I hadn't been playing much Minecraft lately because I'd finally gotten my gear and villagers all leveled up and made a few auto farms for basic stuff I need, and what I really wanted to do next was either more exploring or some really serious building/redstone farms, but I didn't want to do much more exploring in my main peaceful world when the 1.20 update was about to come out, because I wanted 1.20 stuff not too far from my base, and I also didn't want to do any elaborate building or technical stuff until I had shulker boxes, but to get shulker boxes I need a datapack that adds blaze powder, but it also didn't make sense to try to learn datapacks when a new edition was about to come out, and I thought about making a new world just to explore in, but that still didn't make sense when I could wait and start a brand new one for 1.20 –

So anyway 1.20 came out last week and now I have made my first datapack! I am calling it "A peaceful End" and it adds back in all the stuff that is otherwise inaccessible in Peaceful. There are other datapacks that do this, but they are all aimed at making the stuff *easy* to get, and as we all know, Peaceful is actually the hardest mode of the game, for only the most hardcore of players, and I wanted to keep that spirit. So the goal was to make the missing items *possible* but *very difficult* to get - along the lines of slimeballs and string and gunpowder - to keep the difficulty up. The idea is that if you want these things in your Peaceful world, you need to *really* want them. The other main idea is that if you are playing on anything other than peaceful, this datapack probably wouldn't change the game much at all, because it would still be much, much easier to get these things as mob loot.

So it adds:

1. Tridents as very rare chest loot in large ocean ruins.
   
2. Totems as very rare chest loot in woodland mansions.
   
3. Wither skulls as very rare chest loot in Nether Fortresses.
   
4. Froglights as very rare chest loot in ruined portals, since that's the mostly likely place for a frog to have encountered a magma cube in the past.
   
5. Ghast tears as cat gifts at the same frequency as phantom membranes (since *Earth* cats can fight ghosts in other dimensions I don't see why Minecraft cats couldn't.)
   
6. Blaze powder is craftable from one magma cream + one fire charge (with some loss of powder).
   
7. Blaze rods are craftable from blaze powder (with some loss of powder.)
   
8. Nether stars are craftable from four wither skulls + four netherite blocks + one end crystal.
   
9. Wither skulls can be smelted into wither roses.
   
10. Prismarine crystals can be smelted into prismarine shards.

Things you still cannot get even with this datapack:
Piglin, zombie, and creeper heads: these are only available in-game via a special mechanic different from other mob drops. Since they don't really have any game mechanic effects I am leaving them alone for now (you can get naturally-generated skeleton heads without the datapack.)
Music discs: You can currently get 6/16 music discs in Peaceful. I may add these later but there are so many of them and the original way of getting them is so baroque I have not yet come up with something that seems even vaguely equivalent. And six is a lot!
Tide smithing template: Every other smithing template is available in Peaceful. I'm leaving this out until we get a better idea of how smithing templates work out in the game.

As you can tell, so far all I know how to do is alter standard loot tables and add custom crafting recipes. Ideally I would actually like a few of these things to either be rare wandering trader trades, baroque mob drops, or, for the blocks, generate as part of the structures rather than as loot, but I don't know how to do either of those yet. And I would *really* like to be able to summon the Wither to get my nether stars instead of crafting them - there's no game-mechanics reason to not allow that, just like the Dragon, so I suspect there's a technical reason it would be difficult.

But I already have way too much power just with loot tables and custom crafting. Next goal: make a scoreboard-based datapack.

I have also started a new world for 1.20 - it's on Easy mode instead of Peaceful, even, be proud of me! - where my only goal is to speedrun the world border, which is what I used to do when I first started playing in 1.8 and hadn't even figured out crafting tables existed, except this time I am also stopping to light every ruined portal I find (so I can go back through the Nether once i get there, of course.) And as always I am now remembering why I waste way too much time playing Minecraft when I am playing Minecraft again. I still have way to much to do in the next month and a half but I think I have reached a state of extremely advanced fuck-its about it.

Anyway, here you go, tested as much as I know how to test:

A peaceful End datapack

ljwrites posted: Signal Boost bookmarklet with user name tags for more sites

I made a fork/update to melannen's fork of astolat's signal boost bookmarklet, which adds user name tags for more of the sites recognized by the DW user tag. I also made small changes to the text generated by the bookmarklet.

So astolat updated the bookmark code again a few days ago, and then I updated it more, and then ljwrites updated it even more!

So now it
a) preserves html in the copied text (astolat);
b) works for some people it had been broken for before (me);
c)strips out multiple signal boost: prefixes in titles (me, sorry);
d) fails better with non-DW websites (me);
e) actually works well with a list of non-DW websites that are compatible with DW (lj-writes)
f) has slightly more best-practices formatting (lj-writes).

....at some point we're going to have to stop calling it a "tiny" bookmarklet. :D

I also updated the drag-and-droppable version I'm hosting on my website, if you're somewhere that making a new bookmark manually is too annoying, go here and use the link:

SignalBoost 1.4

(If I keep wanting to code things, I need to update my DW style next! Nobody let me do anything else! Even if CSS is the worst!)

