I think I am about to embark on another major new change in the Gryphon Manor series. Actually, I have already started the change. It started while creating my video about my plans for the expanded world map (Episode 13 – Where in the World?) which will go live on April 10th. I talked a little bit about my plans for implementing the trains from the Create mod. However, I also noted that the folks that put together the Steam ‘n’ Rails addon had implemented phantom rails last summer… and phantom rails are an awesome new feature.
They are basically invisible train tracks, and that got my creative juices flowing. With a Create train, I can create a vehicle that follows a track and makes regular stops… just like a train would. However, if I can make those tracks invisible… then I can run them through the water and through the sky and create the illusion of ships and aircraft (basically, disguised trains) doing the same thing. That is a heap of awesome right there and it would really help my world come alive, and after declaring as much in the video, I committed to adding them to my long term transport plans and designs.
But then I spent some time playing around with them… and while the tracks do everything I hoped they would and more (not only are they invisible, but if you are not actively holding a piece of phantom track in your hands, then for all intents and purposes, they are simply not there and you can pass through that same space completely uninhibited), I found a big monkey wrench in my plans. Just as the name would imply, phantom rails have a dependency on phantoms. Specifically, phantom membranes.
Basically, a normal piece of Create railway track requires a stone slab and then two iron or zinc nuggets are added through automation and you have a piece of track, three blocks wide and one block long. But for a piece of phantom track, the nuggets are placed on top of a phantom membrane. So for each piece of track, you will need one phantom membrane… and for a short rail line that goes just one kilometer, I will need at least 1,000 phantom membranes. At that point, I would need to camp and hunt phantoms full time and pretty much forever to ever have the membranes needed even for even a short line.
Yeah… that was not going to fly. Literally.
But this is modded Minecraft. If you can imagine it… it can probably be done… and somebody probably already has. So I went out looking for a mod that lets me craft phantom membranes. I found that the craftable resource space is alive and well and there are mods that let you craft almost anything and everything you would normally have access to only through Creative mode. However, I discovered that phantom membranes are a very notable exception to that.
And that is when I had reached a point that I had been trying to avoid. I could find somebody to do the work for me… but I hardly know anyone in the modding community and that would require a lot begging and pleading… and probably a fair bit of cash. Or… I could just do it myself. After all, what is required is a simple recipe and that can be done with a datapack.
I have already been tinkering with resource packs for a while… but all I have been doing in that space is basically replacing existing textures on existing content with slightly higher resolution versions of the current textures. There is really nothing technical or even interesting about it and it took less than an hour to figure out the mechanics and then I was off to the races.
But datapacks are different. They let you impact a whole lot more… and I did not want to invest the time to figure that all out. However, it turns out the core mechanics of datapacks are pretty much the same as the core mechanics of resource packs, but instead of swapping out PNG graphic files, it is all about adding or swapping JSON text files. So I took a stab at adding my desired phantom membrane recipe and after a few initial failures, I succeeded. Incidentally, I made it a shaped recipe. Throw an amethyst shard into the middle of a full-sized crafting grid and surround it with 8 paper and you will gain 4 phantom membranes. I think the recipe has enough difficulty in it to prevent somebody from paving the entire world in phantom tracks… but is accessible enough to allow somebody to reasonably create a phantom track rail system in survival. Mission accomplished.
However, now that the seal has been broken… it was time to dive into this with both feet and fix a number of other issues I had collected over the past year. For example, if you want to plant a birch or oak forest, you won’t have any problems. Cut down a single tree of either type and you will get at least one sapling… and most likely you will get three or four. Cut down a small forest of them and you can plant saplings to create a much larger forest. For other trees, the number of saplings found after harvesting a tree can be a bit more sparse, and for the largest tress… dark oak, jungle, and giant spruce… it is not unusual to harvest a tree and not recover enough saplings to replant it. This is especially true with dark oak trees and they are one of my favorites to build with and use in forests.
