With his newly named (And thus unlikely to despawn) friends Zombles and 'Cluckles the Valiant Steed' all stabilized and meandering about in their new glass enclosure, John was able to spend his time talking with Steve and getting to see all SORTS of interesting samples!
He hummed happily. "Another stack of crafting benches, a bow, sugar, another shovel, a stack of torches, an iron helmet…"
Although, just as expected, none of it really had the 'weight' he desired from a Pocket Pal, the value of the materials (And the precious nature of the Scans he was collecting) mostly made up for it.
More items were pulled from the chest to the left, examined, then shoved into the chest minecart to the right. Sort of a necessity considering the chest on the left was being fed by ALL THE HOPPERS so having an easily replaced rolling chest nearby to hold the stuff he had already scanned really sped up things.
Thankfully Steve tended to automate a lot of his stuff, so most of his daily chores were being done while messing around with John and letting him Scan this unorganized pile of junk. "Enchanted book with Sharpness I, another stack of 16 chicken eggs, half broken stone pickaxe, some baked potatoes, more bread…"
Doing this really exposed some of the holes in this place, which Steve called an 'Instance'. Not all were as incomplete as this one apparently, most were different from each other in some way, but… What kind of world let you milk a cow with a bucket but NOT craft butter?
Not that it mattered too much, an Essence baked potato was almost sinfully delicious even without salt, much less butter. Speaking of which, sugar existed here but not salt. Nor salt water. Just… Water.
John paused. "Uh… Hey Steve?"
The other guy was shoving a minecart with a fresh chest in it. "Yeah?"
The boy waived the leather saddle. "Is this for horses or for pigs?"
Steve blinked. "Yes."
Wait, what? "Hang on… You mean I can use this on anything?"
The miner shook his head as he replaced the full chest minecart with the new one. "Nah, although some instances allow that. Here you can only put a saddle on horses, donkeys, skeleton horses, and pigs…. But not on chickens, cows, llamas, polar bears, or any of that. Oh, and if you are in the Nether, you can put one on a strider to cross lava fields… Theoretically. Haven't done it myself."
Oh. "Wonder why you can't ride a cow."
Steve shrugged and then smirked. "No idea, they just don't like saddles. I've herd they steer clear of the things."
Alright then. "Gotcha." Wonder why the guy looked disappointed? Whatever. "Half used sheers, more seeds, some cactus, oak wood, another stack of coal, a HOLD UP!"
John carefully lifted the glowing green gem. "Oh you are a BEAUT!" Was this the raw Essence of financial value? There were elements of commerce and trade and worth that had been obviously missing from the diamonds and gold and stuff earlier.
The other guy blinked. "Huh, I wondered where I had put those emeralds… You find a few ore fairly deep down, but I mostly just find a village nearby and trade for them when I need something. Villagers will trade most anything if you got enough of those things, and they always seem to have something useful."
Note to self: Go find a village and trade for more of this stuff. "This is REALLY efficient for Essence storage… Something about being a material focused around 'value' allows it to be extremely dense with imbued energy and matter…"
System, make this the new storage medium for recycled materials.
[[Confirmed. Estimated recovered storage space after conversion: 33.25%. Converting materials into new medium will consume 1.22% of stored raw materials: Confirm?]]
Yeah, confirm. Less space taken up by future collected trash and materials is nothing but for the good.
Speaking of which… John mentally tapped on the patterns Scanned for cobblestone and smoothstone generators. Could the Pocket automate this process for raw material generation?
[[Calculating.]]
It should work, if a section of his Pocket was NOT locked behind temporal restrictions and stuff, right? If nothing else, it would be trivial to have his Pocket auto-collect the generated stuff to keep it from backing up or stalling.
After all, cobblestone generators were fairly straight forward: Just shove lava into/onto flowing water and job's done.
Smooth stone required having the lava flow on a source block of water, which was a bit more tricky but still doable with a square of infinite water source blocks… Should be easy to set up, yes? Yeah, probably.
[[Establishing automated material generation segment within Storage would require the following Consumed materials: NeededSupplies_data. ALERT: Efficiency of designed material generation systems would drastically drop when HOST is no longer submitted to current Realm's environment, rules, and Concepts.]]
Oh. How drastically? Would it still be worth it?
[[Rate of block formation would require days instead of moments to be spawned. Process would retain net positive statistics despite costs of operating the automated material generation segment within Storage.]]
Meh, that was fine. A single block of Essence stone or cobblestone was VALUABLE stuff, and could be converted with only a minor cost into other Scanned patterns from this place once he and Jessica were in another Realm.
While it wasn't as awesome as unlimited mass and energy, at least it would cost nearly nothing to convert that Essence into one of the local impossibly amazing items like Essence cake, a bucket of Essence Milk, and the bread.