I watched Into the Spiderverse over the weekend! It is just as amazing in all different ways as everybody has been saying. Definitely worth the big screen, even almost maybe got me to think it might be worth trying in 3D.

Two questions out of that movie: Why is there not more Liv/May fic already? Specifically why is there not more Liv/May where they've spent the past ten years in a Reed-Doom style UST-powered mad engineer's duel? Because that is pretty obviously what that movie was implying. (You should go read everything on AO3 already, of course, but that will only take you a couple hours.)

Also, where is the Shadowshaper crosssver?


Meanwhile, I have not been making super great progress on my writing WIPs project, but I have been continuing to distract myself with Javascript, so I did finish a couple of coding wips!

Fanfic Plot Structure Generator

--for the shipposters and based on the slightly more complicated version of the pairing randomizer, this will tell you the basic relationship plot arc of your next fanfic! You should click it, and then comment to tell me what pairing it is for, and then (optional) either rec me or write me something that fits it. :D

Pairwisest

--this was actually intended to be a srs useful tool, but it has turned out to be much more useful for farting around. (Also, #$% nested javascript arrays.) You put in a list of unsorted... whatever, and it helps you turn it into a sorted, ranked list by giving items to you two at a time and having you choose which one ranks higher. You end up with a list fully sorted by preference but only ever have to choose between two things.

This is a pretty basic computer sorting algorithm, but this version assumes the person sorting it is a human making subjective judgements, and therefore sometimes they will rank A higher than B higher than C higher than A; or choose A over B but also B over A; or be unable to choose which is higher even though one definitely is. And it assumes that's a feature of having humans do your sorting, not a but, so makes you make a LOT of choices. But every time I've tried it, I've completely agreed with the list I ended up with, even if I was verklempt to start! It works best with lists between ~5 and 15 items, though, or you end up with a completely ridiculous number of choices.

For example, here's lists of Knights and/or Ladies of the Round Table you can copy+paste in and rank:
Gawain, Percival, Lancelot, Galahad, Gareth, Britomart, Palomedes, Tristan, Dinadan, Bedwyr, Kay, Not-Appearing-In-This-Film
Elaine of Astolat, Elaine of Corbenic, Elaine of Benoic, Elaine of Garlot, Elaine the Younger, Elaine the Peerles;, Elaine of Listenoise, Isuelt the Elder, Isuelt of Ireland, Isuelt of the White Hands, The Lady of Hautdesert

Or you could, maybe, make a priority list of December meme topics or writing wips you should be working on instead of playing with javascript toys.



..and that pretty much clears out my coding WIPs! Except wrotegoat, which was supposed to be a fork of written?kitten! that fixed some bugs, had some more visible customization options, and also let you pick if you wanted your images from Flickr, Tumblr, dA, or a directory on your own hard drive, because Flickr wasn't coming up with anything good for super-fannish keywords. But somebody else fixed the bugs first, the Tumblr and dA APIs were SO ANNOYING (and also I'd never done anything with APIs before, so that didn't help), and it will pull from a directory on your hard drive - as long as you're running the code from that directory. And now Tumblr, dA, and Flickr are all terrible! So right now it's mostly just a better-documented mirror with a different skin. I will get back to it after fandom comes up with that AO3 for fanart that has a good API, maybe. :P (IDK, could I do it with Google Image Search maybe? I should probably learn how to work with APIs at some point.)

( I might as well make a directory of other javascript toys I have up, for me if nobody else )

...and I also threw up a drag-and-droppable version of the DW SignalBoost bookmarklet that started all this: SignalBoost 1.1. (If I keep going on the coding the next project is probably changing that so that a) subject lines don't stack and b) non-DW links fail more gracefully - both things I pretty much know how I would do already, but the devil's in the details.)

This is how badly I'm procrastinating on the things I'm currently over-deadline on:

I sat down today and decided it was time to finally teach myself Javascript.

So, um, I have made a thing. Specifically, I have made a Troll Romance Shipping Grid Generator, where you can put in a list of characters and then automatically fill out the grid with ♥/⋄/♣/♠. Because that is something I've needed in my life, and I haven't been able to find one that did what I wanted, and it seemed like the sort of thing I could program with pretty basic stuff.

Troll Romance Shipping Grid Maker


There is a bunch more stuff I'd like to fix/add to it, but it's reached the point of functionality that I'm spending more time playing with it than coding it, so I thought I'd share. :P

(and while the example lists there are all Homestuck characters, let's be honest, I made this so I could do a TTOI shipping grid, it is not limited to Homestuck characters.)

( Sample completed grid )

I spent about half the time trying to remember basic programming stuff I haven't used in so long I've forgotten (like, oh yeah, == and = are different, that matters in C-ish languages) and half the time figuring out the weirdness that comes with js and html and making output happen. (I was going to be good and do the styling with all CSS, too, but I still can't make myself do rube goldberg css kludges when table and font tags work PERFECTLY FINE for the purpose. :P I did the CSS-appropriate stuff in CSS, anyway.)

( Things to work on next )