MAIN MENU     FRONT PAGE MISSION STATEMENT SINCLAIR'S FOUNDRY MINECRAFT IN THE ARCTIC REJECTLAND THE FUNGUSLANDS & OTHER WORLDS RESOURCE PACKS & WORLD DOWNLOADS OTHER LINKS       ASSOCIATED WEB PAGES     THE HAMMER OF RETRIBUTION OGG-CAST HAMMER OF RETRIBUTION PRODUCTIONS PERSONAL PAGES FROM DAYS OF YORE ZX SPECTRUM SECTION: PROGRAMS & VIDEOS COMP.SYS.SINCLAIR CRAP GAMES COMPETITION 2021 RICK DANGEROUS RESURRECTED PROJECT 44: BASE UPGRADES IN 1.11     Project coordinates: X +359 : Y +67 : Z +128 Screenshots: 47 (+ 4 Sinclair) Date completed: 2 December 2016 Version: 1.11 Minecraft day completed: 6077 On 14th November 2016, version 1.11 of Minecraft was released. After a week and a half spent finishing a small round of tweaks in the 1.10 cycle, the Sinclair's Foundry world was run through The Exploration Update. When Open Forum spawns the new Cartographer villager (now hindered by the production of Nitwits), I can obtain the Woodland Explorer Map - and then I'll actually do the exploring that this update is all about, and hopefully not run into Johnny The Homicidal Maniac and his equally unfriendly pals. So for now, I'll stay at base. I have no idea why I left it until the world was two years old (in real time) and past day 6000 in Minecraft time (which is over 16 years!) to make the initial upgrades, but they are long overdue! And then, there's the major project in the base, which is something I'd been meaning to do for a while but never managed to get round to. WAREHOUSE UPGRADES This filter design has been known since version 1.5 - possibly even the 1.5 snapshots - and though I know it wasn't him who developed it, the tutorial video introduced me to Dataless822 (who, by the looks of things, is fully engrossed in the world of modded Minecraft now). It does have one problem if the chests it dumps its load into fill up completely; the filter hopper is supposed to contain 22 of the same item, putting out a signal of 1 from the comparator, and as the 23rd item enters the hopper, the signal is increased to 2, turning off the torch underneath, unlocking the hopper and allowing one item to drop through so the signal drops to 1, the torch switches back on again and 22 items remain in the filter hopper. But if the chests underneath back up so much that the filter hopper contains 46 items, the comparator signal increases to 3, which turns off the torch on the two adjacent filter units, causing the filters to empty and the system to break. This has happened to me a fair few times, and it's annoying; this break in the system was my quick fix when I realised that two filters of the same item next to each other won't work with this basic system. The solution is to strip the whole lot out and start again, installing the unbreakable filter system I've previously used in the gold farm upgrade and the witch farm fix. As with the witch farm, I've alternated the colours of each tiled unit, which might make it easier to keep track of what I'm looking at when I'm underneath - igneous rocks are ideal for this, and I often use them in redstone projects. The comparators are all glowing as the filters are set up, putting out a constant signal of 2. In this system, a signal strength of 3 will release one item through the system. This is how we do it. The filter contains four (64-stackable) pieces of paper renamed STOP on an anvil (doing 64 at once will only cost one level) and 41 of the the filtered item in the first slot. At this point the signal strength is 2, add one more filtered item and it increases to 3, thus turning off the torch underneath, and when one items drops through, it turns back on and locks the hopper, keeping 41 filtered items in the hopper. If this backs up all the way, with 64 filtered items, the signal strength will be a maximum of 3 - keeping the hopper underneath open (and as it's backed up there's nowhere for the items to go!) but crucially, not interfering at all with the filters next to it. A while back, to make space for purpur blocks and End bricks at the start of 1.9, I removed iron ore and gold ore from the filtered chests and set up a filter below ground instead, at the bottom of the massive item lift that feeds this entire system. The ores are automatically directed into a furnace which was loaded with a few blaze rods, or any other kind of fuel I could spare at the time. 1.11 has introduced a whole load more items that can be used to fuel a furnace - doors, boats, carpet, signs, bowls, ladders, fishing rods... essentially anything made of wood or wool. I've had a load of doors blocking up the oak and spruce plank chests for ages now, after some ill-fated attempts to make large temporary villages, and boats aren't usually much good to me. Into the incinerator they go! I don't use trap doors much - and if I make too many, now I can use them to smelt ores rather than have them hanging around. So, vines have ended up in