Oh dear god, the bread.
No baking required, just three Essence of wheat crafted together to accidently taste HEAVEN. Always the perfect texture and somehow warm like it was freshly baked, the bread itself was always soft inside with a crisp crust that crunched when squeezed and…
Seriously, this world was SO CURSED to not have butter!
No, focus. System? Let me know when those automated generators are established, and when the other materials and energies are converted fully into emeralds. Or emerald blocks, most likely.
[[Confirmed.]]
John blinked as his head was poked again. "Huh?"
Steve sighed in relief! "Oh good, you are alive. You sort of just started staring at the emerald and zoned out or… Went into a coma or something. You alright?"
He had? Oh. Oops. "Yeah, just got distracted by, you know." He wiggled the emerald around, looking at the sparkles. "Shiny."
The other guy leaned onto the loaded chest minecart. "You can have it if you want? I have a separate instance in my home Server cluster that I use for villager trading, so I don't need much infrastructure for emerald gathering or trade here."
John waived that off. "Nah, I already Scanned it so I'm good." A thought suddenly pulled out one of his new hefty emerald blocks in his other hand. "See? Got as many as I need from now on."
And Steve's face did some odd expressions again, for some reason. "Oh… Uh. I see."
…Wait, what had he been doing?
Oh, right! He was getting new scans! "So I'm almost done with this load of stuff, you said you need to change how the hoppers are set up to change which double chests are feeding this conga line we got going on?"
The man shook himself. "Yeah, and it shouldn't take long. Mostly breaking the hoppers that normally shove stuff into the 'return system' and redirecting everything this way for you to see… But honestly, it's no big deal. I basically made a 'shove everything into a bunch of chests' system rather than an actually useful 'sort and store' setup, so having you go through it all helps me find all sorts of stuff I misplaced somewhere."
John pulled out… A flower pot? "Fair enough." Why were there SO MANY flower pots? Oh, maybe because of these stored mushrooms. "Right, I'll finish this mess while you go get that set up."
Steve nodded, yet hesitated as he was about to leave. "Are you sure having animals eat you like that doesn't hurt?"
Wait, what? Shit they were STILL DOING THAT!? "Piggums the second, you STOP EATING ME this minute! I can't believe I'm in more danger from you cute widdle pink baby sweeties than from the ACTUAL zombies! BAD Piggums!"
"...Oink?"
Daww… NO! STAY STRONG! "Bad Piggums. I said it, I won't take it back!"
Steve was slowly backing away from the situation. "Uh… I'm uh… Going to do that hopper thing? Alright?"
No! Don't you dare give me those cute piggy eyes! I am a strong man who don't need no piggy! "Eating your friends is not acceptable!"
Oh wait. "Unless you are in a consenting relationship and either cannibalism is legal or you are using the term 'eating' as a euphemism or something. NEITHER OF WHICH APPLIES HERE!"
"Oink."
…Damn it, who could stay mad at a face like that? "Well, just so long as you know, alright? No biting. Or eating people."
Note to self: Do not let Piggums see him enjoying pork chops later on. It wasn't hypocrisy, it was tasty and that… Uh. That didn't count. Right? Right.
~~~Pocket System~~~
Steve observed another stack of diamond blocks in a daze. Each one formed from nine duplicated diamonds (Or spawned anew from raw power) by a walking wheat farm that seemed to have lost all his marbles.
Glancing over at his custom ordered Ender Chest, he ensured the modified box had the correct code on the top for his home Server's automated sorting system.
Some objects like this one were basically life changing, as otherwise people had to do some odd workarounds to be able to transfer materials from one instance to another.
The most common method was to gather enough experience (Around 100 levels or so) to protect a few of your inventory spots during transit to bring materials along with you instead of being left behind with your previous body.
But once you had friends and resources?
You could start looking into really valuable and strange objects from the edges of the minecrafting community.
The modifiers, or 'mods', could craft things that ranged from the useful (A pickaxe that could carve entire tunnels per swing) to the insane (A cow cannon. It launched cows), but some things were fairly widespread just due to practicality.
The modified Ender Chest was considered a staple to most miners by this point.
Like all Ender Chests, which were crafted with an Ender eye bound by obsidian, they were intrinsically connected with the one who owned them.
Oh, other people could open such a chest, sure… But they would only see THEIR connected 'chest', a single box of inventory that was connected to all physical copies in the world. Not HIS stuff, or anyone else's either.
Thus an Ender Chest was a secured method of… Well, not transferring materials, but ACCESSING materials from anywhere such a chest was put down. Put some supplies in the thing at home and pull them out at your base or whatever, bam!
