How Not To Redstone

So... did anyone know that as of 1.7.2, baby zombies could get through one-block-high spaces? It'd been so long since I used my zombie grinder that didn't realize that was possible. So imagine my surprise when I started idling at the grinder and found myself being repeatedly attacked by the little monsters? I even died to one. Today I tried doing a quick little update project. It simply involved adding a piston that pushes up a block when I had the spawner running.

First remove the block to be pushed...

Now let's dig into the redstone a little. For those who haven't been around my blog very long, the lever on the left side of the screen is used to control redstone lamps inside the spawning chamber. When it's up, it's emitting a redstone signal, which gets inverted to turn off the lamps and allow spawns. I can take advantage of this. I dig to where the torch is, and show it in "off" mode.

From here we go ahead and run some redstone to the piston. It's near another piston, but luckily no BUD switch effects take place. Not that it would be dangerous or anything.

I put the blocks back in their places and everything seemed to be working right.

Until after the first run. When I turned off the grinder so I could crush the collected zombies, I realized the error of my ways. The block which I had just installed was pulled down and four or five baby zombies went after me.

Sigh.

So instead I went ahead and installed a lever. The wire I had previously made was removed so at not to have a repeat of my mistake. As it turned out the piston was too low for me to just place the lever on the ground, so underneath it I laid down a piece of redstone dust. It was right next to the piston and works as intended.

Sometimes I get too clever for my own good.

So why is this significant? Well, I'm itching to get back into Minecraft Survival. But one of the things that's been keeping me away is my gravely under-powered toolkit. This is where this zombie grinder complex comes in handy. I can mass-enchant books and build up a powerful tool set. I'm not in the 1.8 snapshots so I'm using the old enchanting system.

I know for sure I want an Efficiency III, Unbreaking V work pickaxe, and an Unbreaking/Fortune one as well. The Efficiency/Unbreaking and Unbreaking/Fortune shovel would be nice as well. I don't have a full plan in place yet. But once I got a good supply of enchanted diamond tools I would be able to do things so much easier. Mining would be way more fun - and safer. Large projects like the underground redstone network would go much quicker.

Because of my incoming need for tons of books and levels, I'm thinking of expanding my grinder complex. There would be a reed farm on a clock, a wheat farm on a clock, a cow farm, and dispensers that shoot resources to make books. I would need to expand my enchantery to hold more chests and more types of enchants. As always my mind is bristling with ideas.