I'm not a builder—not in the slightest. While I'm simultaneously not very good at building, neither do I enjoy the process. I would describe my style of play as "adventurer." Before the elytra, I rode around on my favorite horse and found places I considered interesting, mainly large openings to the underworld such as caves or ravines. I'd then dismount, build a tiny outpost, and explore. When I was finished, I'd return, pack up my things and go home. After elytra, the world got smaller. I now fly around bow or rocket boosting doing the same thing. When I tire of the sport, I build a bit on my main base, Castle Midgard, or continue branch mining at Y=12.
Recently, I decided to renovate a nearby zombie spawner and turn it into a curing station to convert zombie villagers. I figured I might as well be able to sell all that zombie flesh and spider string I accumulate, not that I really care about emeralds. Unfortunately, I found out that an update made it so that zombie villagers don't generate from spawners. Not to be detoured, I decided to lead them from the wild into a capture facility where I would cure them. All well and good, but I'm going through gold like never before due to all the golden apples.
So, I decided that I'd make one of these gold farms that are so popular with all the cool kids.
I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the options, but I do know what I don't want:
I don't want to make one atop the Nether. Very important.
As I'm not a builder, I don't want to make one that's enormous or highly complex. Good thing most designs seem simple.
Finally, I also don't want something that is plainly visible in the overworld. If it's an overworld design, it must buried be underground. I do have (multiple) fully-powered beacons and (multiple) Efficiency V Mending diamond picks.
No one likes to tear down and rebuild, but as obsidian is the primary building material—and there's a lot of it—I really want to do this right the first time!
This is the design I'm considering:
It seems pretty simple and straightforward.
I've read that Netherworld designs produce much more gold, but all the ones I found on YouTube are above the roof and I'm not going there. Since they all seem to be AFK designs, I don't really care in what dimension it's built, but I don't want to break through the roof or use a contrived method to get up there. Just not my style.
I'd like to have the pigmen drop to one heart as I AFK overnight, then kill them with a Looting III sword.
However, I understand that I need to be within 32 blocks of the farthest portals for the pigmen to move, and thus fall off the edge of the portals and into the collection area, so I'm worried that such a drop will have me standing too far away as I AFK.
Also, should I be concerned about the new maxEntityCramming game rule? I don't want to turn it off or edit it in any way. This world is un-modded, locked in hard mode and with no commands.
Helpful input is appreciated. I'm really just thinking out loud here and hope others will chime in with applicable constructive advice.
Thanks for reading!
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I'd like to have the pigmen drop to one heart as I AFK overnight, then kill them with a Looting III sword....
...
I'm really just thinking out loud here...
Here's something to think about: if you AFK overnight, many of the pigmen will despawn before you get the chance to kill them.
If you want to AFK, then they need to die and you just collect the drops and no XP. 25 block fall to the death with a collection system (hoppers or hopper minecart). You get gold and rotten flesh. You will have to deal with the occasional chicken jockey, but in general it will be a low maintenance farm.
There are designs that let you agro the pigmen before they die, and then transfer the XP orbs to your AFK position, but they are much more complicated to build (and you didn't want complicated), or they are not AFK-able, and you have to interact with the farm (and you want to AFK).
Here's something to think about: if you AFK overnight, many of the pigmen will despawn before you get the chance to kill them.
If you want to AFK, then they need to die and you just collect the drops and no XP. 25 block fall to the death with a collection system (hoppers or hopper minecart). You get gold and rotten flesh. You will have to deal with the occasional chicken jockey, but in general it will be a low maintenance farm.
There are designs that let you agro the pigmen before they die, and then transfer the XP orbs to your AFK position, but they are much more complicated to build (and you didn't want complicated), or they are not AFK-able, and you have to interact with the farm (and you want to AFK).
Thanks! Very good advice. I didn't think of the despawning. I've seen those agro ones, but I don't want to mess with it. I just don't enjoy building farms at all.
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If you need villagers you are much better off breeding them than curing them one by one - in my worlds I only cure two, then breed all that I need, you can even easily make an infinite breeder.
Also, I find it harder to get apples than gold myself (I only have 55,000+ gold stored away... all from caving) - you'd still need a good way to mass produce them, either by growing and manually harvesting lots of oak trees or farming emeralds so you can trade for them; either way breeding villagers avoids the need for more gold and apples.
Oh, I have much more gold than apples as well. Apples would be harder to come by, but I have several stacks of blocks, so I'm good there for a while.
I figured it would be easier to breed them, but the mechanics of recent versions seems so complex and prone to failure—but I very well could be wrong. I'll look again, thanks.
I'm jumping into the End portal now to place my beacon and start cutting down the Ender Dragon's obsidian towers it generates.
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I recently built the third of my overworld gold farms in my current world a few months back, and they are all basically the same. I use 23 x 23 portals (the biggest) spaced 1 block apart with a total of 18 portals, the first 9 seperated from the second 9 by a gap of 2 blocks. The collection system is water streams to a 2x2 drop shaft where they hit a false floor to take damage, which also has trip wires they pass thru just before they hit the floor, which then opens the floor after a few ticks, and deposits them into a final water collection area. I built my current one with the MaxCramming rule in mind (I play with similar ideas to yours) and I created a 7x8 collection area with an open side which pushes all the pigmen to it, and where I chop them with my Looting III sword. As a recent test, i let the farm run for 30 mins, and killed just over 200 pigmen with nearly a stack of 64 ingots to show for it. However, for the size of my collection area, 30 mins/200 pigmen is probably the AFK limit before the MaxCramming rule kicks in (i found a nugget in the chest before i started the cull, so i knew a few had succumbed to the rule). So I tend to do mine AFK in short 20-30 min bursts. Overnight AFK'ing with a manual killing farm is probably too hard to accomplish now.
My AFK point is under the farm in the middle about 3 blocks down from the top of the drop shaft (the drop shaft is offset), so there is no despawning Issues for me. My farm is a bit OP (as i like to muck about with redstone) - I can turn the portals on and off, this is useful if your farm is near a main nether portal (mine is), because when you kill them and they become aggroed, if the portals are on, some angry pigmen can go back thru the portals without you knowing and will end up in the Nether at the main portal, so when, a few days later, you decide toi make a trip to the Nether for something - POW! You're met by a horde hell bent on your destruction
My farm is built underground, so together with the portal size and the drop shaft, the collection point might be close to the bedrock levels. It took longer to mine out that it took to build the farm. The farm is adjacent to my Villager Trading Hall, and i built it principally to get gold for enchanted apples to cure librarian villagers, but it also yields lots of rotting flesh to trade with clerics, and is a great XP charger for Mending gear (my XP bar in that above test went from 1 to 31 XP)
Some pics:
The main portals
Drop shaft. Note there are two diff levels, so the drop for some pigmen is less than the others, but not really an issue.
