#shickaxe

The first couple days were continuing with my Minecraft mod, finishing up the amethyst materials in order to make way for my next gem. That was the first hour - imaging the tools in GIMP, writing their code, generating the JSON files, and finally compiling it all together to make sure everything is running. 

And, as it has been the past week, everything went smoothly - until I really began testing the results.

[ To preface: my testing up until this point has been rather lackluster. Basically I would just make sure the items appeared in the creative tab, had the correct texture, and the proper crafting recipe. ] 

This time, I decided to do a full test in vanilla. Giving myself some basic items, I found a vein of the amethyst ore in a cave and started mining with my ruby shickaxe. Boom. Problems. 

Turns out the shickaxe tool I was so proud of a few weeks ago has a few issues with custom blocks. It will mine vanilla ones as expected, but anything beyond that leaves a little to be desired. 

Y U DO DIS!? 

So what was expected to span a day turned into a running tally. I spent two hours the next day working on it, trying everything I could think of in both the shickaxe and ore files to make it work. 

[ Side note: I find it amusing that, given how much I complained Minecraft didn’t allow me my usual preference of test-driven development, the only way I’ve been able to figure this out is make tiny changes to the code, compile and see if it works. ] 

So far nothing I’ve tried has worked. I’m considering reworking the entire code for the shickaxe to see if that fixes anything, or perhaps (if it comes to it) scrapping the idea all together and just making individual pickaxes and shovels (though I have no guarantee those will work either.) 

Ahh Minecraft. Just when I thought I had you figured out. 

But the next day, fueled by my frustration, was incredibly productive. I jumped back to AlexaWeb and started to fill in some of the missing elements. 

The first was my “About Me” section. Despite having to write (or speak) about myself at least a few times a year, I never quite know what to say. Hey, I was a journalist - I’m used to writing about other people’s accomplishments. 

But with the help of NPR’s This American Life and a nice, cold soda, I eked out a couple paragraph/sentences about myself. Again, the entire thing is still in it’s formation stage, but I’m rather pleased as it stands. 

TLDR: Look at me! I can adult! Or at least write coherrently coherently. 

To take a break from writing words and go back to writing code, I played around with the footer of my page. I’m still finding a good spot to put my email (mailto links aren’t working with my laptop, so I have no way of testing whether or not they work) but I was able to link my GitHub and LinkedIn pages nicely. 

All and all, I’m still chugging along. The next couple days will be rather interesting as I finish this project while simultaneously moving into my senior year of undergrad. My goal is to have my website completely finished, or at least to a final draft. 

After many hours of caffeinated research (and a little help from a wonderful person) the mystery of the Shickaxe has finally been solved. We ended up creating an entire new template class that extended ItemTool and customized it to break the blocks we wanted (namely those that are normally broken by pickaxes and shovels.) 

On the plus side, this gives us a lot of flexibility into extending this class to make new items in the future - such as including the properties of an axe.

But, as with much of Minecraft’s code, figuring out how to do this was a pain, which does not bode well for the other things I want to begin including in this mod.

What you don’t see is that these lines go on horizontally for awhile...

The second part of this was creating the ruby shickaxe. Extending the template class and putting it through the game registry is second nature at this point, but I once again ran into issues with the JSON generator. You’d think after two months I’d know how to get it right the first time, but eh, details. 

This was the final design - 

Plus a custom crafting recipe - I’m on fire!

I’m still finishing up the ruby items, but with this success, I’m considering branching out into other joint tools - a shovel/hoe combination perhaps? 

My next mod project will also take a bit of research to make possible - a toaster. It’s simple, but I like toasted things in real life, and I like the idea of a mini-oven that would take fewer resources than an oven, but would still provide more hunger bars than raw.