The Planet

so first off the mod list

• SereneSeasons (always gotta have this, i love me some seasons)
• Quark (gotta have my double doors lol also i want a firefox someday)
• Farmer's Delight (my previous farming mod standby, Simple Farming, isn't into 1.19 yet, so I decided to try this one)
• Naturalist (adds a bunch of new biome-specific wild mobs with a food chain and stuff, like snakes, snails, songbirds, deer, bears, giraffes, lions)
• Ars Nouveau (a magic/spellcasting mod which is VERY nice)
• InControl (lets me explicitly manage mob spawning rules)
• Cooking For Blockheads (since Farmer's Delight uses its own special custom crafting mechanics for food, this isn't as useful, but I still wanted the milk jug)
• Mr. Crayfish's Furniture Mod (... just for fun)

InControl is fricking amazing y'all. So I've long suffered from the quandary of not wanting hostile mobs just roaming around trying to kill me every time i go into a slightly dark place, but also not wanting to lose the hunger mechanic, so I tried to find things that make me get hungry in Peaceful mode. This tho, this is even better. So what I got set up right now is, I'm in Easy mode so if I fight stuff it's not too scary, and I made it so hostiles don't spawn above y=40 (except for slimes and witches, which spawn normally, because I like the idea of swamps being dangerous). That means when I'm on the surface or digging down/caving a little bit, there's no monsters, but if I wanna go deep enough to get The Good Stuff, I'm gonna have to be prepared to fight. And I love it, I haven't fought anything yet but knowing that mining will go all Moria on me is :chefkiss:

Altho I had a time at the beginning where I thought it was behaving wrong and restricting too many spawns because there were no chickens and y'all know there are always plenty of chickens spawning but then I realized later that the snakes from Naturalist eat chickens, so it probably had spawned a bunch of chickens and they just got eaten lmfao. There's plenty of animals in my main game now.

Speaking of my main game! I got a nice spot in the plains, found a cave with some iron and a block of water so I could bring it up top to irrigate a farm, and I got some carrots and onions to grow (they're spring crops). Birch forest one way, oak forest another, savannah the third (so I could "cheat" and grow summer crops there all year round because of how the seasons work but I don't wanna) so I have a lot of nice wood options - haven't gotten any acacia yet but it's easy access. Got myself a couple sheep I dyed for colored wool, couple cows for leather.

I also have two different Archwood (a.k.a. Magic) trees within an easy run distance, past which is... a good-sized Plains village! I got some hay for my animals that way (since wheat is a summer crop so I can't grow it yet) and I also nabbed some of the rich soil (did I mention Farmer's Delight has an extended composting system??) to boost my compost production and I also pretended that I bought one of their horses and brought it back to my home.

Also, between the village and my farm was a flock of chickens being tended by not one but two Whirlisprigs, which are basically little hovering nature fairies from the magic mod that you can bind as a familiar, and as luck would have it, one of the two whirlisprigs decided it liked my new horse I was leading more than the chickens and followed my horse all the way back to my farm!!! Getting a whirlisprig charm shard isn't expensive but it's a little tricky, you have to grow a tree near it, so I composted ALL of my wheat seeds into bone meal and stuck down a sapling and bone mealed it until it grew and lo and behold now I have a whirlisprig charm~ can't actually bind it as a familiar until I get far enough in magery to do rituals and stuff.

BUT, I finally got myself a beginner spell book so I can start making spells! I ran into one more iron cluster under the village and it got me enough iron to make the iron tools you need to craft with a book to make the spellbook and I'm excited. I think I gotta make a scribing table to make spells, tho, so I gotta trim some wood from one of those archwood trees to make one.

The village also gave me a bunch of potatoes, bread, and tomato seeds, along with a few gold nuggets, which is v good because i need two gold nuggets to make the scribe table... I have a feeling I'm gonna need a lot of gold to make the ritual equipment to have familiars, so at some point I'm gonna have to start caving in earnest. Once I've got enough crop variety to make some meals, I think. I'm also excited the town gave me tomato seeds because one of the trades the one farmer there wants is giving emeralds for tomatoes (the other is for wheat) and while both of those are summer crops, i got both now so i will be ROLLING in cash by the end of the summer aw yiss.

Right now tho I'm focused on growing crops and building stuff. I'm gonna level/pave a road from my house to the village so I can ride my horse back and forth for quick trips, and then I'm gonna do some renovation on the village itself - it spawned with some pretty janky levels, so there are basically no flat paths anywhere and I wanna fix that, make it look nicer and be easier to move around, maybe add a few new houses and expand the available professions a bit - it's got a good selection, including two clerics and a librarian, but I wanna get it fully built out. And there's only one cat. Gotta figure out how to tame a cat when there's no streams or ponds or oceans nearby....

I also figured out how to mirror my screen to the TVs through the roku, so when I have time to play during the day, the kids get to watch me do stuff without me having them hovering over my shoulder xD