AFK point (i can watch the pigmen drop past if I choose)
The underside of the false floor
The collection area
I smell pork ...
The Loot from the 30 mins test. Don't forget you can now smelt gold swords in a furnace to get gold nuggets as well.
Mein Gott! You can smelt gold swords now?! This is why I curse myself for not hording everything!
And wow! That's quite an amazing farm. Significantly beyond my ability or desire to construct. I see it also uses packed ice, of which I have no access. I won't use programs to view unexplored parts of my world and it's large biome, so I may very well never find an Ice Spikes biome despite having explored far more overworld area than I've yet seen in anther vanilla SSP world.
Thanks for sharing!
I'll post updates as I go. Hope everyone keeps checking. I feel like I'm out of my comfort zone here.
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Mein Gott! You can smelt gold swords now?! This is why I curse myself for not hording everything!
And wow! That's quite an amazing farm. Significantly beyond my ability or desire to construct. I see it also uses packed ice, of which I have no access. I won't use programs to view unexplored parts of my world and it's large biome, so I may very well never find an Ice Spikes biome despite having explored far more overworld area than I've yet seen in anther vanilla SSP world.
Thanks for sharing!
I'll post updates as I go. Hope everyone keeps checking. I feel like I'm out of my comfort zone here.
You don't need the packed ice, I just had tons of it so used it for contrast. The only real redstone you need is for the false floor, and that's just some pistons, trip wire and repeaters, the basic stuff. All you really need is a shed load of Obsidian ...
You can smelt all iron and gold swords/armour in a furnace - you get 1 nugget immaterial of its wear (iron nuggets were added recently to match gold ones). I tend to hoard, so I had a double chest of dropped gold armour which gave me a nice pile of nuggets.
Though I didn't get to play too much last night, I want to keep this thread updated as it will motivate and help me remain on task. This really isn't "my thing" in Minecraft, so posting a journal of this laborious undertaking will help keep me from abandoning it.
My vanilla hard-mode large-biome SSP world was created July 2, 2014, but since I only play video games less than half the year, it's more like a world half its age. If Mr_N_Derman made his first base just over three years ago, then our worlds are roughly the same age, but his is obviously far, far more advanced.
One familiar with my posts here in the forums might wonder how I keep track of dates for seemingly every little thing I've done. Well, one way is my extensive archive of backup saves: 150 saves weighing in at 246 GB. A testament to its massive size, my un-modded world is now a hefty 2.85 GB so I've started cutting down on the amount of backups.
However, one of the methods I use, in addition to screenshots and an in-game journal I keep in an item frame above right above my bed back in Castle Midgard's Old Tower, is signs. Lots of signs.
Here's the sign I pass on my way down to the End Portal:
So, I appears it took me about two months to slay the Ender Dragon. That would have been still in good ol' 1.7.10, the version in which the world was created, as 1.8 was released less than a week later. Of course, back then, the Ender Dragon couldn't be summoned. It could only be killed once. I've summoned him once more to open a portal to the End cities.
I guess the Ender Dragon didn't "rest in peace!"
(Above) What's left of the "Crystal Cathedral" after the second coming of the Ender Dragon. This is the place where I first did all my enchanting and it's directly beside where I first slayed the dragon, where the former portal to the Overworld was. Of course, I abandoned this place once I found my first skeleton spawner and built an XP farm around it.
Back then, I would go to the End, kill a bunch of Ender Men, then enchant a diamond item hoping it would be a good spell. Ha, ha! That seems so ridiculous now. (I call this short period of time the "Iron Age." Everything I used was iron.)
Remember, back then, the enchantment table UI was totally different. We didn't know what we were going to get and it took either 50 or 30 levels each blind enchant! It probably would have been better for me to enchant books, but I didn't know what I was doing back then. Now I have several double chests of ender pearls and lots of diamond armor and items that I use as decoration back at Castle Midgard.
(Above) I placed the fully-powered beacon on the exact spot of the old portal back to the overworld and activated Haste II. The switch from Achievements to Advancements now in 1.12 doesn't really bother me. I never did ride my 1 km rail all the way from start to finish, in the old system, but other than that, I think the only one I needed was the one where all biomes are visited. As my world is large biome, that would be an amazing accomplishment if unassisted by world-revealing tools. It took a 21.4 km horse ride to find a jungle, for example.
I recall the first time I got this award; it was Nov. 8, 2014, one of the times my normally-SSP world received a visitor:
We then took my max-jump (5.5 blocks!) horse out of the pasture:
Ha, ha! Good times. Back when Minecraft was a mysterious world, ominous and foreboding, yet full of wonder and adventure.
Anyways, back to the dredge. I'm chopping down obsidian towers in the End right now.
So far, I've taken down about 1.5 medium-sized Ender Dragon pillars. It's a boring drudge. I feel like I'm playing "Off-World Hard Labor Prison Simulator 3000" rather than Minecraft. However, I now have 17 stacks of obsidian, far more surplus of the solid black stone than I've ever had before.
I wonder how much I'll need. Oh, sure, I could use math to figure it out, but that would hurt my poor addled brain.
Thanks for reading and checking up on my progress!
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Once I filled my pack with obsidian, I decide to get my blood pumping a little and rocket boost off the now-low platform and shoot straight up and then down. Now, mind you I did this intentionally, and yes, it was sooo very stupid, but my brain was numb with boredom. I knew it would take at least half my hearts, but I doubted there was any way it could possibly kill me. So, I fly up and then rocket down, face planting into the unforgiving End stone. Blam!
It took me down to two or three and a half hearts.
The problem is, the instant before I smashed face-first into the unyielding ground, I triggered an Enderman.
So, there I am, a total fool with a pick in my hand, no shield, more than two potatoes from a full life bar, bewildered and at three hearts with an Enderman attacking me in the End. I slashed him and ran for the portal the instant he teleported away . . .
