Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I think I said some nonsense about wanting to clean up my base and make it look less shit. That is not a thing that happened. Instead, I decided to take it upon myself to remove most of an entire mountain in a massive terraforming project. I did not take any before images but here is an in-progress shot before I started filling back in the copious amounts of dirt that I removed. Most of the mountain was dirt, and I sacrificed a diamond to make a shovel to speed the process up considerably. When I got down to harder blocks it was mined out pretty quickly and I did manage to pick up quite a bit of coal and iron that was hidden under the surface.
The reason why I did this is that I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of room to expand my base perimeter out without having to worry about things dropping down from above. I removed way more than I actually needed but I do like that it gives me a pretty clear approach to the base so that I can see things clearly from a long way off. I’ve been using this recently to bait Endermen to attack me by staring at them… before running down into a safe area that they cannot get into and killing them to start building up an Enderpearl reserve. I am not sure that I will actually play this world long enough to find an end portal, but having a stockpile never hurts.
All of this extra space meant that I could now expand out my wall structure the same distance from all sides of the central tower. Essentially I was feeling cramped in the amount of free area that I had to build little projects. I am probably going to start building some additional buildings to house things like a smithy and such. I need to create an area so that I can grow some other crops like pumpkins, but I am not entirely certain I will do that within the walls of the structure. It is easy enough to pop out during the day and harvest those and they take an awful lot of space. I still have my sugarcane farm outside the walls and it seems fine.
The first building that I built was an enchanter hut, with a maximum-level enchanting table. This has allowed me to start getting some enchants on my weapons and eventually on my gear when I make a full set of diamond armor. Next up will be a smithy so that I can start repairing items. After that probably a consolidated storehouse. Right now a lot of my chests are up in the tower, and the longer I play on this world the less time I want to spend climbing up inside the tower to get items. The tower design was a good start because mobs can’t use ladders and it allowed me to zip up into safety. However, it is getting to the point where it is just cumbersome, leading me to store things in whatever random barrels and chests that I have lying around rather than a core storage area.
Probably the most useful thing that I built yesterday was a dripstone lava farm. I talked a bit about this in yesterday’s post but this essentially allows me to have a renewable source of lava buckets allowing me to use those for cooking up meat and smelting ore instead of relying on coal. This means I have more coal for creating a relatively endless supply of torches. Generally speaking by the time I am ready to cook up full stacks of meat again, I have all five buckets ready to go. At some point, I am going to move my row of smokers/furnaces over to beside the lava machine just to speed the process up.
One of the big problems that I had after building a “meat hole” for chickens was that I had a near-endless supply of eggs. Truth be told… eggs are mostly useless. You can only craft two types of food with them and both require a large outlay of resources. Part of the fried chicken design involved throwing eggs against a wall with a dispenser causing them to occasionally hatch into new chickens. Rather than rebuild my existing machine into the fully automated version, I made a bit of a half-step. I now have a pen for chickens and created an automated pitching machine that I can turn off and on. When I load the hopper/chest up with another batch of eggs I flip it on and let it spawn a pen full of chickens. When they fully mature I hop down into the pen and kill them with a few swipes of my sword and then reap a massive amount of experience that I can turn into enchants… and more feathers and meat than I can realistically use.
I’ve almost entirely stopped cooking steak because the chicken farm is just so damned plentiful. Sure it is a bit twisted that I am creating a killing pen for chickens, but if I was willing to create a “meat hole” I am already morally bankrupt when it comes to Minecraft. I’ve managed to get a Fortune II Diamond Shovel like someone suggested on Mastodon yesterday, and while I would love to have Fortune III instead it is good enough to make a big difference. This alone has made the process of converting Gravel to Flint infinitely easier. When this shovel breaks I will probably craft another one and try for efficiency and fortune on the same tool which should in theory improve my yield. Suffice it to say however I have crafted like eight stacks of arrows which will hold me for a long time and I have more feathers than I need.
The last thing that I built before calling it for the night was a drop farm. This is essentially a chamber with multiple platforms that lure mobs to drop down a center shaft… into a waiting pad of campfires on top of hoppers to collect the loot. It is not working terribly well yet, and I figure this is largely because I did not build it super far away from my base, and also made zero effort to hunt for caves and torch those off to prevent spawns underground. This might be a project for tonight, to dig down and attempt to spawn proof the general area of this farm. It isn’t like I really needed a lot of things from this farm, and mostly built it just because I had copious amounts of cobblestone and deep cobble to burn through. I did quite a bit of deforesting to create all of the trap doors required for it to function, however. I am not super concerned though because I have massive forests in every direction from my base.
All of this said though… I know tomorrow is the release of the Last Epoch cycle restart, and my attention will be drawn elsewhere for a bit. I am not sure if I will return to this world that I labeled “Please Be Good”, but if not I had a lot of fun over the last few days. It filled a gap that I needed filling of having something to do that was pretty low-key and brain-dead. If I continue playing I do want to start excavating some underchambers beneath my base and track down enough obsidian to craft a Nether portal. I tend to prefer to craft these things underground and in a very secure area in case something comes through from the other side.