I had downloaded a mod that lets me craft saplings of vanilla trees by combining a leaf block from the desired tree type with a stick. That let me have all the vanilla saplings I wanted… but unfortunately, it did not work for modded trees or even vanilla mangrove trees. However, I had unlocked the ability to create my own recipes, so I whipped up recipes to craft saplings of all my modded tree types and then I uninstalled the original mod and created recipes for all the vanilla tree types.
Now that the genie was truly out of the bottle, I went out and researched the list of non-renewables in Minecraft and set about to crafting recipes for all of them so that pretty much anything I would need could be created from scratch… though some items will take a lot of work or material… and again, I feel that is appropriate for a massive build-based survival world.
But then I stumbled upon the fact that the Create Deco mod lets you create coins from the various metals available in vanilla and Create. Coins? I checked and they did not seem to have any real use for them in the mod itself, but this seemed to scratch an itch I had suffered from for a long time… my absolute hatred of the emerald-based economy in Minecraft.
Soooo… I went back out there to research mods that would let me redefine villager trades and let me ditch the emeralds as a currency. I found the Custom Villager Trades mod which seemed to fit the bill perfectly. However, I found that the mod author (spacecat_97) also has another mod which lets me define custom villager professions. Whoa, Nellie!
Now I have all the tools necessary to completely redefine the trading economy and design new NPCs. Yes please. So, I will be adding this to my exponentially growing “to do” list, but I am practically giddy with excitement over the possibilities.
Meanwhile, I started working on the next episode of the Gryphon Manor series, but now I have my custom datapack and as I run into new issues, I can pause to fix things the way I want them through my datapack. For example, for several of my ore and metal types, I have duplicates. I have two different silvers (Galosphere and Immersive Engineering), two different Cast Irons (Create Deco and Create Big Cannons). I needed recipes to convert these metals back and forth… but now I have the ability craft a solution myself and so I did.
However, the ability to add recipes improved the gaming experience for me in another way. As you may know, I am running with both the Create mod and the Immersive Engineering mod. In vanilla Immersive Engineering, you have the ability to eventually craft deep drilling devices that can be set up on special ore veins that cannot be seen or harvested in any other way, and this allows you to produce an insane number of resources from that vein. Vanilla Create does not have that… but the Create Ore Excavation mod does and recently, I have been doing a lot of prospecting and work within that mod.
Then it dawned on me that maybe instead of running two different kinds of deep mining rigs… one for Create-based resources and one for Immersive Engineering-based resources… maybe I could set up the datapack so that I could find and tap into both using only the Create Ore Excavation mod. It turns out that I can. So I set all that up and after a few experiments, I discovered that it did not overwrite or change the existing resources that I had already prospected, but that it did sprinkle new resources in between all the ones I had already found and knew about… so I need to do all my prospecting over again.
However, I look on this as a good thing and so that is added to the pile of things to do.
In looking back over what I have written, I seemed to have rambled on a bit, but the point of all of that is that I am having more fun with Minecraft than I have had in years… and not just by a notch or two, but by an entire order of magnitude. The list of things I want to do and build in this world keeps growing, but at the same time, I am finally starting to see the fruits of my labor up to this point and the very beginnings of what is to come are starting to be visible.
I still have the notion of someday moving from 1.19.2 to something more recent, but the problem is mod availability. Most mods that I use are available in 1.19.2 and future versions and that is good. However, some key mods are not yet available past 1.19.2 and normally I would relax and not worry about it, but there are a number of mods that I would very much like to add to the mix, but they are from future versions and not available for 1.19.2. And of course, with well over two hundred mods in the mix, there are plenty of examples of this and so I am kind of stuck for now, but I am confident that at some point in the next year I may be able to move to 1.20… but by then we will have 1.21. Modded Minecraft is almost as much of a hassle as it is a joy.
In the meanwhile, I hope this finds you and yours in good health, good spirits and perhaps a touch of good fortune. Cheers!