their spot, near their climbable counterpart, ladders... ...because, in their place are the new observer blocks. I've made nine stacks of them already - word is, they're going to be very useful and possibly some of the existing mechanisms will be replaced. DECORATION UPGRADES That's a lot of sticks. That's even more iron. That's a ridiculous amount of paper. What could I be doing with it? Of course... maps! As I mentioned, 1.11 brings us the Cartographer villager, who would (I hope) be impressed at what I'm doing here. At the time I was quite pleased with my custom paintings, decorating the base with Sinclair-themed pictures. But the resolution was very low, and anyone downloading this world without the Hammer of Retribution Resource Pack (1.8 mkII onwards) wouldn't see them and many of the paintings would look like a jumbled mess. So, as it was for Rentakill Rita's Lovely Melons and Life, The Universe, and... Chocolate, I've been back to mc-map.djfun.de with some pictures hot off the press from being edited in GIMP, width and height both a multiple of 128, all ready for conversion into the Minecraft map format... Remind yourself what the previous paintings looked like for comparison. Well, strike me down with a feather from the world's tiniest bird, that looks fantastic! I've used the same picture of Sir Clive Sinclair as I did before, only now in a resolution of 496×496 pixels (with an 8-pixel border for a total of 512×512) and the effect is... profound. I had to make sure to alter the settings - turn the colour space to RGBA, select the 1.8.1 map colours and use the dithering option - and even though we can see Sir Clive's head has clearly got some bright magenta pixels (!) and a grey patch, this is as close as the map can get to his real likeness from the 1980s. As for the ZX80 and ZX81, the picture I had before wasn't a high enough resolution, but I found these two, both against a wooden veneer background, and they do look like the real thing. I can even read some of the text on the ZX81 keyboard! Remind yourself what the previous "TV picture" looked like for comparison. If the TV doesn't work, give it a thump and see what happens. As if by magic... ping! The picture quality increases. And although it was possible before to recognise that it was James May and a Bugatti Veyron on the screen, now we can see the Pagani Zonda behind the Bugatti. If you're wondering: Top Gear, series 12, episode 4. Remind yourself what the "abstract art" on the north wall looked like for comparison. I know the ZX Spectrum screen is tiny by today's standards (at 256×192 pixels), but the single-square paintings offered me only 14×14 pixels (once the border had been taken into account) to represent a series of Spectrum games... somehow. After discovering the custom map method, I figured it should be possible to create accurate screenshots of the games instead, using a 3×2 arrangement of maps. Technically the width of two maps is 256 pixels, the same width as the Spectrum screen, but I wanted to keep some border visible and opted for three. Look closely at Jetpac and the Minecraft map colour palette is still limited enough for the magenta to be a bit of a dull (almost Commodore 64-esque!) shade, but the rest is spot on and pixel-perfect, as you'll see if you get up close. Remind yourself what the "abstract art" on the south wall looked like for comparison. On the south wall is the all-new picture of the ZX Spectrum, and who knows, one day I might throw a QL in there somewhere for good measure! If you want to know more about the games, refer back to the original page and I'll tell you all about Spellbound Dizzy, Tantalus, Quazatron, Manic Miner, Jetpac, Blood & Guts... and... wait a minute, Mushroom Mania's gone. There's a new screenshot, of a game from... 2011?! ZX Spectrum screenshot: Buzzsaw+ (Foxton Locks Mix) (2011) Watch this game played to level 10 by Solaris104 (download the RZX file and play it in a Spectrum emulator) via the RZX Archive. No YouTube video is available (yet). The Spectrum, so say so many people, had terrible graphics - because of the way it handled colour, each 8×8 character square on the screen was delegated a byte of attributes, containing three bits for the foreground colour, three bits for the background colour, one bit for brightness, one bit for a flashing square. This was the root cause of the Spectrum's most notorious "feature" - colour clash. Fast forward to 18 years after the Spectrum and all its variants had shuffled off to a quiet retirement in Eastern Europe, and enter Joefish, or Jason J. Railton to his bank manager. He looked upon Cosmo Gang, a Japanese arcade game, and he saw that it was good, in a Tetris-Columns-Puzzle Bobble type way. Would it be possible to make something inspired by it for the Spectrum, which he could develop in his spare time as per all the enthusiastic home-brew-programmers of the 21st