. . . But, I didn't make it. Worse, when I exploded like a piñata of obsidian and enchanted diamond equipment, I saw something skitter into the End portal to be lost forever. My girlfirend came into the room after I yelled, "Aaahhh!!! Nooo!!!"
My blood was boiling. Worse, it was all my fault—hubris mixed with equal parts of apathy, stupidity and extreme boredom.
Thankfully, the only thing I could see that I lost was some sticks. Whew. There went 77 levels of experience that I had no plans on ever using so oh well.
It reminds me that I really think there should be more uses for levels, perhaps spell-like powers that are fueled by levels, for example.
Back at Castle Midgard, I consider my options.
A while back, I started hollowing out a very large room beneath the castle and I think it might make a good place for the gold farm. However, it will link to an existing Nether portal that, on the Nether side, opens to a small outpost.
I wonder if that will cause any issues. I don't want to mess up my portals and neither do I want dozens of angry pigmen suddenly attacking me before I even fully materialize in the Nether.
I'm also thinking about building some houses. It's always been my intention to place some houses around the castle.
Seems like if I build six houses, have one poor testificate to live a solitary life there in the lonely little ghost town, then drop a farmer with some potato crops and a couple other villagers six blocks lower, they will breed indefinitely? Hmmm . . .
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. . . But, I didn't make it. Worse, when I exploded like a piñata of obsidian and enchanted diamond equipment, I saw something skitter into the End portal to be lost forever
Items that fall into the End portal are not lost; they will appear at the exact world spawn point, although you have to be able to get there within 5 minutes (since around 1.8 Optifine unloads spawn chunks if you have "smooth world" enabled, in which case lowering your render distance also gives you more time to get there). For example, after I killed the dragon in my most recent world I found some of its XP at spawn, along with some end stone and torches (it was right outside the entrance to my temporary shelter; I always stay close to spawn and I've even built my main base on top of it):
Huh. Well, Castle Midgard is within sight of the world spawn at 32 chunk render distance (the current maximum, which I sincerely wish was doubled), but it looks like I have "smooth world" enabled. So, I'll check for the sticks. Thanks!
Checked the world spawn at Mt. Olympus:
Nope. No sticks. Must have de-spawned. I turned off clouds for the screenshot as they are head-level (Y=127) and thus, nothing can really be seen from the highest point.
I remember spawning here for the first time and being totally confused because everything was white. I wandered around not knowing that my head was literally in the clouds and I very nearly stepped off the edge and plummeted more than 100 meters to my doom. XD
Flying back, I take a look at my options for building the houses:
I'm considering building the six houses in this area, the north side:
The "World of Color" update really killed the look of green carpet. The "lawn" looked a whole lot better when the carpet was a much darker before 1.12. The one thing that people can do to keep mobs from spawning other than spam torches and lamp posts and Mojang hosed it. It really looked good with the dark carpet, but now it's "meh."
I'm still going to build the gold farm, of course. It's just that the whole reason I did this was to get more involved with villagers and trading so I'm a bit more interested with that at the moment. I really do want a Mending book seller as well as some other good ones. I only have two librarians right now, but one sells Looting II and that's not too bad. The other is a cartographer. I'd buy a map from him, but my world is already nearing 3 GB. I don't know if it can take another gig worth of exploration.
Thanks for reading!
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Hope you are using an Efficiency V pic-axe to mine that Obsidian Sharpe! Every little bit helps
In regards to your worlds "age", even tho your statistics can be corrupted (my current world was started in 1.5 something, and around 1.7.10 I lost my stats somehow - my current stats say I've mined 550,000+ stone, reckon it woulda been 1,000,000 plus with the lost info, especially as I played more in the early days ) you can press F3 and it will tell you how old your world is in MC days - that seems to be rather stable, so we can compare values, I've just passed 11,000 MC days. I play most days - I play at work during my lunch hour and probably average an hour in the evenings (can be more if I'm eager to get on with something). The only day I don't really play it is Sundays. But playing at work involves me copying my game save every day, so like you I've had loads of back-ups I can utilise if I get a big corruption or something similar (has come in handy a few times!)
My current game save is only 710mb tho. I haven explored massively, I tend to make use of tools like AMIDST to locate biomes - I did this to locate a Mesa biome and an Ice Spikes (where my 2nd & 3rd bases are built). I reached these via the Nether, so there are actually no overworld connections between some of my bases. I have a rule also I try to explore only in one of two directions from each new base at the start - this leaves unexplored areas close by a base, and when an update adds a new thing that cant be found in old generated areas, I'm usually lucky in that I don't have to go far to locate new stuff. I think my furthest explored point from spawn is X=12800, Z=-10800 or so.
You base is quite a size! I quite like the concept of large bases, but I also like to have everything to hand, so I usually end up quite compact. I imagine my three current bases (my one at the Mesa I demolished as I decided I didn't like the design and is awaiting a new build) could fit in the area of your Castle with room to spare
77 levels of experience you lost!? Goddamn, I enchant religiously every 30 or so I get.
Like I say, this world was created July 2, 2014 in 1.7.10, but I've taken several long breaks, so it's no surprise I've played less than you. My last break was eight months straight, and I know I've taken two more that were around six months each.
I've probably covered most area between 10 km. I have a wall with 4x4 fully zoomed out maps, so that's an area of 8,192 meters square if I did my math right, but I've explored a great deal more. In my sig, there's a link to a story where I searched for a jungle on horseback and found one 24 km away as the crow flies.
I won't use ADMIST. I enjoy exploration most of all, so that would ruin my favorite activity!
I have used MCMap, which creates a render of explored areas, but I stopped it last time when it rendered a compressed image of more than 100 GB and wasn't even half finished. So, I can't render it any longer. I did have an image with three multi-year worlds (TheMasterCaver's included) compared to mine when it was young, and all three combined weren't half as big as mine. My world has tripped in size since then.
I stopped regularly enchanting. I don't need any more Protection IV books or whatever. I have several double chest full of them, and sorting and storing them became a pain. I could rebuild a max-enchant anything with my current library, so I'm done spending time at the enchanting table.
