Time To Trade!

Just to confirm, the temporary "Cash In" store  is now open at spawn!

Many items that cannot be transferred in the 1.7.10 update can be sold here, so cash in those blocks and items while you can! You have until  the server goes down at 10 am on 2nd April to sell your stuff and store the money in your vault!

DiggyVerse 2.0 Update Schedule

As the expected launch date gets closer I though I'd better post a reminder and a little more detail of how it will be rolled out.

• On the launch date, 2nd April, the server will go down at or just after 10 am (UK).
• Around 48 hours later (4th April) the client update will be released and the server will reopen.

So, here's a check-list for what you need to do and when you need to do it by:

• As soon as possible: check the "Extra things you need to know" section at the bottom of this post.
• By 8 pm (UK) on 31st March: Make sure you have opened any tickets relating to the update, tickets opened after that time are not guaranteed to be dealt with in time.
• Between 10 am on 31st March and 10 am on 2nd April use the temporary store at spawn to sell non-transferable items/blocks.
• By 10 am (UK) on 2nd April: Make sure everything you want to transfer is in your Vault, and that you have checked your chest contents against this list. 

Remember no Essentials or Ontime data will carry over, that includes your economy balance so ensure you have converted your money to currency items and stored it in your Vault! 

Bullion can temporarily be purchased at Spawn to make storing your money easier.

You can get your current rank back, along with additional commands you purchased at spawn, by opening a ticket after the update.

HTTPS Support Added To Website

HTTPS support has now been added to this website/blog!

For those who don't know what this is it basically means that it can now be viewed over an encrypted connection, providing improved privacy and security.

The standard HTTP version of the site will remain working as normal but I would definitely recommend updating your bookmark. 

To find out which version you are viewing just take a look at the address bar of your browser and check whether the address starts with "https", a green padlock is also normally displayed to the left of the web address when using HTTPS.

Enjoy!

Sneak Peek - Biomes, Food & Drink!

This sneak peek is a little late (I was supposed to post it yesterday) but to make up for it I've made it an extra large one!

I posted about a couple of the custom biomes I've added to DiggysMobs a few weeks ago, now it's time to reveal some details about the other three...

Meadow, Citrus Isles & English Orchard

The screenshot above is a Meadow with an English Orchard in the background!

I've always loved the way the Biomes 'O Plenty author made his apple trees work, simply right-clicking the leaves to pick the fruit once it was ripe, so I decided to make my own fruit trees based on that idea. Fruit only grows on the outer leaves.

Each type of fruit tree is unique to a specific biome as follows:

Meadow: Cherry & Plum

Citrus Isles: Lemon & Orange

English Orchard: Apple & Pear

The Meadow biome also has an exclusive custom mob, Butterflies, with various colors!

In addition to the trees I've also added 8 new crops, 6 for foods and 2 for drinks:

Food crops: Tomato, Onion, Parsnip, Chilli, Lettuce & Turnip.

Drink Crops: Tea & Coffee.

All the new crop items can be planted directly, like you plant carrots & potatoes in vanilla.

In addition though I've added 'Sprouts', for all my custom crops and also carrots & potatoes. These Sprouts drop randomly from grass, with different sprouts dropping in different biomes, and each sprout type can be obtained from two different biomes. 

So, you'll need to do some exploring to gather all the different crop types!

As you may have guessed fruits trees and more crops means that we're dropping the Useful Food mod in the 1.7.10 update.

Instead I've added a whole load of custom foods and drinks, over 300 in fact, that make full use of the ingredients available! Below are a few examples...

As you can see the selection includes sweet & savoury pies, extra breads, cheesecakes, pizzas, salads, pasta dishes, cakes, jellies, cereal, ice cream cones, waffles, pancakes, sandwiches, jams, stews, various meat dishes and soups, plus hot and cold drinks.

What's more I've also added numerous cross-mod recipes allowing items from other mods, such as Barley from Natura and Fish Fillets from Aquaculture, to be used where appropriate!

