcoal pit! 9x9x9, or am I wrong? I heard larger pits can cause lag in your world, have you had any trouble with that? (By the way, I am that person who likes chopping trees and making charcoal. Though I think you can't melt bronze with regular coal, and I keep melting my sheets in the forge...)

 

Yeah, the blast furnace took me weeks in real time (I had other things I had to do irl obviously) but it was sooooooo worth it.

 

I guess I have it easier, I love mining and working with metal.  I think I'm a fairly skilled miner and a decent blacksmith.

 

the charcoal pit is actually 9x9x7.  I have a pretty good lap top so I don't get lag unless I spend hours exploring non-stop.

 

I think you can melt bronze with coal or charchoal, I've only ever intentionally melted anything so far.  When I'm blacksmithing I'm in the zone.  I did have an accident with the blast furnace the first time I tried to use it though.  I loaded my remaining blooms into it.  Apparently it only processes raw ore.  That wouldn't have been so bad but I loaded ore in with the bloom so I got a bunch of unknown metal.  Useless waste.  Ah well.

Drooling in anticipation of the next installment. :PP.S. I have never even gotten past bismuth bronze. ^-^;

 

Wow... umm... get a bib... I guess?

 

You should totally move on to steel man, it's ridiculously better than any kind of bronze.

 

Glad you're enjoying this account of my journey.

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Its not that I can't make iron or steel, its that I get bored easily and switch to creative then fly around to fill in my journey map. I rarely have net either so I only do SSP, else I might have actually mad eit to steel. XD

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I keep going to start working on upgrading the way I preserve food and take care of my animals and cook but whenever I start I lose interest and find another project to work on.  I'm currently building a wall around the perimeter of my land and cleaning up the coal field.

 

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The wall will extend into the bay and there will be a sea gate.

 

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At first I was swimming down to place each block but then I had an idea; why not just let the cobble block carry itself to the seabed?  This worked, they stack by themselves nicely under water and I get to stay dry.  Not so with the corners where I'm using smoothed stone.

 

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I quarified the coal field.  I like working on projects which serve multiple purposes.  Here I can gather coal and cobblestone at the same time.  Of course I had to take the time to build a solid roof because I'm not interested in marring my yard with a pit.  I started on this project when I ran out of cobblestone for the wall.  Yes, I ran out.  I suspect I'll eventually run out of gravel and dirt when I finish making my lawn pretty.

 

I think what I lack is someone to take care of the domestic stuff, I'm no cook and while I can catch animals, I'm not much use with breeding and taming them.  Ah well, one does what one must. If anyone is sitting there thinking about a mod or addon or whatever to write for TFCraft my vote would be another tech tier in food preservation where you could rest assured that your food would keep after you labored to preserve it.  :shrug: Just sayin'.

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Hey guys, raging noob with a camera here, bought a nikon D90 and an 18-105 lens and and a 55-300mm lens. Sister in law has given me some settings, heading out to take some full moon shots, will post em back tonight Any feedback would be good once i upload some pictures.

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