You and I both share the want for a base with everything to be close at hand. Castle Midgard is actually little more than a (highly-decorated) traffic controller. All paths, halls and corridors lead to one place as quickly and efficiently as possible with little regard to aesthetic design. That place is Old Tower:
(Above) Facing West; Castle Midgard—which means "middle enclosure" in Old Norse—is situated in the middle of the four maps
(Above) Facing Southeast
(Above) Facing Southwest
(Above) Facing Northeast
And, here I am in this same room Oct. 13, 2014, proudly displaying my first ever suit of diamond armor, getting ready to summon a Wither for the first time:
Compared to the first picture, one can see almost nothing has been moved or replaced, just decorations hung on the wall. However, a keen eye might notice the bed was moved over one block to the south in order to accommodate a double chest there on the west wall. It's the same bed and the first one ever made in the world.
The trapdoor in the northeast corner leads immediately down to a small room with six furnaces and more storage. It was the "basement" back in the day when Old Tower was a small, stand-alone fort and my first base:
(Above) Oct. 13, 2014
(Above) Also Oct. 13, 2014, the day the first Wither was slain
Notice Bleach Bone Forest surrounds the fort. I cleared and terraformed the area around the castle long ago (but in the Diamond Age). It was difficult while dodging zombies, but I tried to get a screenshot as close to the above one as I could:
As one can see, Old Tower remains the same as it did years ago. The castle was built around it, because, like I say, it's just a (decorative) traffic controller. The stairs and entrances and doors are just there to make getting to Old Tower quicker from any cardinal direction.
What about the tall tower? Well, I built it before I knew of "bow boosting" with the elytra. I needed a platform at Y=256, the build height limit, to launch. Just like the rest of the castle, which was built little by little over the years, it's there for practical reasons. It's also visible from just about any location within the 32 chunk render distance.
As massive as Castle Midgard is on the outside, it's even larger below the surface, but we'll save those pics for another post.
Oh, and I did take the obsidian with an Efficiency V pick. I carry two: "Everbite," Silk Touch, Mending, Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, and "Stoneshatter," Fortune III, Mending, Efficiency V, Unbreaking III.
No game play report today, but thanks for reading! :-)
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Like I say, this world was created July 2, 2014 in 1.7.10, but I've taken several long breaks, so it's no surprise I've played less than you. My last break was eight months straight, and I know I've taken two more that were around six months each.
I've probably covered most area between 10 km. I have a wall with 4x4 fully zoomed out maps, so that's an area of 8,192 meters square if I did my math right, but I've explored a great deal more. In my sig, there's a link to a story where I searched for a jungle on horseback and found one 24 km away as the crow flies.
I won't use ADMIST. I enjoy exploration most of all, so that would ruin my favorite activity!
I have used MCMap, which creates a render of explored areas, but I stopped it last time when it rendered a compressed image of more than 100 GB and wasn't even half finished. So, I can't render it any longer. I did have an image with three multi-year worlds (TheMasterCaver's included) compared to mine when it was young, and all three combined weren't half as big as mine.
Here is the image that you are referring to; even at 10% of original size it is still 7659 pixels across; my own world is in the lower-left corner:
Since then I've doubled the size of my own world, with 8,134 in-game days of playtime (111.43 days in the stats, which reflects the actual time spent and is almost exactly double the time as of the renderings above, taken from this post); as in your case I have not played it consistently since I started it on March 28, 2013, with three breaks of 6-12 months spent on other worlds, including more than 1,600 in-game days spent in a world I played between January-May this year (my average daily playtime is around 3.5 hours; the only real "breaks" that I've taken since I started playing Minecraft were to finish off a mod, most recently a few weeks prior to my most recent world).
While not as large as many other worlds (at least in this thread, as I know that many do not play on the same worlds for years) this is by far the largest and most-played world that I have; here are surface renderings of most of my worlds (despite appearances the latter four worlds were created in 1.6.4, not 1.7+, using my own mods, which would reflect how I'd mod 1.7+ if I ever played in those versions - I never go out of my way to find anything other than a stronghold and also do not like using tools like AMIDST to find biomes; when I used Unmined to see what I've explored I even make a copy and trim away unexplored chunks before rendering the underground; World1v2 and World1v3 (not shown) used the same seed as World1 except caves were altered; TMCWv1 also used the same seed but biomes were also changed):
Here is the image that you are referring to; even at 10% of original size it is still 7659 pixels across; my own world is in the lower-left corner:
That's a great image, but it's actually not. I can find neither that image nor the one I'm talking about, though I really looked. I'll look later. It's my girlfriend's birthday and I'm more than half lit.
I imagine my world is now larger than that whole image—whitespace and all.
Your World 1 is looking good though! Mighty fine area of exploration, especially considering you've traversed it pretty much all under ground! Amazing!
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Well Mr Sharpe, I have some stats for you comparing that gold farm in #1 with mine ...
Haha! Very well, you've won me over!
I'll be happy to use your design, especially since it includes both an AFK killing floor and a switchable collection area for use with a Looting sword.
I'm clearing out an area right now! Expect me to be a source of great annoyance for you in the coming days, Mr. Architect!
The "World of Color" update really killed the look of green carpet. The "lawn" looked a whole lot better when the carpet was a much darker before 1.12. The one thing that people can do to keep mobs from spawning other than spam torches and lamp posts and Mojang hosed it. It really looked good with the dark carpet, but now it's "meh."
Clearly, I'm specifically talking about large outdoor grass areas—"lawns."
It is common practice in the Minecraft community to use green carpet to create a look of a mowed lawn with alternating light and dark stripes, for example:
I didn't come up with the method; I've seen it on several builds.
Here's the difference:
(Above) Oct. 24, 2016, version 1.10.2
(Above) Aug. 5, 2017, version 1.12—Same clouds by pure coincidence, even!
Like I say, I personally prefer the dark contrast, but I didn't start this thread to compare colors or discuss whether or not there needs to be a method for preventing mob spawning or lighting large areas. Other places on these forums as well as Reddit's r/MinecraftSuggestions is rife with conversation about all that.
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Greetings!
I'm not a builder—not in the slightest. While I'm simultaneously not very good at building, neither do I enjoy the process. I would describe my style of play as "adventurer." Before the elytra, I rode around on my favorite horse and found places I considered interesting, mainly large openings to the underworld such as caves or ravines. I'd then dismount, build a tiny outpost, and explore. When I was finished, I'd return, pack up my things and go home. After elytra, the world got smaller. I now fly around bow or rocket boosting doing the same thing. When I tire of the sport, I build a bit on my main base, Castle Midgard, or continue branch mining at Y=12.
