Spent the past couple days back at the cave base, where I did two things of notice.
First, I moved my enchantment table. If you recall, the table was originally in the basement of the cave base, which was accessed by the stairs in the central room. This position was actually a bit inconvenient. In order to get to my zombie experience grinder I need to take the spiral stairs to the surface, then drop down at the collection point. Once I've built up 30 levels I would usually jump down the water drop and enchant in the basement. This was a bunch of excessive moving around, so I figured I would move the table.
This is how I first had it arranged:
That turned out to be too big, and the highest enchant level I could muster was 8. So I moved the books in a block.
Much better. The only annoying part is that the entrance to the room is right where the ladder to the place is, so it takes me a few tries to get in without being hoisted by the ladder. Still, it's much more convenient than having to run back to the cave and in fact, I can reach the table without really moving from the spot I normally stand to hit the zombies.
One of the zombies apparently had chainmail armor!
(I'm using the Mindcrack texture pack. The pinkish reddish mobs are regular zombies. Those slivers of blue? Those are zombie villagers. I could set up a sorter to generate villagers in the future.)
Finally, I reclaimed the bookshelves. I'll store those for later use.
The other thing I did was set up a simple carrot farm. For the first time in about three months I actually played Minecraft on my desktop. The laptop I've been using is woefully troubled by sounds. Whenever the game needs to load a new sound file, such as a Creeper hiss, the entire game will lock up for as long as a few seconds. This has on more than one occasion led to a Creeper exploding in my face. That's what happened today. So I took a copy of my map and put it on my desktop. The game experience was wayyy better. On to the carrot farm.
My first possible location for it was the stone brick road, next to my resupply room. I discovered there wasn't enough room there, as my wheat farm ever so slightly interferes. Instead I placed it in the tunnel that led to my former Nether portal. I cleared out some space and set things up:
Then I cleaned up the area and used a little bone meal to advance carrot growth.
Easy as pie. Though maybe not carrot pie.
The final change that needed to be made for the time being was a way to get up there. I opted to use wood slabs to make a simple staircase. Not the prettiest, but it works.
My preferred method of growing mushrooms, by letting them just sprout all over the place, is working nicely. I have an abundance of brown, but not much red, so those are mainly the ones I've been planting.
As I was working on the carrot farm, I started to question the future of this base. Granted, it's only been a little over six months since I first settled down in the cave, but things have changed since then. As a player, my ability to design things has improved dramatically. The game itself has gained a lot of new things which weren't around at the base's start - carrots, potatoes, beacons, and Withers to name a few. Most of it is in an incomplete state of some sort. There's frequently a mob, usually a Creeper, roaming the area because I haven't lit it up well enough. My laptop can't handle my piston elevator. I also wanted to make a base on the surface, back when my creative skills weren't worth much, but that's never happened.
So at worst I might get my stuff and head somewhere new. I'm not one to create new worlds. Since I currently play in version 1.4.5, this map has seen no less than 10 versions of Minecraft since I made it in 1.0.0. I've made a lot of progress on this world and have no desire to leave it. I like living in the caves, but with my newly found building skills I also want to take a stab at surface construction.
Two Year Anniversary
Tomorrow marks two years since I started this blog! I want to do something special to celebrate that and the New Year. Last year I did a tutorial of sorts on making an airship carrier. I like ships, so if I did something it would be something else related to ships, although perhaps a spacecraft this time around. This circle generator has been very useful, so I now have the ability to make things that aren't blocky.
