MOAR CAVES

I have never been so hooked on exploring caves and soaking up what resources I find in them. Today I log yet another post on my adventures.

As previously mentioned, this world is rather bad for getting diamonds. Nonetheless, there were a couple patches of them.

After fighting a zombie wearing a chainmail chestplate, I ended up getting it as a drop!

At one spot there was a horde of zombies itching to get at me. A couple Creepers helped whittle away at them until I finally dove in and took out what remained.

Much more also happened while I was in the cave systems. I promise this will be the last time I make a caving post until my resources run low, which I imagine won't be for several weeks or months. I have enough iron to keep myself armed and prepared for a long time. Here's the net collection of this mining trip:

It was nowhere near as much as the last time but it's a very handy addition to my current reserves. I now have a stack of iron blocks - I'm that rich.

After the conclusion of one night, I observed a Creeper stuck in a small hole next to my storage room. I went to kill it, and didn't quite manage to get away in time.

That kind of sucked. I filled it in with gravel to make it secure as I fixed it up, then repaired it and now things are good as new. I also placed a torch where the mobs kept getting stuck, so maybe now the problem won't come up again.

In my next post I should be returning to working on either the village or an XP grinder. Depending on how things go, I may not even need to use the spider dungeon as an XP farm - I could simply configured my mob grinder to let me one-hit-kill mobs. This in combination with my anvil would make it possible for me to get high-level enchants on my iron armor and tools.

Caves, Dungeons, and Mob Traps

On my friend's private server and my single player map, I have been doing more cave clearing. It's a bit of a diversion from working on the village tower but it's fun and it's letting me stock up on resources for the project.

Friend's Private Server
A couple skeletons were shooting at me, when suddenly war broke out between them. I went down another tunnel to let them duke it out, and when I returned the victorious skeleton was still shooting where its opponent once was. Rather trigger happy, apparently.

Later on, found a proper skeleton dungeon!

Not more than a few minutes later in another tunnel there was some cobblestone protruding under a pile of gravel. It wasn't place there by me. Moments later I noticed some zombies and discovered it was a dungeon!

Those were some good times going through the caves. Eventually I'll need to get back in and collect the ores. It will leave me well-set for a while.

Single Player World
I've been hurting for mob drops ever since the map began so finally I've put together a cheap and ugly mob trap by my house. At the bottom of the 20-something block fall is a hopper-chest pair which collect the deceased mobs' remains.

A picture from the top early in the construction.

And now a montage of pictures from various angles.

At the bottom where the hopper and chest are, I built a small chamber with an iron door to protect me. Here I can idle for as long as I want while the trap brings in the goodies.

After a little while of running the trap I realized it was possible spiders were spawning in it. Since they are 2x1 in shape it is possible they might clog the tunnel to the bottom, rendering the whole setup useless. My suspicions were confirmed when I pillared near the spawning chamber.

Those red dots are almost all spiders, locked on me and hoping to pounce at the first chance. I went around to the top and broke in, but ended up falling right into the midst of them. Somehow my armor was able to keep me alive while I battled almost 20 spiders at the same time!

I lived with half a heart remaining! That was a bit terrifying.

While recovering I placed half slabs at every other block on the spawning pads. Now there is no way a spider can spawn, leaving me with zombies, skeletons, and Creepers. It's very satisfying to hear their death sounds as they hit the bottom of the long fall.

Clipping Enderman!

In order for a mob trap to run efficiently, you need to light up all the caves within 128 blocks of the central spawning point. As you do that, the game will have fewer and fewer dark areas to place a monster. Eventually you just have the mob trap itself, making it very efficient and fast. While on a trip to light up some caves I came across a zombie dungeon.

At this point I've found all three types of dungeons, plus a cave spider spawner. I didn't actually have it as a goal to find all three types of dungeons, but somehow I've done it, and it's quite pleasing. As for the mob trap, I might add a second layer in order to make it faster.

Caves, Continued

Single Player World

I've got cave fever... need to explore, explore, explore! An abandoned mineshaft was generated a little distance from my mines, and it was time to get into them. My main objective was to find one or more cave spider spawners.

I was welcomed into this area quite warmly...

As usual, I didn't take many screenshots. Like when I explored the ravines and connected caves, the plan is to light everything up first before going back and collecting the ores. This mineshaft system actually seems fairly small. One of the cooler things I found was this skeleton dungeon.

There were a few angry Endermen, even though I didn't look at them. They didn't attack me, fortunately, so it's probably just a bug in the game's code. Endermen are by far the creepiest mobs in the game.

I kept hearing the sounds of many spiders in the area of the skeleton spawner but for the life of me I could not find it. So on a whim (and with advice of my minimap) I dug straight down for a few blocks. And found this...

That's right, I was standing right on top of the cave spider spawner. Eventually I ran across a path leading to it, and have since conquered it. It's my first experience dealing with spider poison but I made it out alive.

Caves kept on going and going. Eventually the game started to lag, which meant new chunks were being generated. I finally found diamonds after much exploration. (They came out to 5 in total. Wonderful.)

A spider and skeleton were both heading toward me, when suddenly the skellie shot the spider and they began fighting. I think the skeleton won, but it was fun to just sit there and watch them battle.

Shortly after another duel with a skeleton I checked out my armor and found this:

Holy cows! No wonder I was taking damage so easily. My armor was next to completely gone! A trip home to get myself protected again. The chestplate was repaired using the anvil, but I didn't have enough XP to do the same with the pants. A new helmet and pair of boots were crafted, and now I'm ready to fight once more.

I went back to where the normal spider dungeon was and worked on the floor of the spawning chamber a bit.

