Public World Download - June 12, 2012

Well, a month has now gone by since I first put up a download link for my world. I've made quite a bit of progress since then. My storage room is now finished and functional, the mob grinder is producing at quite a solid rate, I've gathered a ton of diamonds and redstone, I've started terraforming the landscape around my base, and now I've begun the glass dome over my base.

With this download, I've placed helpful signs around my world, helping to guide you to various important features. If you wish to explore the local area, I have a map in my Miscellaneous chest in the first storage room. If you feel like downloading the map, look no further!

June 9th, 2012

Well, I'm back from my vacation, and I did play a little bit during the evenings so I have something to show. The mob grinder is now fully functional, and I am very happy with the drop rates. Although I am not completely done with it just yet, I'm happy to at least have the base structure finished, allowing me to move onto new projects.

The enchantment table room with half the bookshelves active

The enchantment table room with all of the bookshelves active

So here is the main enchantment table for my base. It's under the second tier of my base and just barely fits with two blocks to spare. Unfortunately, I believe I only need 15 bookshelves in 1.3 in order to achieve the highest enchanting level, so this will soon be outdated. Still, it was a fun little build that didn't take very long. It's been too long since I had enough redstone to build something with.

My next goal for the mob grinder is to have an on/off switch. With redstone lamps available to me, I was able to avoid using lava and was thus able to build with wood. This is an example of the wiring I used for one side of the mob grinder, which I think looks nice actually. I'm still debating about how to join all of this together, but I have awhile to think on that, as it takes quite some time to do even one side of this. You also will notice the glass dome starting to take shape for the walls of my base. Unfortunately, I'm out of glass and sand, so I'll need to get more before building again.

I'm also still working around my base as well as inside of it. I'm changing the hillside to grass in this picture. I also have enough for two stacks of TNT to finish blowing these mountains away and forming my own in a somewhat mellow shape. I'll also probably plant trees around the area and light the inside of them up using pumpkins or glowstone.

Aside from that, I've been helping my sister with her world. We haven't really been playing multiplayer much, but we will sit and chat and play our respective single player worlds. She wanted me to build her a minecart system to keep her dogs in motion constantly to prevent them from teleporting to her, and I agreed thinking it would be a five minute job, but then she showed me her pack of some 20 dogs. Yeah, forget that, she's on her own. She's also had very bad luck recently trying to dig for redstone and diamonds. She wants to emulate the endermen farm that I'm using, but she doesn't quite have the resources for it.

That's all I've got for now. Next update will be a download link to my world for the month. Signing out!

June 5th, 2012

Happy Summer fellow students! Surprisingly, I've been more busy now than I have been at school, but that doesn't mean I've been slacking on my survival world, oh no. I've been working on quite a few things, most of which are unfinished, but all are necessarily for mid-term goals with my world.

First up, I'd like to talk about the mob grinder. Three of the four towers are now finished, and I am sitting at around 1,000 spawning spaces already. It works beautifully, and I already have two double chests full of loot from it (with most of the gunpowder being used for TNT as well). It seems to me that I'm going to need to install a lighting system on to have it shut off from time to time. I was planning on just forcing the items to drop down into a lava pit, but I have a new idea for my base that forces that to not be possible.

Functionally, I'm almost done with the mob grinder. Aesthetically, I have a lot of work to do on it, starting from the bottom and working my way up probably. It kind of looks unrealistic for that one central point to support these four towers, and I definitely want to change it.

I mentioned that I had TNT before. In fact, I've used four stacks of it already. I didn't like that large mountain next to my base, and I definitely wanted to remove or re-shape it. I do believe I'll reshape it eventually, but for now, I'm just going to work on shallowing it out and moving it further away from the border of my base. The point I'm standing on in the third picture is also going to be shallowed out, but it's far enough away that I don't care about it for now.

Other than that, I've done a lot of caving. Specifically, I've started a branch mine, which is located just across the river. I'll probably create a fancy entrance for it later, but for now, I'm leaving it as is. And yes, in this picture, I'm up at the world height by stacking up there with nothing but redstone ore blocks and diamond ore blocks. I think it's safe to say that I can use diamond armor now. And I'm glad to finally have something in my redstone chest again.

Finally, I've also been mining a lot of sand. The plan is to build a giant glass dome over my base, which is going to require something like 7,000 glass blocks. That's more than two double chests of glass, to put it in perspective. Half way there with the sand now though.

Recently, I've introduced my sister to the game. At first, she said she didn't like blocky games (would you believe it?) but as soon as I sat down with her and taught her how to play, she's been playing more often than I have. I actually set up a locally hosted server on our network for us to play on. I'm debating about whether or not to post pictures from it when we get it up and running. I'm still teaching her a lot about the game, but just yesterday she surprised me by showing me her zombie spawner xp farm. I'm glad she's willing to look some of this stuff up and work with it on her own. Pretty soon, she might be inventing things as well.

In closing, we are nearing a month since I first released my world. I think I'll make it a monthly occurance from now on, and you guys can get a good, scaled sense of my progress by using that. This time, I plan on making it a bit better, with signs directing you guys around in order to find key landmarks (which will be marked by glowstone pillars, most likely).

That's all I've got for now. Signing out!