Century? Yes, it would. Now, look at the cute and cuddly Japanese graphics. Look at them very carefully. Look at the crates, and the robot, and the bug-eyed blobs, and the buzzsaw... There's no colour clash. Yes, you heard me, there is no colour clash. The game sprites have more than two colours per 8×8 character square. This is a Spectrum game that does what programmers of the 1980s thought was impossible. "Had Jason Railton released this in 1984 he would have either been revered as a programming god, or burned at the stake as a witch." Remind yourself what the previous painting looked like for comparison. The last artistic upgrade is the picture of the Sinclair C5 in the guest room. As with the ZX80 and ZX81, I've had to find a new picture at a better resolution. The lighting's far better on this one as well. NEW AREA: THE ART STUDIO The great thing about building a base that's mostly underground is that you can just keep digging, making more space further down until the bedrock bars your way. Because I barely have to go mining any more, I've moved the mineshaft cart out the way, and directly opposite the Nether entrance looks like a brilliant place to start the new tunnel. As luck would have it, I won't have to do much mining to make my new corridor either... there's already this cave that I've been in before (in the very early days) and lit up. All it needed was a bit of tidying up - and although it doesn't look like much yet, I've already gone and put the doors in. The grand plan is to build an art studio to house anything that involves colours and dyes - stained glass, stained clay, wool, carpet - and to be a central hub for creating banners. I'd had a vision in my head of how it might look for many months - which is why I've dug out this stepped area. With the shape of the room as it is, I knew I was going to run into trouble lighting the back wall. The steps will all have rows of chests on them, and I figured the best idea was to hide some sea lanterns behind the top row of chests so their rather ungainly colour isn't visible, and reflect the light off some dazzling white quartz blocks. As it turned out, I had the lanterns one step too far up, but it wasn't a difficult fix. I've replaced the floor with wood and lanterns, all of which will eventually be covered with carpet and will light up the studio brilliantly. The steps are all made of coloured wool, corresponding to the colour of whatever is contained in the chest that sits on it - with stained glass letting the light through from the sea lanterns. As for the strange pattern of diorite in the roof - it seems I'm a bit close to the level above, as those are blocks that the redstone sits on for the guest room and music room, so once the roof is finished those have to be fixed. Again, it's a trivial job. The studio continues to take shape. After considering a huge number of potential patterns for the floor carpet, I figured it was best to extend the stripes of colour all the way across. As for the ceiling, we're back to another obscure old favourite of mine from the early days of the Spectrum... ZX Spectrum screenshot: Spectron (1983) Watch this game played to attack wave 41 (by which time it never gets any harder) by ME! Yes, ME! via the RZX Archive. Once again my attention turns to Spectron, the Robotron clone from Virgin Games' dodgy early days, which was crippled on my Spectrum +2 as it checked for an issue 2 keyboard, when even most of the old rubber-keyed 48K machines used issue 3. Previously, I'd carpeted the floor of the warehouse with the Swarmer and Speeder, the lowest two adversaries of the game; for the art studio, I thought I could use some of the vast supply of purpur blocks from the Time Trax Rune Cube... only to find that the Electron was the inverse colours of what I'd been expecting and I used more sandstone in the background than I did purpur blocks. Still, at least this Electron doesn't leave an electric fence behind - and the last Spectron enemy, the Launcher, I've got a plan as to where I can fit that one in. It was planned from the start to keep my supply of flowers in the art studio, as they can all be crafted into dyes. The tall flowers - rose, sunflower, peony and lilac - are crafted into red, yellow, pink and magenta dyes respectively, and can be spammed with bonemeal to replicate themselves, for a very quick and easy source of all four of these dyes and orange, obtained from mixing red and yellow. Red dye is really easy to obtain. If I don't want to waste bone meal, a quick modification to the ironworks will jam the hopper that collects the poppies to be thrown away; this way I can take as many as I need. Of course, I also have a beetroot farm, which already contains as much red dye as I will ever need - though that does eat into my trading profits because I can feed beetroot to pigs, kill them all and sell their bacon for a ton of