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I did Blue Skies a while back, but i went back to get crystal wood, cause i wanted to make windows out of it.

my review is: any "other dimension" mod that has to nerf tools to make their own tools relevant is bad. the gold standard of alt dimension mods, The Twilight Forest, doesn't do this. it introduces tools in case someone wants to start out in the world fresh, but some have specific uses, like autosmelt on fiery tools or armor penetration on knightmetal tools.

blue skies either copies those or doesn't have anything interesting. also, the dungeons required to progress are so rare. if your world isnt interesting (both blue skies dimensions have over five biomes but they all look and feel the same), at least make the dungeons frequent. twilight forest biomes are small and dungeons are easy to find in them (except for the dark forest sometimes...)

blue skies does add some cool blocks and wood colors. i used the purple wood on my new ae2 room and the transparent crystal wood planks there too.

also, the nature dungeon is way too big. just room after room of cherry blossom saplings and finding the nature keys is so frustrating. you may as well have a large backpack with auto pickup and break the chests with how many there are. or just have enough saplings to get keys from the gatekeeper.

AND, if you don't already know the boss is a tree you need to attack with an axe, you're out of luck. I had to spawn in an axe because I didn't know that ahead of time. maybe if the creatures inhabiting the dungeon required an axe to kill i'd pick up on that. I know minecraft is all wiki-reading and we're all used to that but I like being a little surprised.

rant over. sorry, I can't get over how good twilight forest is, and there doesn't really seem to be any reason for blue skies dimension to be in this modpack. especially if it's just going to add level bloat.

my other favorites have to be the aether (my second ever mod I ever installed :D ) and erebus (an obscure insect domain with a cool soundtrack). i know the aether is still in development, but it never seems to make it into the modpacks i play.

it was funny to use the allthemodium pickaxe in blue skies cause the "it appears this tool is not as effective here" shows up despite the pickaxe obliterating everything XD. you can kind of see the text in the image

here's the wood I made my house out of. it's called skyris. thought id follow through on that. very whimsical tree. i took a screenshot on the way back from a nearby meteorite, since I was made aware of some disturbing news about refined storage...

I was reading up on the discord about how to make infinity storage cells for refined storage, but everyone said not to do it, since the way these storage cells work is that they append nbt tags to the end of the item name. applied energistics 2 (ae2 for short) circumvents this by only allowing 63 different types per storage cell, which means if you have more than 63 different types of items, you need to make another cell, no matter how many items are in there.

refined storage doesn't have that limitation, so that makes it more appealing, but because you can technically have 100000000 different items in one cell, the nbt tag can get too long and it can corrupt the save. great! so i'm getting into ae2. that screenshot up there is my new ae2 room and the mess of cables is my attempt at automating making processors, because it is very tedious to do manually.

you can't just throw 64 silicon and a silicon press in there. it has to go in one... by... one.... it's miserable. at least growing fluix crystals is better. and certus quartz seeds has a high rate of return on duplicating seeds, so growing them isn't that much of a hassle.

and, honestly, ae2 cells are easier to make than refined storage cells once you get the parts. the inscriber tentacle monster I had to make does a good job at making processors. i just wish I could do it in a single block lol.

i got pretty far on ae2 pretty quickly, so now I'm just deciding what to put in there. i think i'm okay in general, though, in that I probably won't reach the corruption limit any time soon.

turns out I didn't have as much netherite as I thought. instead of farming apotheosis demons for armor though I decided to go a different route...

yep, that's four phytogenic insulators, each equipped with phyto-gro and nether seeds, upgraded with resonant components. these are really kicking out netherite essence. and my autocrafters are making it into ingots without any intervention :).

it's as elegant as I could get it. I got an rftools crafter making phyto-gro out of things from my refined storage system. I haven't put any other augments into the growers, except for the one that makes outputs go into inputs (for the seeds), but it works great so far. I got distracted with other things before I could optimize this.

ended up making the chunk destroyer. wasn't as resource intensive as I thought, although 512 glass for a component was unexpected... it's a pain to get working. you just have to be patient with it. if it doesn't start immediately, maybe just wait.

once you wait... hehehehe

I initially enchanted it from a book with fortune VII on it, but it only took life mending III. I thought I messed up bad but it turns out it will just take as many enchantments as you can throw at it.

and so I put fortune VII on the chunk destroyer.. and it started mining copper.. wow. just look at all that. there's no way I can use all that. not if I build the tallest copper spire in the world

I never understood why the quantom quarry from extra utilities 2 never stuck around. it was such an elegant solution to quarrying. maybe it doesn't go with all the mods' vision, since the allthemods ores aren't quarryable. you kind of just see the ores floating down in the pits and you have to fly down and collect them. still. wish quantum quarries came back.

I decided my nuclear reactor is fine. 0.5 mb/t is not too bad, especially how fast I grow uranium. I'm not used to building these reactors so tall, so maybe that's why it's so hot and that's why I thought there was something wrong with it. it's on all the time now.

I put an auto compressing upgrade in one of the sophisticated storage chests by the chunk destroyer, and it will compress raw ores into raw brick blocks, which my mekanism ore processing machines cannot process. so I had to make an rftools crafter that just takes the bricks, breaks them back into ores, then makes them back into blocks. so stupid. quark has a lot of hits but a lot of misses too. not that this is really quark's fault but how is this happening? raw copper blocks are a vanilla minecraft block is it not?

i'm kind of at a spot in the game now where I'm not sure what I want to do? I have to learn a bunch of mods to get even close to getting the atm star, and I'm not sure if I feel like doing that right now. i might enter into a post-game slump and then try something else.

the problem is that I know what will happen when I make the atm star. I'll make creative items, and then what? you win! so I might slow down playing a bit and work on other parts of the website.

I'm also slacking on chores. I'm the designated dishes doer and cat entertainer. we got more dishes and pans so there's more to do now, but it's all dishwasher safe, I just need to get up and do it. the cat isn't totally warmed up to me yet, but maybe she just likes to play rough with me. she plays fetch with my partner.

life is kind of great right now, even in between self-studying and full-time chores. I'll try and make it come out on the website as much as I can.