Under A Rock Art

Location Taken: Ruby Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008

I have spent a large portion of today building a factory run entirely off of fish.

I’m not even joking.

Well, except for the “entirely” part, since diversification is key to keeping things running. And I already had most of the factory part built, just needed a stable power plant.

Which I now have. And yes, it is powered by fish.

Alright, time for some sort of explanation. I’ve been playing Minecraft again, and what’s more, I’m trying out some of the mods people have made over the years. One mod I’m using adds in the factory machines, another adds in some interesting generators to power said machines, several add in ways to automate farming and fishing. You may see where this is going.

The Culinary Generator is a fairly innocuous item, you place food inside and it burns it to produce power based on how filling that food is. Compared to, say, the Pink Generator, (which is powered by pink items. Really.) it’s easily overlooked. Normally you’re far more interested in, you know, eating that food, as by the time you get a stable enough base built to stop worrying about dying from hunger, you can start playing with several more powerful generators.

But I’m not after powerful right now, I’m after stable. I need something to provide a steady power supply, to make sure I don’t run out. And a lot of those powerful ones? They feed off of rare items, pretty much the opposite of stable.

Fishing, in un-modded Minecraft, isn’t too impressive. You stand around for a minute or two, letting your hook dangle in the water, until you catch something. There are a few rather useful rare items you can catch, but given the time investment, it’s rarely worth it, as you could be doing tons of other interesting things instead.

Another mod I added puts in all sorts of rather decorative plants. I tossed that one in there so I could make attractive farms to decorate my base. But there’s also this item called a Fishtrap tucked in there, just a simple, fairly cheap to make item that fishes for you. It’s not any faster than doing it by hand, and it can manage to catch those rare items as well. On the surface, it just seems like a way to make living off of fish easier, if that happens to strike your fancy. It’s got limited inventory space, so it can’t hold too much, but if you check it every so often, it works out well.

Or you could hook that Fishtrap up to a pipe system (from the same mod as the generators) and pull those items out of there, to be sorted and sent around wherever I want. Like, say, into a furnace to cook, and then into those Culinary Generators.

Oh, and that furnace? I’m powering it off of the same network the generators are putting power into. Plenty of excess power, too, for all the other things I’m running.

However, since the fishtraps are rather slow, I had to set up a lot of them, packed into a tight space. Needed a bunch of water around them, of course, since they need adjacent water blocks to actually produce fish. And, of course, there’s the pipe system in there as well, pulling all the fish out of there.

Hmm… Pit full of water, with gray pipes stuck into it in regular patterns, and bright white fishtraps in a checker pattern… Why does my fish-powered reactor looks so much like a real-life nuclear one?!?

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