AstroBot

OK. This is an excellent game and I really enjoying. I’m hoping to complete it sometime during the Easter break as once this week is over my time for gaming returns to practically zero.

AstroBot Photomode 3
AstroBot Photomode 3

There’s a photomode in the game which I keep forgetting about unless there is a photo point like the one above. The whoe game is pretty amazing and excellent fun. It’s pretty much my level of stuff. The feedback on the controller is really impressive and the game uses the device to its fullest.

Astrobot Photo Mode 1
Astrobot Photo Mode 1

Oh, and everything looks gorgeous.

AstroBot Photomode 2
AstroBot Photomode 2

Just For The Fun Of It

Just wandering along and enjoying the game of Lego BrickLife within Fortnite and it’s all so much fun or gorgeous.

Gorgeous Sunset Views - Lego Brick Life
Gorgeous Sunset Views – Lego Brick Life

It is delightful to drive the school bus into the sea, jump out at the last minute and watch it float along for a little bit before sinking to the depths. I love it.

Sunken Bus Fun - Lego Bricklife
Sunken Bus Fun – Lego Bricklife

My favourite spot to put my house in on the beach front next to the concert stage. There’s a rock arch just south of that and I found out it’s possible to drive the bus up the arch and then drive off and land on top of my house.

Parked The Bus On The House - Lego Brick Life
Parked The Bus On The House – Lego Brick Life

The last image today is the underground garage with cars dumped inside. These are other players’ cars that I have run around and “stolen” and then brought to the car park for storage. It’s a fun game.

Stealing Cars Fun - Lego Brick Life
Stealing Cars Fun – Lego Brick Life

Views Of Flight

I’ve been trying to fly in X-Plane a bit recently. I need to do more I guess. There’s a plugin called Volanta by Orbx which I’m using to track my flights and it has some challenges it can add to the simulator so that gives me things I can aim for. I recently took a dawn flight from Biggin Hill to Le Touquet and I flew under the QE2 bridge and alongside my village. In the second picture here you can see the village where I live, if you know what you are looking for.

T-6A Dartford Crossing
T-6A Dartford Crossing
T-6A Where I Live
T-6A Where I Live

It’s A Hard Knock Brick Life

Fortnite – the game [although I’m not sure what else you might think it is] – has now become a platform for loads of games. They have teamed up with Lego and now have a few official Lego based games in the Fortnite family. One of these is Brick Life and the other I enjoy is called Odyssey.

Lego Brick Life is game where you run around a little seaside town doing jobs, making money, and build your dream house and decorate it. IT’s an escape from real life where everything looks lovely. It reminds me of Playstation Home from about ten years ago. Brick World is a good place to spend some time enjoying yourself.

Fortnite Lego Brick Life - Chess Board
Fortnite Lego Brick Life – Chess Board

Just look at the view in this picture, the sea, the stars, the sand, the city.

Fortnite Lego Brick Life - Beach Views
Fortnite Lego Brick Life – Beach Views

Now, the following picture is not from Brick Life but I think it captures the thought and playfulness that has gone into creating the Lego games. Isn’t it pretty:

Fortnite Lego Odyssey - Aurora
Fortnite Lego Odyssey – Aurora

Fancy Armour

I have spent a little time recently trying to get netherite armour in Minecraft. It used to be relatively easy – you “just” needed to get some ancient debris to make netherite ingots. Then they went and added a “smithing template” to the list of requirements and it took me a while to a) want to get a smithing template, b) be bothered to look for a bastion and cope with the general sense of death in the nether, c) feel netherite armour was worth it.

I have now done such a thing. I expected the bastion to kill me over and over but I actually managed to wander around relatively unscathed. It could be my gold armour saved me some injury – I don’t know. I not only found a netherite template but I also found an armour decoration template and that made me super happy. Although the templates are destroyed in the manufacturing process once you have one template you can craft more so I don’t have to go searching around other bastions, but I might just for the challenge.

So, armour has been upgraded and prettified.

Minecraft Armour Front View
Minecraft Armour Front View
Minecraft Armour Back View
Minecraft Armour Back View

For information and nothing else I’ve just checked my Minecraft world database file size and it’s coming in at 6GB at the moment. I have no idea in terms of average world size but it seems impressive.

