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.

Of Towers and Tunnels

What is up everyone! Since the last time I posted, I have gotten further ahead with the villager tower. Let's jump right into the action.

First of all, I got the top floor built. With it being done, the skeleton for the tower is complete.

The first thing I did from there was begin clearing out the bottom level. This will have eight wedge-shaped rooms that could be used as shops or something, and the main road of the village will pass through it.

An unfortunate pig was encased in the dirt. I excavated the little creature, hopefully it learns its lesson.

A sequence of images showing the bottom floor be hollowed out and have the outlines of the road and rooms be put in place.

I'll need to get pictures posted of the rooms for the upper two levels. I also did exterior work, putting in some logs to make it look like there were support beams.

This Iron Golem always seems to reappear inside this fence if it's not broken open...

One of the things I envision myself ultimately doing in this map is having tools with high level enchants that I repair using diamonds and an anvil. In order to do that, however, I need lots of iron and lots of diamond. That's not something that you can just walk around and get (well alright maybe you can, but it takes a real long time). To get those, you need to mine. A lot. So I took a break from building and went back to my makeshift cave home. I found that Endermen had stopped by and played with some blocks...

When I first started up this map, the best animal for me to breed for later food was chickens. The creatures haven't been able to get outside so they've been wandering around in the cave. Unfortunately, now they're getting into the mines. I'll need to fish them out one day.

During the time I was mining I picked up several experience levels. These went into enchants and I'm pretty happy with the outcome.

Minecraft 1.5 is out, and I'm pretty happy about it. I'm looking forward to hoppers in particular, because they are going to feed my laziness quite well. There is something I have in mind, an automatic smelting-sorting system. Here's the scenario: I come back after a long trip of mining and in my inventory is coal, iron ore, gold ore, diamonds, emeralds, flint, cobble, and other things. I want all these to go to their respective chests, with the ores getting smelted. Upon entering my home I dump everything into a master hopper. Using things like water, dispensers, droppers and chests, whatever needs to get smelted will be funneled through furnaces. These furnaces automatically smelt what is in them, feeding on the present coal supply. A comparator alerts me when coal reserves are running low. One the smelting is done, the output is sent to a chest. That last step can be turned off with a lever, in case I want to manually take out the ores and receive the XP.

I hope to be playing 1.5 in the next day or two. ModLoader is updated to 1.5, so now I'm waiting for OptiFine. It looks pretty close to being done, which makes me happy.

Tower Coming Together

I've dropped one of my college classes because it was a huge time sink and I was going to fail. That's sad, but it means more free time. For things like Minecraft! The villager tower is coming together very nicely.

I still have to build the fourth level, and then I will begin working on details and rooms.

I was delighted to find this had spawned in the village:

That Iron Golem is a sign that things are going well. I've yet to see any baby villagers, but all in due time. Poor thing was carrying a rose around, but I don't remember anyone taking it.

Glitchy villager.

Remember that emerald I got for no apparent reason? One of the villagers here was selling melon slices for one emerald. This turned out to be an excellent way of jump starting my melon farming.

I am thinking of starting a pass-it-on map, with a spin: each person who gets the map has it for a week so they can do more and I don't have to spend as much time managing it. There will also be three kingdoms of sorts that the player could choose to build up - a desert kingdom, a plains kingdom, and perhaps a snow biome. Who would be interested?