Tag: Moved

Posts that I’ve moved to another part of the site (outside the blog), but kept at least the intro here so they’ll still be connected to tags, search or related posts.

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A Minecraft farmer-type villager standing inside the composter, with his crops nearby.

The latest Minecraft update, “Village and Pillage,” has completely revamped villager professions and trading, and made major changes to the village structures as well. Each profession now has a work site defined by a block like a stone cutter, or a loom, or a composter, etc. and unemployed villagers will try to fill jobs based on what’s available.

Now, Minecraft has always been (in my experience, anyway) pretty good about upgrading existing worlds as the game engine changes.

  • Unexplored areas will generate using new rules.
  • Previously explored areas will remain the same, except…
  • Specific blocks will convert as needed (ex: if you built a generic wooden fence before they introduced fences for each type of wood, it will convert to an oak fence.)
  • All areas will start operating on new rules.

Normally this works great! But can you see the problem with villages?

Yeah. The villagers operate on the new rules, which means they need work sites to do their jobs, but the existing villages were built without any workstations.

So the village near my current base suffered an economic collapse, or perhaps an attack of existential mass ennui, leaving every villager unemployed.

Fortunately, all the new workstations are craftable. Even the ones that the player can’t use yet. So I spent some time on the wiki, writing down the ingredients I needed, went back to my base, crafted all of the ones I could, and started placing them around the village.

And it worked! Pretty soon I was able to trade with a farmer, librarian, fisherman, butcher, cartographer, etc. I’m still waiting for some of the unemployed villagers to pick up jobs. Maybe they need to actually walk close enough to the job sites or something?

Anyway, here’s the list of ingredients I put together based on the wiki article on villagers. You can get the crafting recipes from the wiki or in the game from the recipe book:

Minecraft Villager Job sites

Job Site Block Profession Ingredients
Blast furnace Armorer 5 iron ingots, 1 furnace, 3 smooth stone
Smoker Butcher 4 logs, 1 furnace
Cartography Table Cartographer 2 paper, 4 planks
Brewing Stand Cleric 1 blaze rod, 3 cobblestone
Composter Farmer 4 fences, 3 planks (Java) or 7 planks (Bedrock)
Barrel Fisherman 2 wooden slabs, 6 planks (Java) or 2 wooden slabs, 6 sticks (Bedrock)
Fletching Table Fletcher 2 Flint, 4 planks
Cauldron Leatherworker 7 iron ingots
Lectern Librarian 4 wooden slabs, 1 bookshelf
Stonecutter Mason 1 iron ingot, 3 stone
Loom Shepherd 2 string, 2 planks
Smithing Table Toolsmith 2 iron ingots, 4 planks
Grindstone Weaponsmith 1 stick, 1 stone slab, 2 planks

(Yes, a few of these are actually different in Bedrock Edition and Java Edition! I don’t know why Mojang would deliberately introduce differences in something as basic as crafting recipes, but apparently they have.)

Depending on how you play the game, you may never need to do this. If you generate new worlds all the time, or if you’re happy to just pull up stakes and move to a new area in the same world, you’ll encounter the updated villages to start with. But if you play like I do – explore the same world slowly, digging in, building up and establishing bases as I go – you’ll be glad to know that this works to manually upgrade your villages.

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Last summer I saw the 25th Anniversary production of Les Misérables on stage. I started reviewing it, but never finished. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I figured it was time to rescue this from the draft folder before writing my thoughts on the film.

For the 25th anniversary of the show, the staging has been completely redone (in part to get rid of the rotating stage). The songs have been adjusted again, and long-standing direction, costume design and characterization has been allowed to change.

Overall I like the new staging. It’s not a stripped-down production at all – in fact, most of the sets are more elaborate than the original, which basically relied on the rotating floor, lighting, two jumbles of boxes, and a bridge. Fortunately they didn’t go overboard: they let the songs carry the show, which leads to an interesting mix of elaborate sets for ensemble numbers and empty stages for the solos.

Continue reading →

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We saw Cirque du Soleil’s resident Los Angeles show last weekend. Cirque is always impressive, and IRIS has the usual collection of trapeze artists, contortionists, tumblers, ribbon flyers, and elaborate costumes you’d expect from one of their shows. This one stands out for several reasons:

  1. I like the history of movies, so all the thematic references to early cinema and classic movies were fun. The Dolby Theater is a great match for this look.
  2. They did a great job of mixing live performances with live and time-delayed video, giving it a very different look from most shows. (And as the program pointed out, the video effects react to the performers, not the other way around.)
  3. This is the first Cirque show I’ve seen in a long time where I enjoyed the clown performances as much as the acrobatics.

Some highlights:

  • The filmstrip act, where the performers walk through a series of identical rooms, each performing an action for a camera that plays back on a short delay, and each interacting with the previous performer’s recorded action.
  • The soundstage number at the opening of act two. I think the entire cast was onstage, all doing something different, all at the same time. An incredible illusion of chaos.
  • A film noir-style fistfight turned into a tumbling trampoline act.

The only disappointment was that act two felt a bit short, probably because the individual numbers were so long.

One more thing: this stretch of Hollywood Blvd is a bit odd if you’re not used to it: It’s sort of like walking around Comic-Con, except the people dressed as Jack Sparrow, Spider-Man and Hello Kitty are there for money instead of fun.

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I finally saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen today.

In some ways it wasn’t as awful as I’d heard, and in some ways it was worse. On the plus side, it had giant robots blowing stuff up, and they put more thought into the story than I expected them to. And there were certainly good moments spread throughout the film. On the minus side, the visuals were so complex that they were hard to follow. That’s a problem I had with the Transformers’ designs in the first film, too — they look insanely cool in still shots, but start them moving and you end up with two clouds of shrapnel fighting each other. Plus Michael Bay has a very different sense of humor than I do, which didn’t help. And amazingly enough, the movie was tedious. I don’t know how you can possibly take a movie about giant robots and explosions and make it dull enough that I checked my watch at least five times during the film.

In summary, I’m glad I waited for the second-run showing and only spent $1.75.