Un-Mined

I like playing Minecraft. It’s a better world than the one we live in. I know there are creepers and zombies obsessed with trying to kill me but the farming is fun and apart from the strange slavery the game is mostly peaceful. I only play in survival mode, I have entered a creative world, once, but I hated it. The offspring don’t really play in this world much anymore so it’s mostly me just wandering around and doing little projects. I do want to get elytra soon so I will need some help in The End.

There are many cheats that could be applied to the game but having played since Covid-times I have a good idea of which ones keep me playing and which ones make the game far less fun. In the past I have used teleportation and even edited the contents of chests and inventories. I don’t use these cheats anymore. As much as travelling around the map in real time seems frustrating, teleporting from one place to another really kills the fun and sense of acheivement.

I use one main cheat these days and that is software that produces a map along with coordinates on the screen. This does mean I can easily find resources underground such as coal, diamonds and gold. But I think it balances out the time I spend. I don’t have to strip mine, I just mine but in calculated directions.

A Mine Map - Minecraft Level 17
A Mine Map – Minecraft Level 17

In the above picture you can see the routes I have mined and also some of the resources that remain, ready for me to plunder. Brown is copper ore, silver is iron ore and the grey is coal, I think. I can hover over the map in the application and it informs me the type of block I am over.

The mapping software I use is called Unmined, and it needs you to be able to access the world database. I normally FTP this from my server so I can explore using the map but without live updates.

A Minecraft Item Sorter
A Minecraft Item Sorter

The above picture shows my item sorter which is placed underground. The red squares are all redstone. I will be making a video about this soon as the last one I uploaded covered my dugout mountain.

This is what the current base looks like from above:

Minecraft Mainbase
Minecraft Mainbase

Flight Sim Photos

This is just a page of flight sim photos.

T-7A - 2024-08-21 08.23.39
T-7A – 2024-08-21 08.23.39
T-6A - 2024-08-05 07.47.24
T-6A – 2024-08-05 07.47.24
T-7A - 2024-08-04 07.48.08
T-7A – 2024-08-04 07.48.08
T-7A - 2024-08-06 06.51.32
T-7A – 2024-08-06 06.51.32
T-7A - 2024-08-21 08.04.00
T-7A – 2024-08-21 08.04.00

What A Shocker

You know how it goes. You’re flying along over the Netherlands and then BOOM, there’s a lightning storm in front of you. Fortunately for me I was already planning on landing before the storm but I don’t recall seeing lightning before in X-Plane.

T7 Red Tail Over Netherlands with lightning
T7 Red Tail Over Netherlands with lightning

You might need to click on the picture to embiggen it and then be able to see the lightning forks.

These Were A Surprise

Not much more to say than I was travelling my Minecraft world when I came across these beauties.

Ice columns in Minecraft
Ice columns in Minecraft

I was surprised as I hadn’t expected to see things of such amazingness.

The Portal

I have and have not wanted a PlayStation Portal since I saw they were released. There was a period of time that I had a notification from a stock checking site to try and buy one but I was always too late to the party. I nearly managed to order one from Currys but then the order got cancelled as they had run out of stock. So, I gave up on stock checking sites and just thought I’d be ok without one.

So, I had settled myself to not owning a Portal, I can always use remote play on my iPhone if I wanted to even though I really hate using screens as controllers. Then, one day, EE sent me a text message saying they were selling Portals in their shop. Even though I had mentally settled on not owning one, I somehow went through the entire order process and ended up having a Portal delivered to my home.

Playstation Portal
PlayStation Portal

The above image is a poor photograph because you can’t see the main features of the Portal which would be the controller part of it. But you can see that I am logged into Fortnite. I have found that the Portal works really well on my home network. I haven’t tested it fully on another Wi-Fi network yet, but I am going to do so this weekend. So far it seems a great little device, as long as you have connectivity. If you don’t then it’s just a lump of plastic and electronics.

One of my main methods of connecting to my PS5 will be via my phone’s hotspot. I figured that I pay for quite a bit of data so I might as well start to use the allocation. However, when I first tried to connect to my iPhone the Portal said it couldn’t connect. I tried again and I still got an error message. I spent a little while using Google and I found a number of pages where they said it was not possible as iPhone doesn’t support the particular NATs or whatever. I was somewhat upset at this.

Then, through a random Reddit post I saw that someone had connected to an iPhone using manual settings in the Portal and so I tried that. It worked!!! I now have the best of all worlds. I am a happy chappy.