emeralds. However we look at it, that's five dyes sorted for a start. A lengthy stay at Horace's Revenge brings us a healthy supply of bones - for making bone meal, not just for throwing at the flowers in the studio, but also as white dye in its own right. That's easy access to six dyes now. Likewise, the active squid farm that is Ned's Oasis will very quickly give us what Hewlett Packard, Canon, Epson, Lexmark and any other printer manufacturer you might care to mention doesn't want us to have - a large and free stash of black ink. Mix this with bone meal and this also gives us the two shades of grey - no messing about finding flowers for the light grey when we've got these two running, and nine dyes are now in plentiful supply. Oh Mummy! Why have you built this cactus farm? I hear the naysayers scream. Not so smug now, are you? So it doesn't look like there's much in here since it was built just before day 3000, but I've emptied this chest several times and I know there's at least a double chest full of cactus in the warehouse, and I have both lava buckets and blaze rods coming out of my ears to roast it with into green dye. Combine that with bone meal for light green, and we've covered 11 dyes with our automatic farms. And finally, we come to the latest major build. Life, The Universe and... Chocolate isn't an automatic farm as such, because I have to replant the cocoa pods manually every time I hit the harvest button. But even though I've only done so three times I've already got this double chest full of cocoa beans, and the one on the other side is nearly there. It might take a while to hit the magic 42, but at least I've got more than enough to fill the dye chest with - and now 12 of the 16 dyes are all considered to be trivially available. Light blue dye is easily obtainable from a renewable and automatic source - but was via a machine I hadn't built until this point. This is Maiq's flower farm, which predates hopper clocks and other such ingenious machinery, operating on a time loop of delayed repeaters that sends a shot of bonemeal into the grass as the dispensers turn on, but not as they turn off. Building this in a Flower Forest (as I might well do) will yield all sorts of wonderful flora but here, in a Swampland biome, only orchids will grow. These orchids are what I need to turn into the stash of light blue dye, and this is how many I collected (including all the seeds from the long grass) from filling the dispenser with nine stacks of bone meal. Of all the dyes that are available, I now have 13 of them fully collected, and here ends that automation. So now, only three dyes aren't farmable - blue, purple and cyan, all of which (no surprises here) involve lapis lazuli. I've got tons of the stuff, but I'm supposed to be saving a lot of it to build with - although I will fill the chests here before the project is considered finished. I don't need much dye to fill the wool chests, though. Just six pieces of each dye, applied to a total of 90 of the 100 sheep at Jeff Minter's Llama Friendly Woolly Jumper Facility (which may soon have its own real llama), is all I need. That and a stack of iron that I can keep on making shears with. So I sat in the minecart with three shears ready, clamped down the "snip" button... and in about 20 minutes or so, this is what I had collected when the final shears broke. A few more runs here and I'll have 15 chests full of coloured wool (and one of white that I could sell if I wanted), and I won't even have made the tiniest dent in my gangantuan stash of iron. Knowing that I might want to leave Minecraft running AFK while I did other, more important things (such as make dinner), I built some enchanted shears that would last up to 44 minutes before breaking (and I'd always make sure they didn't). The name of these shears is a memorable piece of Spectrum folklore... ZX Spectrum screenshot: Advanced Lawnmower Simulator (1988) Watch this "game" completed by Jamie Angus via the RZX Archive. "This is quite possibly the best and most elaborate hoax in the history of the Spectrum, performed by the editors of Your Sinclair." - World of Spectrum The story goes like this: for April Fool's Day in 1988, said staff of Your Sinclair decided to prank their readership by reviewing an obviously terrible game that one of them had built in BASIC in the time it takes to make a mug of tea, giving it YS Megagame status and waiting for the screams of indignation to flood in via the letters page from those who hadn't looked at the calendar. Only one of the six mowers was in action (always the Patio Sprintette), and all it took was to hold down the M key to display "Well Mown" and earn yourself a corned beef sandwich (provided you don't randomly run over the power cable and electrocute yourself, thus dying in a bizarre gardening accident). The title was a parody of Codemasters' penchant for naming their games "Advanced/Super/Professional (something) Simulator", which became a lasting joke on comp.sys.sinclair and World of Spectrum after it. Your Sinclair's readership soon showed they weren't thicker than a ticket tout's wallet, and merrily played along with it. And in September 1989, Your Sinclair bundled Advanced Lawnmower Simulator on their cover tape to finally reveal the extent of the joke to everyone. The art studio wouldn't be complete if I didn't hang a few banners around it - after all, that's one of its central purposes. One of the uses of banners is to make flags, and I've honoured the countries that have been associated with the Spectrum in its lifetime. First and foremost, the flag of the United Kingdom, or as close as can be made with the banners - British designed, British built, all from the mind of Sir Clive Sinclair, the archetype of a British eccentric whose small company that was little more than an office in Cambridge in the beginning went head-to-head against the huge corporations of America. But the flag of the United States - with most of its stripes but missing its stars - isn't there as the rival representing Commodore and Apple, it's there because the Timex Sinclair variants of the ZX81 and Spectrum were Sinclair's first foray into the international market. Timex Sinclair's great American adventure didn't work out, but on the other side of the studio we have the flags of those international forays that did work - whether they were intended or not. Via Sinclair's Spanish distributor, Investrónica, and some bizarre decisions made in the Spanish government, the 128K "toast rack" model came to be developed - who knows if we'd even have had that upgrade otherwise? Throw in the Spanish game developers who took to the Spectrum in a way other countries didn't, and it's worth paying a suitable tribute to Spain. And then there's Russia, the main player in the migration of the Spectrum to Eastern Europe while still under the iron fist of communism, where a cheap computer that could be assembled from parts that were available there was ideal for the fledgling computing scene behind the Iron Curtain. Since the hammer and sickle was rightly dismissed, other countries have also taken to Sir Clive's marvel, keeping it alive in a quiet retirement to this day, but it was the Russians who were the main contributors and for that I say спасибо! The studio is finished, and the official Sinclair's Foundry banner is revealed and hung on the wall - we'll be seeing a lot more of it soon. To make your own: start with a yellow banner, add light green per bend (three in the top right corner), red inverted chevron (V shape at the top), light blue chevron (inverted V shape at the bottom), black saltire (diagonal cross over the field). There is one last thing I needed to do with one of the banners, though. Finally, after more than nine months and two further version upgrades, I've built my first shield! I've never needed one before, especially with this ridiculously strong armour, but for an upcoming piece of exploration I'm going to need it, or so I'm told. I was searching for potential names, but Skornir (from Valhalla) didn't really fit as this isn't a Norse-themed world, and though I'd always thought Tir Na Nog had a shield as one of its quest items, it doesn't. The Falcon Shield from Hexen doesn't look anything like this one (though, with careful construction of a suitable other banner, it could) and looking through the annals of Knightmare, I found the Shield of Liberty was later renamed the Shield of Justice... and we already have a Helmet of Justice from that series. Then it hit me, while thinking of the Mirror Shield from the Legend Of Zelda games: what does a shield actually do? Bingo, I'll call it Deflektor! With a K. ZX Spectrum screenshot: Deflektor (1987) Watch this game completed by Roman Rugalenko via the RZX Archive. One of the great niches the Spectrum found in its heyday was puzzle games - Tetris, for instance, was ideal as what better way was there to avoid the dreaded colour clash than to have a game entirely based on squares? Aside from the Russian giant, Deflektor is a simple enough game on the face of it - guide the laser beam into the detector by deflecting it off mirrors which you have to rotate. Sounds easy, right? Of course it isn't. The laser has to shoot a number of blobs which will open a locked gate to the detector, usually requiring it to be deflected through several different paths. There are tiles that only let the beam pass through in one particular orientation, some of which are constantly spinning, there are other tiles that scramble it so that it darts all over the place, even more that teleport it through hyperspace, and there are roaming nasties that knock all your carefully placed mirrors out of line. Add that the laser is constantly losing energy and thus there's a time limit, and also you have to be