Downtime

This will be a short post to get you all up to date with what I've done. I haven't written recently, mainly because I haven't done much worth noting. Lately boredom has been setting in, which kills motivation to play. Just about everything I might do in Minecraft has been done a dozen times already by others. So there's not much point in doing it again. A quick summary:

• Been enchanting like a madman at the zombie grinder. I still need to finish some of the redstone.
• Spent a couple days on a new server and started a faction. But I don't foresee myself staying there.
• On my friend's private server I began making a new underground base. This one is going to have a design similar to Etho's single player base and Nebris's base on the Mindcrack server.
• Started working on a new manually built village in my single player world. It's not particularly interesting as it only has one barely started building in it. And since it faces north you can't see the entrance on the overviewer. I will have to adjust its position.

One of the things that caused me to get bored was the villager tower. I picked a bad spot for it. The land on the north side of it gets high quickly, and landscaping all of it would take forever. I don't want to abandon the project, but right now the tower isn't likely to remain in its current state. I may end up blowing up what I have right now, elevating and leveling out the land where it's located, and starting over. This would effectively raise the tower to a more even terrain. Goodness knows I have the gunpowder to make enough TNT. I had a layout for the village drawn up somewhere, but I think I discarded it. Oops. Oh well, it's not difficult to remake.

Cows and Enchants

Finding and breeding mobs is one of the more tedious parts of Minecraft, if you ask me. But I needed some cows in order to get enchanted books, so it was time to get breeding.

I knew there were a couple of them near the villager tower. Before setting off for home with them I bred them to get the first baby.

The journey lasted a good few hundred meters. Along the way I picked up another cow, got another baby, and lost a cow as it took a swim into a ravine. I made a pen for them and thus began my herd.

It's not terribly far from my house. Then I figured, why stop with an unprotected pen? Why not build a house? So, using my increasingly developed aesthetic skills, I did just that.

I debated with myself how I wanted the top part of the building to look. Did I want the walls to all be the same color plank? Or should it be something different, for variety? The end result was a line of birch plank at the top. The pattern of the roof is akin to the style used by Mhykol on the Mindcrack server.

Cow Outpost 1 was ready to run.

And my goodness does it work well.

From my first round of harvesting cows (to put it nicely) I got about sixteen books, which I proceeded to enchant. Oh, and I also did some style work on the enchantery.

So much XP!

Some of those books were efficiency and unbreaking enchants, which I applied to my main pickaxe. I ended up repairing all my tools and getting ready to resume work on the village. I want the upper levels to be used by villagers, but I don't think that's going to happen unless I force them up there. I can't find any ways of including stairs. Maybe I'll just build up the population first and use minecarts to get them up there.

Coming Together

Today's activity update starts with some home improvement. I've wanted to put some flower pots in the bedroom, but only now got to it. I may have to use these more often, because they are rather nice looking.

Getting in and out of the spawner complex was a rather tricky trot through a cave complex. I crafted up a bunch of ladders and made a simpler entrance/exit. I still need to design the aboveground part of it. It is on the border of a swamp and a rather hilly snow biome.

Then it was time for the enchantery. It's so much more convenient to have it in the spawner complex than at home. I disassembled the stuff from the roof and established a small room for it.

It's a relatively simple design, but I don't see many other ways to augment it. Perhaps put a couple chests in there to store enchanted books and tools. The dirt is a placeholder until I get more bookshelves. I might just raid Polis Youssarianis and get the books from there. Either that or I need to start a cow farm. The leather will do me good, and I'll probably need it anyway to enchant books.

At this point I arrive at a bit of a choke point. Comparators need to be crafted with Nether quartz. And it'd also be nice to have glowstone for lighting the room instead of jack o'lanterns. Oh, and part of my Minecraft Experience project is visiting the Nether. I'm actually rather concerned about going to the Nether. The game gets rather slow and laggy when I hop in the Nether. Nonetheless all the goodies are in there. This portal awaits my entrance...

And when I get there, this pickaxe will let me get a good haul.