Recently, I decided to renovate a nearby zombie spawner and turn it into a curing station to convert zombie villagers. I figured I might as well be able to sell all that zombie flesh and spider string I accumulate, not that I really care about emeralds. Unfortunately, I found out that an update made it so that zombie villagers don't generate from spawners. Not to be detoured, I decided to lead them from the wild into a capture facility where I would cure them. All well and good, but I'm going through gold like never before due to all the golden apples.
So, I decided that I'd make one of these gold farms that are so popular with all the cool kids.
I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the options, but I do know what I don't want:
No one likes to tear down and rebuild, but as obsidian is the primary building material—and there's a lot of it—I really want to do this right the first time!
This is the design I'm considering:
It seems pretty simple and straightforward.
I've read that Netherworld designs produce much more gold, but all the ones I found on YouTube are above the roof and I'm not going there. Since they all seem to be AFK designs, I don't really care in what dimension it's built, but I don't want to break through the roof or use a contrived method to get up there. Just not my style.
I'd like to have the pigmen drop to one heart as I AFK overnight, then kill them with a Looting III sword.
However, I understand that I need to be within 32 blocks of the farthest portals for the pigmen to move, and thus fall off the edge of the portals and into the collection area, so I'm worried that such a drop will have me standing too far away as I AFK.
Also, should I be concerned about the new maxEntityCramming game rule? I don't want to turn it off or edit it in any way. This world is un-modded, locked in hard mode and with no commands.
Helpful input is appreciated. I'm really just thinking out loud here and hope others will chime in with applicable constructive advice.
Thanks for reading!
My short story-like journals; quick-and-easy reads:
My Quest for Elytra Complete! (Pic Intense, End-Game Spoilers)
[Journal & Pics] After a Year and a Half, I Finally Found a Jungle
FrozenCore: Hardcore Death; 3/20/15 to 5/3/15; Eight Weeks on a Frozen World in Pictures
Here's something to think about: if you AFK overnight, many of the pigmen will despawn before you get the chance to kill them.
If you want to AFK, then they need to die and you just collect the drops and no XP. 25 block fall to the death with a collection system (hoppers or hopper minecart). You get gold and rotten flesh. You will have to deal with the occasional chicken jockey, but in general it will be a low maintenance farm.
There are designs that let you agro the pigmen before they die, and then transfer the XP orbs to your AFK position, but they are much more complicated to build (and you didn't want complicated), or they are not AFK-able, and you have to interact with the farm (and you want to AFK).
Thanks! Very good advice. I didn't think of the despawning. I've seen those agro ones, but I don't want to mess with it. I just don't enjoy building farms at all.
My short story-like journals; quick-and-easy reads:
My Quest for Elytra Complete! (Pic Intense, End-Game Spoilers)
[Journal & Pics] After a Year and a Half, I Finally Found a Jungle
FrozenCore: Hardcore Death; 3/20/15 to 5/3/15; Eight Weeks on a Frozen World in Pictures
If you need villagers you are much better off breeding them than curing them one by one - in my worlds I only cure two, then breed all that I need, you can even easily make an infinite breeder.
Also, I find it harder to get apples than gold myself (I only have 55,000+ gold stored away... all from caving) - you'd still need a good way to mass produce them, either by growing and manually harvesting lots of oak trees or farming emeralds so you can trade for them; either way breeding villagers avoids the need for more gold and apples.
See: https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Village_mechanics#Breeding_indefinitely
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Oh, I have much more gold than apples as well. Apples would be harder to come by, but I have several stacks of blocks, so I'm good there for a while.
I figured it would be easier to breed them, but the mechanics of recent versions seems so complex and prone to failure—but I very well could be wrong. I'll look again, thanks.
I'm jumping into the End portal now to place my beacon and start cutting down the Ender Dragon's obsidian towers it generates.
My short story-like journals; quick-and-easy reads:
My Quest for Elytra Complete! (Pic Intense, End-Game Spoilers)
[Journal & Pics] After a Year and a Half, I Finally Found a Jungle
FrozenCore: Hardcore Death; 3/20/15 to 5/3/15; Eight Weeks on a Frozen World in Pictures
I recently built the third of my overworld gold farms in my current world a few months back, and they are all basically the same. I use 23 x 23 portals (the biggest) spaced 1 block apart with a total of 18 portals, the first 9 seperated from the second 9 by a gap of 2 blocks. The collection system is water streams to a 2x2 drop shaft where they hit a false floor to take damage, which also has trip wires they pass thru just before they hit the floor, which then opens the floor after a few ticks, and deposits them into a final water collection area. I built my current one with the MaxCramming rule in mind (I play with similar ideas to yours) and I created a 7x8 collection area with an open side which pushes all the pigmen to it, and where I chop them with my Looting III sword. As a recent test, i let the farm run for 30 mins, and killed just over 200 pigmen with nearly a stack of 64 ingots to show for it. However, for the size of my collection area, 30 mins/200 pigmen is probably the AFK limit before the MaxCramming rule kicks in (i found a nugget in the chest before i started the cull, so i knew a few had succumbed to the rule). So I tend to do mine AFK in short 20-30 min bursts. Overnight AFK'ing with a manual killing farm is probably too hard to accomplish now.
My AFK point is under the farm in the middle about 3 blocks down from the top of the drop shaft (the drop shaft is offset), so there is no despawning Issues for me. My farm is a bit OP (as i like to muck about with redstone) - I can turn the portals on and off, this is useful if your farm is near a main nether portal (mine is), because when you kill them and they become aggroed, if the portals are on, some angry pigmen can go back thru the portals without you knowing and will end up in the Nether at the main portal, so when, a few days later, you decide toi make a trip to the Nether for something - POW! You're met by a horde hell bent on your destruction
My farm is built underground, so together with the portal size and the drop shaft, the collection point might be close to the bedrock levels. It took longer to mine out that it took to build the farm. The farm is adjacent to my Villager Trading Hall, and i built it principally to get gold for enchanted apples to cure librarian villagers, but it also yields lots of rotting flesh to trade with clerics, and is a great XP charger for Mending gear (my XP bar in that above test went from 1 to 31 XP)
Some pics:
The main portals
Drop shaft. Note there are two diff levels, so the drop for some pigmen is less than the others, but not really an issue.