There are plans for this thing. I am going to build a (hopefully) aesthetically pleasing complex around it. There will be the main room which is used to kill the spiders, access an anvil, and also have a room with an enchanting table. In the main room there will be a pair of levers.

The first lever turns the mob trap on and off. When it's pulled up, pistons in the spawning chamber's wall will be retracted, blocking light from jack o'lanterns. Also, there will be no water flowing. Either I will use a pair of pistons blocking a water source, or I'll read up on how dispensers handle redstone signal and use those. When pulled down, the pistons extend, darkening the room, and the water will begin flowing, send spiders through the tubes and to their demise.

The second lever controls whether the system will be an XP farm or grinder. The default form, for the lever being up, is an XP farm. If this is the case, a certain block will be pushed into the dropping tunnel, causing the spiders to fall just enough that they can be killed with one hit. In doing so they will build up then I'll spam punch them. If the lever is down, they will fall a few blocks further and die on top of a hopper, which collects their drops. I may just do a double chest for extra storage. A light indicator will let me know when the chest is nearly full.

Of course, there will also be a waste disposal pit of lava, where excess stuff goes. A head-level half slab will keep me from diving in.

Other Stuff

Remember the Minecraft Experience project I was talking about? Of the roughly 56 goals I decided upon, these recent activities have brought me to 12 done. I'm about a fifth of the way through.

The point of starting this new world on Normal was to give myself a bigger challenge, and to make the resource I have more valuable because of the danger I went through to collect them. I don't really like stuff that scares me, and sometimes I've gotten startled by mobs and lava appearing out of nowhere. But overall, this has been a very worthwhile thing. I don't regret bumping the difficulty up to Normal, and I don't see myself changing it anytime soon.

I will try to get a world upload posted on here in the next couple of days.

Cave Expedition and 1.5

One of the more boring things I do in Minecraft is mining. Nobody really talks about that much, because it's something everybody already knows about. During my mining I've been repeatedly coming across a giant ravine, with the occasional mob. Running into it over and over was getting old so it was time to jump in and explore it.

I ended up spending about five real-life hours over the course of two or three real-life days lighting up the place, then going back in and picking up the ores. It ended up being a huge haul.

Before I even got into the caves, the game was out to get me...

There are actually two main ravines my mineshafts intersect. The first one is about 6 blocks wide at the most, and the ground is dry. It leads to a whole mess of caves and the second, much larger ravine. It bottoms out at the lava layer and appears to reach nearly to the surface. The widest point is about a dozen blocks.

I didn't take pictures for most of the expedition since I way mainly concerned with lighting up all the caves and fighting the mobs. Here's a good rule of thumb for exploring caves: keep moving! Don't stay in one spot for too long, because that will give mobs a chance to spawn in your area. Personally, it's surprising how much land I can clear without running into a mob, even on Normal mode. That's probably due to being mobile, thus not giving the game an opportunity to drop a mob by me.

One of the more interesting formations was a pair of circular caves stacked upon each other, connected by a water stream.

And diamonds, hooray!

Then there is this awesome find:

Spider dungeon about 170 meters from home. This will be converted into an XP farm, one that I intend to make with some aesthetic flair.

The caves kept going and going but after a while it was time to stop. I've lit up so many that they won't be pestering me for a while. Now it was time to collect the ores! This could have gone on forever, too, but after a couple hours of collecting them I called an end to it all and processed what I got. Here are three pictures of my progress, showing the approximate amount of stuff collected.

That should be enough for a while! It's disappointing that there were so few diamonds (my world appears to be rather devoid of them) but the staggering amount of iron makes up for it. Just look...

My last bit of experimentation was making an anvil. It sits quite nicely on this inverted stair.

Out of curiosity I checked to see if it could repair iron tool, and it can - with iron! I thought you could only use diamond with the thing. This gives me an idea. Since it will probably be forever until I can have enough diamonds to use diamond tools and items all the time, it would be wise to get a good set of iron tools and repair them with the anvil. As you can see, iron is in no short supply for me.

1.5!
It was nine days after 1.5's release that I updated. That's how long it took my preferred mods (ModLoader, Optifine, Single Player Commands, and Rei's Minimap) to all get up to date. But now I'm in 1.5 and I'm excited, mostly because of the hopper. You all know how much I love the idea of automation, and the hopper provides that capability. You can move, sort, and store things with these handy devices. Containers in conjunction with comparators will let me set up automatic sorters and smelters.

Really, my only complaint about 1.5 are the trapped chests. Apparently you can tell regular and trapped chests apart by slight color differences around the latch and rims. Perhaps you've heard of colorblindness? It's when colors that are similar in shade look the same to a person. About 7% of the population in the USA have it, including me. I can't see the difference between the two types of chests. Hopefully they will fix the default texture pack so there is a bit more noticeable difference.

Big Boom

On my friend's private server, I've been building what I've dubbed the roundhouse. But there was a house I lived in before that, and it was kind of ugly-looking. I didn't care much for it, since it was composed mainly of sandstone and planks.

The server owner said that he wanted to blow up the house once I had moved all my possessions out of it. This actually happened about a little over a month ago. I wanted to see the place get sacked myself.

First thing I did was collect all the empty chests from the storage room and move them to the work-in-progress basement of the round house. Then I emptied the storage.

I don't remember if the owner was on the server when I cleared the stuff out, but eventually I informed him it was ready to be demolished. What happened next can only be described as "majestic carnage" as he went for about ten or so minutes TNT'ing the place to oblivion. Here are pictures I took of the demolition.

Using plugins, the area was eventually flattened and turned into a level plan of grass. It'll either become grazing area, or perhaps neighboring players will build on the land.