Minecraft - Feed the Beast - Mad Scientist style

To start off today's post: a humorous story.  My nieces and nephews love it when I come over.  Not simply because they like to see me either.  Within moments of me walking into the door at my parent's house Sunday, one of my nephews approached me and asked "Did you bring your laptop?!" in a very excited voice.

That's right.  I somehow have my nieces and nephews addicted to Minecraft, despite the fact that they have never actually played it.  It ended up with all of them (except the little guy learning to crawl) crowded around my small laptop screen to watch me play.  Then comes the barrage of things to do, and sadly, I can't do all of them.  After nearly dying twice, it was time to head upstairs for dessert.  When they were all leaving, my nephew (the same one who approached me before) asked my mom for some paper and a pen.  Moments later, he was asking me how to spell my name.  He left me a cute little folded note entitled 'open these'.  I opened it up to read 'Bring your laptop, Andrew.'  Well, so much for the 'cute' part.

That aside, Minecraft has been keeping me very busy.  Feed the Beast has officially launched some of there mod packs.  One of them is called the 'Mindcrack' mod pack.  I've been really enjoying playing this one.  Here are some screenshots:

I changed my minecraft skin to look a little bit more like me!

This is a world anchor.  It was supposed to keep my base loaded when I wasn't there (so the machines would run).  I found out later that it required Ender pearls to run (been super hard for me to find those!).  I got angry, so I flew up and put it up on the ceiling where it has stayed ever since.  I just learned that I could turn off that requirement.

These are the barrels that I use to sort things that I have a lot of.  It may be hard to notice, but the rightmost barrel one up from the bottom contains leaves.  I discovered that the electric chainsaw tears through trees rather quickly.  In about 15-20 seconds, I can make an entire small tree disappear.

I have a skylight in my base for solar panels.  A few times, spiders have dropped in to visit.  This one spun in place for about 30 seconds while I stared at it in confusion.

These sorting machines hook up to the barrel as well as other chests.  I love sorting machines.

These chest allow me to send items to different machines in my secret lab without having to walk over and put the items in myself.  I even have it hooked up so that all the results get sent to the chest on the far left.

My 'older' machines.  In the back, you can see my geothermal generators.  I found a massive pool of lava underneath my base that I am pumping up to my base to use for energy.

The bigger, newer machines.  The one on the right is a blast furnace.  The one on the left is a grinder, for grinding up ore.  You can also kind of see my sorting system working.  The little items in the purple boxes are flagged to go to my 'machine output' chest.

Better look at my geothermal generators.

View of my base from the stairs.

Another look at the industrial grinder and an electrolyzer

My solar panel array.

My fully automatic tree farm!  Doesn't require me to babysit it at all.

This whole area used to be a giant lava lake.

This is the level it is at right now.  The obsidian is the old 'surface' level.

My magic room!  The enchanting table from vanilla minecraft, and some items from a mod called Thaumcraft which allows you to do 'magic'.

Another shot of the magic room

My old farm, with two of the Thaumcraft golems hanging out.