Anyone familiar with my minigames, going right back to Tekkit Classic, will remember the ongoing joke about waffles... well now the waffles are no longer a lie!

Sneek Peak - Mod Integration!

One thing that I've always felt the current 1.6.4 based version of DiggyVerse is lacking in is customisation of the recipes and uses of items from other mods.

DiggyVerse 2.0 contains literally thousands of tweaks aimed at better integration, I've already mentioned the addition of Thaumcraft Aspects to over 1000 additional items, blocks and mobs but here's some other examples of tweaks I've made:

Some of the items in Aquaculture were essentially useless and although I added a way to sell those items in DiggyVerse 1.x I know some players still find it annoying... not any more! Every single fish and other item from the mod now has at least one direct use, see the images above for a couple of examples.

Between Metallurgy and Tinkers Construct a lot of extra types of ores/metals are added, most of which have very limited uses. I've added over 100 additional recipes for mods like BiblioCraft and GrowthCraft which make some of those metals far more useful, again there's a couple of examples above.

Some of the Skill Orbs from Dynamic Sword Skills are very common and so players tend to build up more than they will ever need. Again I added a way to sell these in DiggyVerse 1.x but now you can simply craft unneeded orbs directly into Bottles O' Enchanting to either use yourself or sell to other players!

If you've used Thaumcraft before then you'll know that it adds Coins that you can get, for example, from loot bags. Mostly these coins are used to trade with Villagers but they can also be substituted for Gold Nuggets in some recipes. 

I've added a few extra basic crafting uses for the Thaumcraft Coins, like using them to craft the Golden Carrot, and also added a recipe that allows you to convert them into DiggysStuff Coins using an Ectonic Slender Pearl!

Talking about Villager trading, I've also added dozens of extra trades to vanilla Villagers, but you'll have to find out for yourself what they are!

Sneek Peak - Improved Doggy Talents!

I'm a big fan of this mod and I know many others are too, the move from 1.6.4 to 1.7.10 brings us big improvements including a greatly improved menu system and new styles.

On top of the improvements to the mod itself I've added a few custom skins to give even more variation, they are loosely based on a Dalmatian, Golden Retriever, Collie and Labrador! 

The single biggest improvement though has to be the addition of Radio Collars, which together with the radar style map helps you track down your lost dog over large distances!

Sneak Peek - Ocean's Alive!

My custom mod Diggys Mobs has been massively expanded for DiggyVerse 2.0,

and one of the most transformed areas are the oceans...

You'll find colourful coral reefs, two varieties of seaweed that grow and can be farmed at different ocean depths, and three new mob types, Fish, Big Fish and Jellyfish, which each have several sub-types. Both types of fish are harmless but be cautious of getting too close to the Jellyfish!

What's more to make underwater building and exploration easier I've added a new use for the Slender Pearl... it can now be crafted into an Atlantean Pearl. When you are underwater and the Atlantean Pearl is on your hotbar (you don't have to actually hold it) you get both both Night Vision and Water Breathing potion effects!

The Atlantean Pearl does randomly take damage and will eventually deplete but it is never destroyed, it can be recharged in a Crafting Table using a combination of Seaweed and Shells. Shells can be found in Beach biomes, and can also be farmed as they spread naturally along Beaches.

Seaweed also has a shorter relative, Pondweed, which can be found in rivers and other inland bodies  of water which are at least two blocks deep.

Sneak Peek - Foxes!

One of the most requested things in the last feedback questionnaire

was more mobs, specifically... a few more animals.

So here's the first of the new mobs I've added to my mod, 

Diggys Mobs, for the 2.0 update... the Fox! 

This little fellow is cute, fast and always on the lookout for his next meal!

If you are keeping chickens or ducks then make sure they're in a secure pen, foxes will try everything they can to get to them and if they do it's feast time!

The Fox also has a smaller cousin, the Arctic Fox!

