#jawoodle

Just so it’s clear, these were taken at night; so I adjusted the white levels of the outdoor pics to make them viewable. I’ve got a miner’s lantern inside, so that didn’t need any help

OK, so if you read my previous post, you’d know that Jaded has wiped his 8k server (after backing it up, though) and used NitroGen to generate a new map. In this case it’s a 10k map, and includes both the custom prefab pack recommended by the NitroGen author and a Darkness Falls prefab pack. So there are lots of custom prefabs, the map is huuuuuge, and there are more buildings than you can shake a stick at.

This is a pair of them on top of one of the plateaus in the mountains that I was talking about. It’s the Ranger Station, which we’ve been calling the Info Center, right next to a military base with an extensive underground and tons of loot. 

The loot includes more than 20 turrets. It turns out that if you encounter a prefab like this with active turrets (not “shoot you when you walk up” active -- just not ruined, nor special POI turrets), you can pick them up by slapping down a claim block. I also got a bunch of motion detectors that way.

It’s a shame I can’t get the solar banks or solar panels that way, nor the battery banks. But Jaded is running a modlet (mine!) that gives you a chance to get a solar panel when you wrench a POI solar bank; and another modlet that lets you get a workstation by wrenching a good one (not “destroyed”) from a POI as well. So I’ve gotten at least one workbench and my first cement mixer, two of those forges, plus a brace of chem stations that way; I made the rest. At 400% loot, though, it’s pretty easy to collect the materials.

Meantime I’ve got, hmm, I think five solar cells of various quality; the solar bank is cheap enough, as is the battery bank.

I said there’s a lantern in the ceiling. There is; but I’m going to try building three more and moving all four to the corners of the upper walkway, which as you can see I’ve made into the top of the cheese wedge. Those things are awfully bright, and the light doesn’t follow actual physics, so I expect four at those locations will not only light the outside where the zombies are, but also the inside. If not, I can always make another. Or add a light bulb connected to the electrical system, which I should have up and running in not too long.

Garden on the roof, of course, and a zombie-proof invisible forcefield in the back protecting the only door. The windows are just wood center plates painted to look like industrial glass; I’m planning to replace them with glass at some point. We’ll see. I want to put turrets on the walkway facing inwards to take care of vultures so I don’t have to worry about completely enclosing it. (And throwing a lot more resources at upgrading at least three times as many bars to iron. There are 60 there as it is.)

I put the door on the North side because I’m assuming I’ll get the majority of zombies from direction of the base. So far that’s true, but I haven’t endured a horde night yet in this monstrosity.

We’ll see!

I also plan to upgrade the wedges eventually; the zombies aren’t normally inclined to attack them, but if enough gather in one place, they start doing random attacks. And these are set to Insane. I’ve been mining, so I have a bunch of stone, and I’ve been assiduously cooking up concrete mix. I should have enough by now, but I don’t plan to stop yet; I still want to upgrade the walls as well, and may end up converting another prefab somewhere.

So... I’ve been playing on a couple servers that apparently have been using NitroGen to generate their maps. (I got kind of tired of dealing with a number of issues regarding Jaded’s servers and decided to take a break.) Sadly, one of them may have been taken down -- a shame, I was just getting into it, and had found a place to make a permanent base. That one was called Oasis PVE. It was up and down at the best of times, so I’m hoping the owner has simply been away on vacation and that it will come back online later.

The other is called Jamestown PVE, and I’d temporarily set up shop on top of an Ostrich Hotel (of course!) with a temporary horde base that I’ve been calling the “cheese wedge base”. Because it uses walls made of wedges and it cheeses the AI... geddit? Eh? Eh?

Loot is set fairly high and I managed to find parts for a gyrocopter fairly quickly, once I started actually playing seriously on the server. Which I did when I was taking that break I mentioned above. SerNdipity joined me for a while but, alas, she doesn’t play as regularly as I, so she’s fallen behind.

In any case, the maps in question were both different from the usual vanilla maps in several ways. One is that instead of a few regular, circular cities at more-or-less fixed locations, the cities a) are scattered more randomly; b) are packed tighter, rather that being on fixed grid patterns; c) have a lot more variation in size; d) are more numerous; e) have more prefab variety. For example, amongst the screenshots above is a pic from the top of the hotel (from before I built the cheese wedge base) showing a Dishong Tower across the street. And that’s just the cities; there are prefabs and roads all over the damned map, rather than just a handful of fixed clusters with huge amounts of unused space. Easily double the number of prefabs.

I was captivated as I was flying around, seeing all the roads and prefabs in the mountains. Instead of just, well, mountains, these had plateaus with one to three prefabs installed. I guess I’ll get some better screenies later. And the circular lakes. For the most part, the roads are far better than on the vanilla maps.

After a bit of poking around, I concluded that the latest versions of NitroGen were responsible. So: Jaded’s 8k server was getting more and more unstable, and he suspected somebody had done some hacking that exacerbated the problem. So he was talking about wiping and restarting. Coldan and I convinced him to start with a new map, not just start over with the same one; it’s no fun to explore if you already know where everything is! Otherwise we’d just be playing Navezgane over and over, eh? And I took the opportunity to send him to check out NitroGen.

But that’s another story. These pics are from Jamestown PVE. There may be more later; I’m in the position of trying to move to a trio of prefabs on top of one of the aforementioned plateaus, having just finished moving all my possessions but not had a chance to build the actual horde base I’d planned; I last left the server on the morning of a horde night with insufficient time and resources to complete the task. So I’ll doubtless use the Cheese Wedge base one more time before I make... a bigger Cheese Wedge base. 

It seems that JaWoodle is branching out. Or branching back, maybe, since apparently he’s done Minecraft before.

Hah! An LCB has the same SI and weight as metal. So when I moved the front support pillar of my KC cage back by 1 and left the LCB in place, the effect was that one side of that pillar was the same as using a metal block. That may be what saved it from collapse. (Then again, it’s not very large, even counting the Zombie Drop area.)