As I put the finishing touches on episode 15 of Gryphon Manor, I have come to realize that I have been spending a lot of time and effort thinking about this game world. Some men think of other women. Others think of fishing. I think of my little Minecraft world… and my family… though not necessarily in that order. However, in Gryphonshire, I have had some recent problems and discoveries that have me considering a new direction for some of the elements in this world. The biggest issue is a performance issue between the Create mod and running shaders. I ran into it way back in my Gryphon Hall series, but I thought that I could mitigate the problem… and to a large extent, I can and I have. As a result, I have gotten much further in this world than I did in that one. However, despite the mitigations, the problem has returned and with the current base design/plan, I can only imagine that it will all get much worse.
Therefore, I have been thinking about my options. I could sidestep the issue by not using shaders at all… but the problem with this approach is that the beauty of these worlds as viewed through a shader is a huge factor in what has kept me playing Minecraft all of these years. If I stop using shaders, Minecraft becomes a whole lot less fun and interesting for me and I doubt I would continue playing much longer… and if I start binge watching the streaming services I will revert back to my pandemic self… a video zombie. So I can’t go down that path.
I could abandon this world entirely, and start over without the Create mod. In fact that has always been my plan B, and I would probably spin up a medieval or fantasy-based world. Ars Nouveau would be the main mod that I would construct the world around. However, the truth is that there are many aspects of the Create mod and its add-ons that I don’t think I can do without. They have spoiled me… and so it would be more likely that I would spin up a new world with the Create mod, but keep the Create usage minimized.
I find this option more appealing… but if I could do that with a new world, I could certainly retrofit this approach into the existing world… but that would put a severe hindrance on building an interesting steampunk world… and that is a key motivating factor in what I am doing here in the first place. I think everyone has built a Minecraft castle at this point, but airships and turn-of-the-twentieth-century cities are still kind of fresh… and rare. Besides, I have spent a lot of time in this world and I have come up with lots of plans and I am truly excited to see them come to fruition. I have invested a lot of nerdy mojo into this world and it would be a shame to just cast it off and fade into the aether. Therefore, it seems to me that since centralization and concentration of materials and processing seem to be causing the performance problems… the best solution is to do the opposite… decentralize.
Centralization of processing is a key element of the Industrial Revolution… but centralization as I have been building it here is a pretty extreme example… and one that catered to my convenience. I admitted my laziness on camera many episodes ago. However, there is no one place on the planet that has it all. Historically, towns and regions would specialize to some extent and so there is still some centralization, but it is more evenly distributed and in such a way that makes more sense in terms of geography and the availability of resources… and a solid transportation infrastructure at that point is not a nice thing to have… it is an absolute requirement.
For example, one village may be located near the ocean and so instead of building large kelp farms in my base, I would build automated kelp harvesting systems in or near that village and then transport the harvested materials to whichever processing location needs those resources… and so on and so on. For this model to work, each location needs to be relatively far from each of the others to prevent more than one hub being active at the same time. Currently my simulation distance is 32 chunks, which works out to half a kilometer.
With everything centralized at the world origin, those chunks are always loaded and thus my automation is always running… so I could go anywhere in the gameworld and production continued regardless of my location… and that is exactly why I built the base where it is. However, I know that the Create mod does have some ability to run stuff outside of the simulation radius (i.e. Trains), I am not clear on what else may or may not be included. I have seen some circumstantial evidence that there is a bit more to it than that, but it will take some time and effort to research and experiment to figure out the nitty gritty details.
There is also the notion of moving away from water wheels and windmills as much as possible. Both of those have many surfaces that can bring the shader to its knees, so if I switched to nearly universal steam engine use that might do the trick. It would certainly help.
And since a perpetually fueled passive steam engine generates just over 8,000 stress units, it could completely replace a full-sized windmill… though a small bit of power will be needed to pump water into the engine… and for that matter, a good bit of water will need to be locally available if I am going to stick with my interpretation of how the Create mod authors intend for them to work. But I may just have to be more practical on that matter and loosen my standards a bit.
Another idea… and it is one that I am reluctant to even mention… is to come up with some horridly expensive recipe that I can add to my datapack that will let me access the creative energy source from creative mode. I could then generate as much or as little power as desired or needed without having to follow all the rules and restrictions which will almost certainly grind my system to a standstill in relatively short order. I guess that might be my plan C… or even D. I will have to think about it.
And if I do go for regional specialization, then I will definitely need to think about my transportation system and probably start actual work on it earlier than I had originally intended. In fact, I have already started playing around with locomotive and carriage design in my little test bed world, and I am getting pretty excited about the possibilities there.
Aside from the trains disguised as airships and ocean steamers, and actual train trains… I have been thinking about Sudchester and the possibility of adding a monorail system to the city… or perhaps cable cars/trolleys. There are just so many options and so few hours in the day. It really is an exciting place to be in the process and I really don’t think I can start over again at this point unless I am forced to do so because of some technical issue… as was the case with Gryphon Hall… and that might just have me out shopping around for a different sandbox/survival builder to play.