Serendipity in Minecraft

 

One of the mods I quite enjoying playing in Minecraft is Millenaire. I cannot go into all the detail of this mod as I cannot do it justice. Basically, though, it adds villages of various cultures into the game which you an choose to interact with. Now, I hear a few people saying that wait, base Minecraft has villages. it does but the villages have limited use at the moment.

Millenaire adds a few village types with different cultures (mainly based around 11th century cultures like Normans, Hindi, Mayan and Japanese) spread liberally across your Minecraft world. You can interact with the villages by visiting the village town hall (or the equivalent in each village). You start off as a stranger but if you trade with the villages you get reputation which turns into cash which you can spend on various things. For example you can buy goods, a plot of land or even get the villagers to build you a nice house in the village. You can become one of the village.

Basically, you visit the town hall, find out what they need (e.g. stone, glass, wood etc) and trade with them. Sometimes they send you on quests, which can be simple or complex, for additional reputation. You can even visit multiple villages to start trading across villages. You even get to visit loner buildings for trade or even fight bandits. The idea is to get your village to its ultimate goal of upgrading their village to its full extent and also being self sufficient. It is a good mod.

Now, in X Mod Pack, Millenaire does not exist. This in understandable as it is a big mod and can be incompatible. Other mod packs have it but they tend to make way for it. Well, I wanted to play it again and decided to push into the X Mod Pack manually to see if it would work. After lots of crashes I seemed to get it to work.

I started playing and I would have random crashes. I traced it back to Millenaire to find it was because I had used tweaked settings that caused the game to build 4 villages too close. Everytime they interacted, and they do, it would crash. I did not want to abandon my world so I disabled Millenaire for now and continued to play. This is where the serendipity came into play.

Once you disable Millenaire, all the villages stayed as they were built using standard Minecraft blocks so now I had a few empty villages to explore. So I decided to use this as a positive.

I slowly removed the villages by hand collecting all the resources and returning the landscape back to its original shape (or as close as I could). This was a fun challenge. I would remove all the buildings and remove all traces of them there but placing soil and trees back in their places.

I was treating Minecraft as a greening rehabilitation project. I then decided any fortress I conquered in Better Dungeons would also be treated the same.

You end up with lots of resources and land returned to its former beauty. It was a challenge I enjoyed and continue to enjoy in Minecraft.

This is one of the reasons I like Minecraft, you can try and idea and take it to its fullest till you get bored and come up with something else.

You should try this. It takes patience but you get some satisfaction when you return a natural landscape back to its original shape.

Here are some pictures of the rehabilitation. In some cases I left traces of the village and in some no traces. In fact in one picture I have replaced a whole castle from Better Dungeons. See if you can work it out.