AFK point (i can watch the pigmen drop past if I choose)
The underside of the false floor
The collection area
I smell pork ...
The Loot from the 30 mins test. Don't forget you can now smelt gold swords in a furnace to get gold nuggets as well.
Plan section using Minutor.
Mintutor now works in 1.13!
MrKite & Mc_Etlam ... I salute you!
Mein Gott! You can smelt gold swords now?! This is why I curse myself for not hording everything!
And wow! That's quite an amazing farm. Significantly beyond my ability or desire to construct. I see it also uses packed ice, of which I have no access. I won't use programs to view unexplored parts of my world and it's large biome, so I may very well never find an Ice Spikes biome despite having explored far more overworld area than I've yet seen in anther vanilla SSP world.
Thanks for sharing!
I'll post updates as I go. Hope everyone keeps checking. I feel like I'm out of my comfort zone here.
My short story-like journals; quick-and-easy reads:
My Quest for Elytra Complete! (Pic Intense, End-Game Spoilers)
[Journal & Pics] After a Year and a Half, I Finally Found a Jungle
FrozenCore: Hardcore Death; 3/20/15 to 5/3/15; Eight Weeks on a Frozen World in Pictures
You don't need the packed ice, I just had tons of it so used it for contrast. The only real redstone you need is for the false floor, and that's just some pistons, trip wire and repeaters, the basic stuff. All you really need is a shed load of Obsidian ...
You can smelt all iron and gold swords/armour in a furnace - you get 1 nugget immaterial of its wear (iron nuggets were added recently to match gold ones). I tend to hoard, so I had a double chest of dropped gold armour which gave me a nice pile of nuggets.
Mintutor now works in 1.13!
MrKite & Mc_Etlam ... I salute you!
why dont you just make a normal farm...
The OP decided on an underground Overworld gold farm, which is a fairly standard gold farm design.
Watch out for the crabocalypse. Some say the day will never come. But it will.
Feel free to drop by for a chat whenever.
If you'd like to talk with me about other games, here are a few I play.
Team Fortress 2
Borderlands series (Borderlands 2 is my favorite game, ever. TPS combat is a lot of fun and makes up for the lower-quality story, in my opinion)
Elder Scrolls series
Warframe (IGN is something like That_One_Flesh_Atronach)
Pokémon series (HGSS forever)
Rocket League
Fallout series
Left 4 Dead 2 (Boomer files always corrupt though)
SUPERHOT (SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!)
Dead Rising series (Dead Rising 2 is one of my favorite games, and the 3rd was a lot of fun. 1st has poor survivor AI and the 4th is bad)
Just Cause series
Come to think of it, I mainly play fighting-based games.
Though I didn't get to play too much last night, I want to keep this thread updated as it will motivate and help me remain on task. This really isn't "my thing" in Minecraft, so posting a journal of this laborious undertaking will help keep me from abandoning it.
My vanilla hard-mode large-biome SSP world was created July 2, 2014, but since I only play video games less than half the year, it's more like a world half its age. If Mr_N_Derman made his first base just over three years ago, then our worlds are roughly the same age, but his is obviously far, far more advanced.
One familiar with my posts here in the forums might wonder how I keep track of dates for seemingly every little thing I've done. Well, one way is my extensive archive of backup saves: 150 saves weighing in at 246 GB. A testament to its massive size, my un-modded world is now a hefty 2.85 GB so I've started cutting down on the amount of backups.
However, one of the methods I use, in addition to screenshots and an in-game journal I keep in an item frame above right above my bed back in Castle Midgard's Old Tower, is signs. Lots of signs.
Here's the sign I pass on my way down to the End Portal:
So, I appears it took me about two months to slay the Ender Dragon. That would have been still in good ol' 1.7.10, the version in which the world was created, as 1.8 was released less than a week later. Of course, back then, the Ender Dragon couldn't be summoned. It could only be killed once. I've summoned him once more to open a portal to the End cities.
I guess the Ender Dragon didn't "rest in peace!"
(Above) What's left of the "Crystal Cathedral" after the second coming of the Ender Dragon. This is the place where I first did all my enchanting and it's directly beside where I first slayed the dragon, where the former portal to the Overworld was. Of course, I abandoned this place once I found my first skeleton spawner and built an XP farm around it.
Back then, I would go to the End, kill a bunch of Ender Men, then enchant a diamond item hoping it would be a good spell. Ha, ha! That seems so ridiculous now. (I call this short period of time the "Iron Age." Everything I used was iron.)
Remember, back then, the enchantment table UI was totally different. We didn't know what we were going to get and it took either 50 or 30 levels each blind enchant! It probably would have been better for me to enchant books, but I didn't know what I was doing back then. Now I have several double chests of ender pearls and lots of diamond armor and items that I use as decoration back at Castle Midgard.
(Above) I placed the fully-powered beacon on the exact spot of the old portal back to the overworld and activated Haste II. The switch from Achievements to Advancements now in 1.12 doesn't really bother me. I never did ride my 1 km rail all the way from start to finish, in the old system, but other than that, I think the only one I needed was the one where all biomes are visited. As my world is large biome, that would be an amazing accomplishment if unassisted by world-revealing tools. It took a 21.4 km horse ride to find a jungle, for example.
I recall the first time I got this award; it was Nov. 8, 2014, one of the times my normally-SSP world received a visitor:
We then took my max-jump (5.5 blocks!) horse out of the pasture:
Ha, ha! Good times. Back when Minecraft was a mysterious world, ominous and foreboding, yet full of wonder and adventure.
Anyways, back to the dredge. I'm chopping down obsidian towers in the End right now.
So far, I've taken down about 1.5 medium-sized Ender Dragon pillars. It's a boring drudge. I feel like I'm playing "Off-World Hard Labor Prison Simulator 3000" rather than Minecraft. However, I now have 17 stacks of obsidian, far more surplus of the solid black stone than I've ever had before.
I wonder how much I'll need. Oh, sure, I could use math to figure it out, but that would hurt my poor addled brain.
Thanks for reading and checking up on my progress!
My short story-like journals; quick-and-easy reads:
My Quest for Elytra Complete! (Pic Intense, End-Game Spoilers)
[Journal & Pics] After a Year and a Half, I Finally Found a Jungle
FrozenCore: Hardcore Death; 3/20/15 to 5/3/15; Eight Weeks on a Frozen World in Pictures
Well, I about had a heart attack.