It was useful as hell, even if crafting an 'Eye of Ender' was dangerous and required killing Endermen to collect Ender Pearls and going to the Nether to find a fortress in that hell to then kill Blazes to gather their Blaze Rods to make Blaze Powder to enchant the pearl INTO an eye and…
Eugh, such a damned headache all to get a single 'chest' worth of space that was shared between all the physical instances of it. No matter where it was, regardless of dimension, as long as it was all in the same instance? Shared.
For many, it was just not worth it… Why not find and conquer The End dimension and craft a few Shulker boxes instead? A single inventory spot could hold so much stuff when the portable box was used after all!
The answer? The mod community.
These modified Ender Chests had three wool 'codes' on the top of the box. Use wool dye, and now you don't only have a SINGLE Ender Chest bound for only your use…
You had 16 colors in three slots worth of exclusive space. Something like over four thousand channels, from what the techs had been telling Steve when he ordered one.
Which meant over four thousand Ender Chest Networks, just for you.
Then some brain head or genius villager discovered how to allow those Ender Chest Networks to breach the boundaries between Servers and instances and not be restricted to your local trip… and bam!
Interinstance Item Transportation.
Now back home in his Server, he had one of these hooked up with a hopper under it, that would drain out anything placed within and send it off to be sorted and stored and saved for later use.
For ease of use, Steve had ensured the default white pattern was the 'Throw junk from my most recent instance into me' network. For obvious reasons. Even had a couple of backup patterns for when the rate of transfer for one network got too jammed up, so all the dozens of instances he might explore wouldn't get stuck waiting for a single chest of space to clear up room.
How was it all done? He had no clue.
Heck, Steve wasn't even sure how this modified chest could even exist alongside the STANDARD Ender Chest without the two exploding or something!
But it was useful as all hell, now that he had met a happy go lucky wheat farm dude who threw out incredibly valuable materials without effort or care while watching a named chicken zombie wander around a small (Newly crafted) enclosure.
Steve continued to dump incredibly valuable materials into the chest, idly checking now and then to ensure they were being drained away back home as expected, while debating how to best handle such an unexpected encounter like this.
Give the new guy a sample material and some raw resources to work with? Overflowing inventory of incredible worth.
So logically, he should attempt to get John samples of EVERYTHING, right? Or as much as possible. Not like it wouldn't be worth the time, as the stuff he had easily given Steve was already incredibly valuable.
He shoved another stack of diamond blocks into the chest… Maybe he should set up a hopper above this to automatically feed stuff in? Yeah, work smarter not harder. A chain of boxes feeding hoppers feeding boxes feeding the Ender Chest would let him leave this to automatically transfer stuff while working.
As for the sample issues… He had already collected some stuff from The Nether already (He hates that place… Lava everywhere, and the massive flying white Ghasts that screamed like babies and vomited explosive fireballs), and knew roughly where to find the stronghold that would lead to The End most likely…
But what would be MOST worth his time when it came to collecting easy duplicates? Elytra capes, for easy gliding/pseudo flight? The more complicated potions? The rarer enchanted books?
And Steve paused, even as he was in the middle of placing more equipment to feed the Ender Chest even more loot.
Ancient Debris ore.
The RAREST ore from the deadly and terrifying Nether, that could only spawn when entirely enclosed deep within other hellish materials… An ore that required luck and sometimes weeks of effort to locate while fighting monsters, all while trying not to fall into lava (Which would not only KILL you but would also destroy all your equipment and stuff when your body despawned).
But now with John in the picture? If he could find a single block of Ancient Debris ore, and use a silk touch enchanted pickaxe to mine it out without damaging the original ore itself…
Instant wealth.
Steve could see it now. Stacks and stacks of ore, waiting to be mined from the safety of home using the most expensive and precious of Fortune enchanted diamond pickaxes… Collecting entire storage warehouses of Netherite Scrap! Melt some worthless gold with the stuff and he would have an endless sea of Netherite Ingots!
Unlike almost anything else, Ancient Debris was not only immune to explosive damage from creepers or TNT or what have you, it laughed at heat. Floated on lava. Ignored all fire entirely, basically.
It led to the stuff having astounding properties, ones worth the deadly environment it spawned in and the incredible difficulty of finding more or repairing your equipment after use.
Just temper your diamond equipment, your armor and swords and tools, with a Netherite Ingot? Bam, more powerful, more durable, more EVERYTHING basically. Some strange stuff also used the material, and the mods adored the junk!
Not to mention that chicks love the bling factor.
It made Netherite gear basically near priceless, on any Server!
Plus with John's support, getting enough gear for such an expedition, to hunt at least one ore of Ancient Debris and collect it? It should be doable. Trivial even.
And Steve grumbled as he slumped against the chests and hoppers funneling raw wealth back home… Plans and glorious futures aside, this meant he would have to go to the Nether again, wouldn't he?
Notch damn it.