With the piston elevator complete I could go on to something new, which was to conquer this dungeon and convert it into an XP grinder. Using Minutor I attempted to plot a path from my base to the dungeon but couldn't quite figure it out. So instead I went to where the dungeon was and followed the caves to my home. The path is fairly straightforward.
First it's up the grass stairs which for some reason has remained until now.
Then through the tunnel to a gravel patch, then a patch of dirt.
Finally, and quite fittingly, I have to go up a steep path to get to the dungeon itself.
I put my armor on, with its low levels of enchantment, and prepared to race through the path. It was expected I would face at least a couple hostile mobs along the way. To make a long story short, however, there was absolutely no resistance, even though it was night time. There were only a couple zombies in the dungeon and I was hit a whole one time. How anti-climatic.
Here is the dungeon after being conquered, and how it looked after I cleared out the cobblestone in preparation to convert it.
There was a very fancy tutorial on YouTube that I looked up as my guide. It showed me how to set up the trap quite nicely. Here is a link to the tutorial. This is the only picture I took during the setup:
The room is symmetrical around the spawner, which is surrounded by the dirt and cobblestone. I have the walls of the room made of cobble since it seems most fitting. On the two corners closes to the left are small platforms the water emanates from, leading the zombies down that lowered level and into a mob elevator, then the drop. The appearance from the outside:
Yeah, that's pretty ugly. I intend on making it look nice. After all, it will be part of my ground-level base. That's where the zombies swim up and plummet down.
Figuring out how far to make them fall has been a crapshoot for me. I'm at a certain level now where they still take two hits to die, but if I lower the block by one they're guaranteed to always die. I'm going to try a half slab and see what that does. Otherwise, the trap works wonderfully.
I'm racking up the levels pretty nicely. I'm securely underground so I simply put the game on Hard, which I think maxes out the spawn rate (I could very well be wrong) and let it run in the background 10-15 minutes while I do other things. My computer seems able to handle over 100 zombies but once it gets to 150 or so, it slows down. Earlier this morning I completely forgot I was letting them accumulate and when I next looked, there were about 250 zombies in front of me. I could barely move. Perhaps I should implement a timer?
I'm being slowly overwhelmed with the iron helmets I'm getting from this thing. The shovels and swords tend to disappear quickly, as I use them to hit zombies. But the experience being gained is very nice and, with me building the books around my enchanting table, I've been able to get higher levels of enchantment. I now have a bow with Flame I and Power V.
What's next? Probably the built-in mob trap I was speaking of doing overhead. The issue with that is, what if I want to build upward? Digging into that very often would ultimately make it a waste of time.
Also, here are some unfortunate animals that have found themselves in unfortunate situations. How unfortunate.