Once I filled my pack with obsidian, I decide to get my blood pumping a little and rocket boost off the now-low platform and shoot straight up and then down. Now, mind you I did this intentionally, and yes, it was sooo very stupid, but my brain was numb with boredom. I knew it would take at least half my hearts, but I doubted there was any way it could possibly kill me. So, I fly up and then rocket down, face planting into the unforgiving End stone. Blam!
It took me down to two or three and a half hearts.
The problem is, the instant before I smashed face-first into the unyielding ground, I triggered an Enderman.
So, there I am, a total fool with a pick in my hand, no shield, more than two potatoes from a full life bar, bewildered and at three hearts with an Enderman attacking me in the End. I slashed him and ran for the portal the instant he teleported away . . .
. . . But, I didn't make it. Worse, when I exploded like a piñata of obsidian and enchanted diamond equipment, I saw something skitter into the End portal to be lost forever. My girlfirend came into the room after I yelled, "Aaahhh!!! Nooo!!!"
My blood was boiling. Worse, it was all my fault—hubris mixed with equal parts of apathy, stupidity and extreme boredom.
Thankfully, the only thing I could see that I lost was some sticks. Whew. There went 77 levels of experience that I had no plans on ever using so oh well.
It reminds me that I really think there should be more uses for levels, perhaps spell-like powers that are fueled by levels, for example.
Back at Castle Midgard, I consider my options.
A while back, I started hollowing out a very large room beneath the castle and I think it might make a good place for the gold farm. However, it will link to an existing Nether portal that, on the Nether side, opens to a small outpost.
I wonder if that will cause any issues. I don't want to mess up my portals and neither do I want dozens of angry pigmen suddenly attacking me before I even fully materialize in the Nether.
I'm also thinking about building some houses. It's always been my intention to place some houses around the castle.
Seems like if I build six houses, have one poor testificate to live a solitary life there in the lonely little ghost town, then drop a farmer with some potato crops and a couple other villagers six blocks lower, they will breed indefinitely? Hmmm . . .
My short story-like journals; quick-and-easy reads:
My Quest for Elytra Complete! (Pic Intense, End-Game Spoilers)
[Journal & Pics] After a Year and a Half, I Finally Found a Jungle
FrozenCore: Hardcore Death; 3/20/15 to 5/3/15; Eight Weeks on a Frozen World in Pictures
Items that fall into the End portal are not lost; they will appear at the exact world spawn point, although you have to be able to get there within 5 minutes (since around 1.8 Optifine unloads spawn chunks if you have "smooth world" enabled, in which case lowering your render distance also gives you more time to get there). For example, after I killed the dragon in my most recent world I found some of its XP at spawn, along with some end stone and torches (it was right outside the entrance to my temporary shelter; I always stay close to spawn and I've even built my main base on top of it):
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Huh. Well, Castle Midgard is within sight of the world spawn at 32 chunk render distance (the current maximum, which I sincerely wish was doubled), but it looks like I have "smooth world" enabled. So, I'll check for the sticks. Thanks!
Checked the world spawn at Mt. Olympus:
Nope. No sticks. Must have de-spawned. I turned off clouds for the screenshot as they are head-level (Y=127) and thus, nothing can really be seen from the highest point.
I remember spawning here for the first time and being totally confused because everything was white. I wandered around not knowing that my head was literally in the clouds and I very nearly stepped off the edge and plummeted more than 100 meters to my doom. XD
Flying back, I take a look at my options for building the houses:
I'm considering building the six houses in this area, the north side:
The "World of Color" update really killed the look of green carpet. The "lawn" looked a whole lot better when the carpet was a much darker before 1.12. The one thing that people can do to keep mobs from spawning other than spam torches and lamp posts and Mojang hosed it. It really looked good with the dark carpet, but now it's "meh."
I'm still going to build the gold farm, of course. It's just that the whole reason I did this was to get more involved with villagers and trading so I'm a bit more interested with that at the moment. I really do want a Mending book seller as well as some other good ones. I only have two librarians right now, but one sells Looting II and that's not too bad. The other is a cartographer. I'd buy a map from him, but my world is already nearing 3 GB. I don't know if it can take another gig worth of exploration.
Thanks for reading!
My short story-like journals; quick-and-easy reads:
My Quest for Elytra Complete! (Pic Intense, End-Game Spoilers)
[Journal & Pics] After a Year and a Half, I Finally Found a Jungle
FrozenCore: Hardcore Death; 3/20/15 to 5/3/15; Eight Weeks on a Frozen World in Pictures
Hope you are using an Efficiency V pic-axe to mine that Obsidian Sharpe! Every little bit helps
In regards to your worlds "age", even tho your statistics can be corrupted (my current world was started in 1.5 something, and around 1.7.10 I lost my stats somehow - my current stats say I've mined 550,000+ stone, reckon it woulda been 1,000,000 plus with the lost info, especially as I played more in the early days ) you can press F3 and it will tell you how old your world is in MC days - that seems to be rather stable, so we can compare values, I've just passed 11,000 MC days. I play most days - I play at work during my lunch hour and probably average an hour in the evenings (can be more if I'm eager to get on with something). The only day I don't really play it is Sundays. But playing at work involves me copying my game save every day, so like you I've had loads of back-ups I can utilise if I get a big corruption or something similar (has come in handy a few times!)
My current game save is only 710mb tho. I haven explored massively, I tend to make use of tools like AMIDST to locate biomes - I did this to locate a Mesa biome and an Ice Spikes (where my 2nd & 3rd bases are built). I reached these via the Nether, so there are actually no overworld connections between some of my bases. I have a rule also I try to explore only in one of two directions from each new base at the start - this leaves unexplored areas close by a base, and when an update adds a new thing that cant be found in old generated areas, I'm usually lucky in that I don't have to go far to locate new stuff. I think my furthest explored point from spawn is X=12800, Z=-10800 or so.
You base is quite a size! I quite like the concept of large bases, but I also like to have everything to hand, so I usually end up quite compact. I imagine my three current bases (my one at the Mesa I demolished as I decided I didn't like the design and is awaiting a new build) could fit in the area of your Castle with room to spare
77 levels of experience you lost!? Goddamn, I enchant religiously every 30 or so I get.
Mintutor now works in 1.13!
MrKite & Mc_Etlam ... I salute you!