Friend's Private Server

I have been rather inactive on the server lately. Just not much motivation to keep working on the roundhouse. I may just pack my things and go elsewhere. I want to make a skybase. The idea of a server Nether hub has been discarded. I still want to make something that is easy accessible to all and that people can go to for supplies (akin to Pakratt0013's house on the Mindcrack server).

Miscellany

You can now see an overview of my map on my personal website by visiting this link: http://shawntc.x10host.com/mcmap

Lookin' Nice

The zombie grinder is coming together very nicely. I had to change the design a little bit so that the zombies wouldn't be blocking each other from getting into the killing chamber, and it started being really effective.

The redstone mechanisms work as intended. I've had to move them once or twice in order to accommodate for changes, but it's really not that complex. I have a personal rule where all redstone must be done on wooden planks.

Silly gravel, staying afloat when it is supposed to fall.

It became time to carve out the shape of the grinder room. I had an idea for the room's floor, but was undecided for the walls.

To the right of the spot where zombies are processed is an alcove for the anvil. I found out you could place an anvil facing forward or sideways. I also came up with a tentative design for the alcove.

The beginning of the redstone part of the room. This dispenses stone swords, and will eventually have an indicator when I'm low.

That has been updated, as we will see momentarily. I began working on the walls and door to the enchantery. I think it looks pretty good.

A couple more miscellaneous pictures to bring you all more up to date.

The floor currently has concentric circles, but the wiring for the crusher kind of interferes, so I think I'm going to change the floor pattern.

Mob Spawner Madness

The world of spawners and XP grinders beckoned to me today. The spider dungeon I was working on previously had caused me a bunch of trouble, and it didn't seem like I would be figuring it out anytime soon. A little bit further away, in another cave system, was a zombie dungeon. In my previous map my main source of XP was a zombie spawner so it would be the easiest for me to construct.

This time I wanted to take a more high-tech but simpler route of making an XP farm by implementing a zombie crusher. It uses pistons to suffocate the mobs. All that I really needed was an idea for how to do the redstone. This video shows how the redstone was to be done. It was fairly simple to construct and works just as intended.

Perhaps the only thing I don't like about the redstone is how it's operated using a lever instead of a more convenient button. Until I get used to it I may end up botching a lot of zombie crushing.

Water streams and redstone in place, I was able to get a crude XP grinder working. Due to the variable armor points zombies appear to have, it's usually not a one hit kill. I will need to add a dispenser that outputs stone swords in order to get one hit kills.

The finished results, for now:

It is a really good start, but there is more I wish to do with it. I think I laid out my plans for the spider in another post but I've modified them slightly. They are as such:

• The main chamber, which has the killing spot, anvil, and a crafting table, will be roughly round. Not terribly large, but hopefully not small enough to feel cramped. A ladder will lead to the surface.
• At the surface will be a sort of little outpost with windows and a door. For the sake of convenience I will point the entrance toward my current main home.
• Connected to the main chamber will be a room for enchanting stuff. I will keep a stack or two of iron ingots here for making and repairing tools.
• I need to modify the spot where zombies gather because right now only one is able to get into the killing area. Perhaps I need to lower it and the redstone a few blocks.
• The spawning chamber will be made to look better, and controlled by redstone. When I hit a lever, pistons will hide jack-o'lanterns and cause dispensers to release water. Turning off the spawning chamber will light up the room and cause the water to be retracted.
• A dispenser/hopper/double chest system will be used to provide a steady supply of stone swords. I may also include a comparator and torch system to alert me when the chest is almost out of swords.

In a mineshaft I explored some time back I found a skeleton spawner and a cave spider spawner just a few blocks apart from each other. I'm thinking of using the piston crushing technique to make an automatic grinder. Water and gravity will push the skeletons and spiders to a central collection chamber. Every 20 minutes (controlled by how items despawn after 5 minutes when dropped) the pistons will activate, crushing the mobs. Their drops will fall into a dispenser beneath them.

This is all very nerdy and exciting for me.