careful not to deflect the beam back into itself and cause an overload... no, this is not an easy game by any means. But it is a great one. A FINAL ROUND OF BASE DECORATION I admit, I was writing this page while still building the base tweaks, and wondering out loud whether I should add a Sinclair QL to the new range of map-based pictures, I came to the obvious conclusion that I should - the result is this 6×2 mural. Yet another of Sir Clive's potentially brilliant ideas that was hamstrung by budget constraints, indifferent build quality, inept planning of the internal circuitry and his own utter refusal to admit that floppy disks were a better idea than his own microdrives, the QL might have been the step for Sinclair to conquer the world à la Microsoft but once again fell flat on its face. Its legacy is an interesting one, though: one owner of the QL in its day was a Swedish-speaking Finn called Linus Torvalds. Utterly frustrated by the QL's lack of available software and its inadequate operating system, he set about learning to program it... and wrote the kernel for the operating system which would eventually become known as Linux. So, all those who worship at the altar of the penguin called Tux... give us a round of applause for the Sinclair QL! I thought I'd give the doorways a much-needed makeover, to use the new banners, some more sign-based trickery and to break up the monotony of stone bricks. Two maps form the new sign over the doorway, which needed a huge amount of experimentation with the colours before it looked anything like right - and for those wondering, the font I've used is Lutz Headline, a font developed from old British numberplates (often seen on British Leyland's most fearful piles of junk). I also thought that a couple of relevant items stuck in frames wouldn't go amiss - so the Golden Hall of Valhalla gets a couple of golden swords I nicked from some zombie pigmen. For the music room, the obvious choice of decoration was a couple of spare discs that I have kicking around somewhere. And no, I'm not going to tell you where they are. Download the world, look for them yourself and if you find them, I might offer you 75p and a packet of Rolos. The guest room was built to offer bed and breakfast. And that is, quite literally, what the door shows. Hope you like grilled salmon first thing in the morning. To decorate the library, what better idea could there be than to take the two most useless books of them all, and shove them in the item frames? Finally, aftert all this time, I have a use for Bane Of Arthropods! For the brewing lab, the sailor in me came rising to the surface: red for port, green for starboard. Admittedly the colours are slightly obfuscated by the glowing enchantment effect, but the bright magenta Healing potion and the turquoise Leaping potion are about as good as I'll get. The Luck potion, which was a truer shade of green, was always unbrewable since it was introduced in 1.10, and now Mojang have said it was so useless that they're getting shot of it in 1.11.1! By the time I'd come to this stage, the expanded Open Forum had already spawned its first Cartographer. I'll be making use of him soon enough, but I'd thought - why don't I buy the Ocean Explorer map from him and use it in the item frame here, because it's not as if I need it to go looking for another Ocean Monument. Then, of course, it occurred to me what happens when maps are put in item frames... talk about not seeing the wood for the trees! An empty map, though, works just fine - and I put a compass in the other side. The entrance to the Nether has a slight variation - I've used Nether brick instead of ancient oak logs, which seems appropriate. Also, given that I now have a dedicated area to hunt for Wither skeleton skulls (and I had plenty in reserve), I can use them for decoration. The new corridor has had an expansion to three blocks wide, so I can make the entrance to the art studio look just like all the others. I've opted for a peony and a splat of yellow dye to show what this place is all about - the yellow looks much more like it belongs in a painter's pallette than, say, the pink or light green dyes with their regular oval shapes. There aren't too many changes to the master bedroom - I'd rather keep my solid gold door frames as they are! A couple of banners either side gives a bit of extra character, though. I miscalculated on how many Sinclair's Foundry banners I'd need, and still have a few left over. These two found their home either side of the red sandstone golem, just to add to the warehouse a little. That took longer than I'd expected, and some will say I got carried away with putting up new map-based artwork as well as spending seemingly forever harvesting wool. But it's all for a good cause, and now it's time to do a bit of exploring, because that's what 1.11 is all about, isn't it? Onwards, into the wilderness!