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.