Just because they're smaller doesn't mean they are any slower or less hungry! 

They tend to blend in to their habitat, snowy biomes, so can be very hard to spot.

Both variations drop Fox Fur, which can be crafted into a suit (either white or orange), and when a full set is worn your running speed is boosted by 20%

Sneak Peek - Storage Bags

A more compact way to store common items like leather and feathers was requested by a couple of players in the early days of planning the DiggyVerse 2 update, so here it is... 

Storage Bags!

As you can see they are very cheap to craft, they are also infinitely reusable!

In total they can be used with 16 different items, 

some vanilla and some from the Diggys Stuff 2 Mod.

To fill a bag you just place it in the centre of the crafting grid and surround it with the item you want to fill it with. As you probably realised that means each bag holds 8 items, essentially allowing you to compact 8 stacks into one for long term storage or selling via Vending Blocks in higher quantities!

Sneak Peek - Swamps & Reapers

This sneak peek reveals the first of the new mobs added to DiggysMobs 2...

The Piranha!

This feisty little critter lives in Swamp biomes and will chase down and kill players, villagers or animals unlucky enough to fall into the water and get too close. They are found in small groups and can flap their tail at high speed allowing them to glide across the surface of the water and get to their target easier!

They even consume any meat, raw or cooked, dropped by their victims!

Reaper Changes

In the most recent player questionnaire a number of people said that the Reaper was their favourite mob, but we also had some feedback saying that they put players off living in or near swamps as they were difficult to avoid when they suddenly spawned (living next to a swamp myself I totally get that).

So, I've made some changes in DiggysMobs 2, firstly Reapers no longer spawn naturally in swamps, in fact they no longer spawn naturally in any biome. 

Instead when a player dies there's a 25% chance that a Reaper will spawn and try to kill any nearby players, for every player the Reaper kills there's then a 50% chance that it will de-spawn (on average they de-spawn after 2 kills). This means that they won't kill you over and over any more, but it also means that you have a limited chance to kill them before they de-spawn. 

Why would you care about killing them? Well, they now drop a new item, the Nether Star Fragment. Combine four Nether Star Fragments with a little ectoplasm and bingo you have a new way of getting yourself a Nether Star!

Sneak Peek - Better Villages & Shipwrecks

The new version of GrowthCraft brings with it some great new features for villages,

including orchards, rice paddies and beekeepers houses!

You won't find all the new features in every village but most have a couple of them, making them a lot more varied and in some cases a lot more rewarding to find!

One of the new mods that's made it's way into DigggyVerse 2.0 is Shipwrecks.

Four players requested this mod in the most recent feedback questionnaire,

and having tried it out we decided it was definitely worth including!

For those that haven't come across it before it basically adds a variety of shipwrecks to the world (as you'd probably guessed by the name), which randomly generate both in the ocean and on coastal land, sometimes containing loot.

Due to the way the mod generates the shipwrecks they will only be found in the main world,

and not in Veteran World, giving higher ranked players an extra reason to explore it!

Sneak Peek - New Custom Biomes!

Biomes O Plenty is being dropped from the modpack for 1.7.10.

As much as I love the mod the new biomes added to vanilla in 1.7.10 are great and with Biomes O Plenty installed they just get lost among the massive number of biomes!

So, I decided to just add a few of my own instead to give a little extra variety without drowning out the vanilla biomes, here's a little preview of two of the more simple ones...

Autumnal Forest

This biome adds a splash of colour to the landscape, the three tree colours grow randomly from a single sapling type and leaf piles spread naturally across the forest floor! 

Shrubland

I love the new Podzol block in 1.7.10 but it isn't really used much in the vanilla biomes, so I decided to add a biome using it as the entire top layer! This biome is covered in low growing bushes, grass and dead bushes, with the occasional patch of Natura barley and a complete absence of flowers.

In addition to these two biomes I've also added three more, but I'll post about those later as they all share a new feature I'm not ready to reveal yet!