So, Minecraft.

[DeeBye]

Thread necromancy!

My son and I are still totally hooked on this wonderful game. We seem to have a theme going. We love making brand new worlds and starting from scratch over and over again. We are both pretty proud of what we've done in our latest world, so I'm going to show it here.

I made an Imgur album link

Here's an overview of our house. We found a pretty nice patch of land beside an ocean, right on the border of a forest and desert biome. We spent a long time flattening the land and terraforming the coastline so it was just right. At this point I should mention that we play totally in Survival with no mods at all. Everything was done the hard way. Right now it's made up of wood and cobblestone, but eventually we want to switch it to red bricks and stone bricks because we like the way that looks.


Inside the front door we have our furnace/crafting area. Our experiences in other worlds was that we sometimes need a lot of furnaces for doing things like turning a vast amount of cobblestone to regular stone for nicer looking building blocks. Torches on walls alone wasn't enough to prevent monsters from spawning within the house, so we placed torches under glass blocks in the floor to light it up better. We might switch that out for glowstone later when we make enough trips to the nether for supplies.


We made sure to make a big-ass storage room and label everything very clearly. In our last build we had a huge storage room with tons of chests, but we neglected to do any sort of labeling system so we always forgot what chest was for what. This time we set up a system with wooden signs pointing to each chest (is there a better way to do this?). We also allowed for the expansion of this room if the need arises.


Enchanting room. Nothing too fancy here.


Here is our sugar cane farm. It's 2x25 and supplies us with more than we need. Eventually I want to put in a piston system to harvest it all in one shot, but we don't have enough resources for that yet. I've left enough room on each side to make that easy enough to do.


We found an abandoned mineshaft, and within it we found 2 spawners - one was a cave spider spawner and the other was a zombie spawner. We opted to use the zombie spawner to make this XP farm. We used this design, which I've used in the past and I really like. The design itself is very reliable, but digging it out and assembling it took me the better part of 2 afternoons. It's tricky dealing with spawner farms in survival mode. I wish we had found a skeleton spawner because they drop arrows and bones, which are infinitely more useful than what zombies drop. This is okay for now though.


Here is our source of food. It's a 7x8 wheat farm (those dimensions were very intentional - more on that later) and it was the first thing we built after the building the "main" part of our home.


Before we had access to redstone we harvested the wheat all by hand, but when we had enough supplies to build pistons the first thing we did was make this into something easier to harvest. A row of pistons holds back a row of water source blocks, and when we flip a level they all open and a water stream harvests the wheat from back to front. The 7x8 dimensions were important, because we had water sources on each side making the entire area tillable (tilled land must be within 4 blocks of water). The water drop required the 7 block length, because water travels 8 blocks and we needed the extra block to perform the drop. You can't drop water onto wheat without destroying the wheat and possiblly making the dirt block un-tilled, so 7 is the maximum length we could go. It definitely produces enough wheat for us to easily rely on bread as our number 1 food source.


Things we plan on doing:

• We need a proper infinite water supply and lava disposal system within our house. No idea why I haven't made these yet because they are super easy to do. I guess it's because I haven't decided on the proper spot for them.
  
• Animal farms! We don't really have a spot for them now, or an idea of where they might go. I think I might want to build them underground though.
  
• Find a skeleton spawner to replace our zombie XP farm.
  
• Slime farm. We dug out an area we think is a slime chunk, but it doesn't seem to be spawning slimes. I'll have to do more research on this.