Day 4,383 for me. Good to know! Thanks!
Like I say, this world was created July 2, 2014 in 1.7.10, but I've taken several long breaks, so it's no surprise I've played less than you. My last break was eight months straight, and I know I've taken two more that were around six months each.
I've probably covered most area between 10 km. I have a wall with 4x4 fully zoomed out maps, so that's an area of 8,192 meters square if I did my math right, but I've explored a great deal more. In my sig, there's a link to a story where I searched for a jungle on horseback and found one 24 km away as the crow flies.
I won't use ADMIST. I enjoy exploration most of all, so that would ruin my favorite activity!
I have used MCMap, which creates a render of explored areas, but I stopped it last time when it rendered a compressed image of more than 100 GB and wasn't even half finished. So, I can't render it any longer. I did have an image with three multi-year worlds (TheMasterCaver's included) compared to mine when it was young, and all three combined weren't half as big as mine. My world has tripped in size since then.
I stopped regularly enchanting. I don't need any more Protection IV books or whatever. I have several double chest full of them, and sorting and storing them became a pain. I could rebuild a max-enchant anything with my current library, so I'm done spending time at the enchanting table.
You and I both share the want for a base with everything to be close at hand. Castle Midgard is actually little more than a (highly-decorated) traffic controller. All paths, halls and corridors lead to one place as quickly and efficiently as possible with little regard to aesthetic design. That place is Old Tower:
(Above) Facing West; Castle Midgard—which means "middle enclosure" in Old Norse—is situated in the middle of the four maps
(Above) Facing Southeast
(Above) Facing Southwest
(Above) Facing Northeast
And, here I am in this same room Oct. 13, 2014, proudly displaying my first ever suit of diamond armor, getting ready to summon a Wither for the first time:
Compared to the first picture, one can see almost nothing has been moved or replaced, just decorations hung on the wall. However, a keen eye might notice the bed was moved over one block to the south in order to accommodate a double chest there on the west wall. It's the same bed and the first one ever made in the world.
The trapdoor in the northeast corner leads immediately down to a small room with six furnaces and more storage. It was the "basement" back in the day when Old Tower was a small, stand-alone fort and my first base:
(Above) Oct. 13, 2014
(Above) Also Oct. 13, 2014, the day the first Wither was slain
Notice Bleach Bone Forest surrounds the fort. I cleared and terraformed the area around the castle long ago (but in the Diamond Age). It was difficult while dodging zombies, but I tried to get a screenshot as close to the above one as I could:
As one can see, Old Tower remains the same as it did years ago. The castle was built around it, because, like I say, it's just a (decorative) traffic controller. The stairs and entrances and doors are just there to make getting to Old Tower quicker from any cardinal direction.
What about the tall tower? Well, I built it before I knew of "bow boosting" with the elytra. I needed a platform at Y=256, the build height limit, to launch. Just like the rest of the castle, which was built little by little over the years, it's there for practical reasons. It's also visible from just about any location within the 32 chunk render distance.
As massive as Castle Midgard is on the outside, it's even larger below the surface, but we'll save those pics for another post.
Oh, and I did take the obsidian with an Efficiency V pick. I carry two: "Everbite," Silk Touch, Mending, Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, and "Stoneshatter," Fortune III, Mending, Efficiency V, Unbreaking III.
No game play report today, but thanks for reading! :-)
My short story-like journals; quick-and-easy reads:
My Quest for Elytra Complete! (Pic Intense, End-Game Spoilers)
[Journal & Pics] After a Year and a Half, I Finally Found a Jungle
FrozenCore: Hardcore Death; 3/20/15 to 5/3/15; Eight Weeks on a Frozen World in Pictures
Here is the image that you are referring to; even at 10% of original size it is still 7659 pixels across; my own world is in the lower-left corner:
Since then I've doubled the size of my own world, with 8,134 in-game days of playtime (111.43 days in the stats, which reflects the actual time spent and is almost exactly double the time as of the renderings above, taken from this post); as in your case I have not played it consistently since I started it on March 28, 2013, with three breaks of 6-12 months spent on other worlds, including more than 1,600 in-game days spent in a world I played between January-May this year (my average daily playtime is around 3.5 hours; the only real "breaks" that I've taken since I started playing Minecraft were to finish off a mod, most recently a few weeks prior to my most recent world).
While not as large as many other worlds (at least in this thread, as I know that many do not play on the same worlds for years) this is by far the largest and most-played world that I have; here are surface renderings of most of my worlds (despite appearances the latter four worlds were created in 1.6.4, not 1.7+, using my own mods, which would reflect how I'd mod 1.7+ if I ever played in those versions - I never go out of my way to find anything other than a stronghold and also do not like using tools like AMIDST to find biomes; when I used Unmined to see what I've explored I even make a copy and trim away unexplored chunks before rendering the underground; World1v2 and World1v3 (not shown) used the same seed as World1 except caves were altered; TMCWv1 also used the same seed but biomes were also changed):
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
That's a great image, but it's actually not. I can find neither that image nor the one I'm talking about, though I really looked. I'll look later. It's my girlfriend's birthday and I'm more than half lit.
I imagine my world is now larger than that whole image—whitespace and all.
Your World 1 is looking good though! Mighty fine area of exploration, especially considering you've traversed it pretty much all under ground! Amazing!
My short story-like journals; quick-and-easy reads:
My Quest for Elytra Complete! (Pic Intense, End-Game Spoilers)
[Journal & Pics] After a Year and a Half, I Finally Found a Jungle
FrozenCore: Hardcore Death; 3/20/15 to 5/3/15; Eight Weeks on a Frozen World in Pictures
Goddamn,. this thread is nearly on to page 2!
*initiates rescue*
Well Mr Sharpe, I have some stats for you comparing that gold farm in #1 with mine ...
Sharpe Farm (surface area 23x23) ...
20 portals (5 groups, 4x 23x23, 4x 19x19, 4x 15x15, 4x 11x11, 4x 7x7)
5460 portal blocks,
980 Obsidian (- corners @ 8 blocks per portal group = 940)
Portal block to Obsidian ratio = 5.57 (5460/980) - better ratio because more portals used shared obsidian
My Farm (surface area 36x23) ...
18 portals (18 x 23x23)
7938 portal blocks
1584 Obsidian (-corners (@ 4 blocks per portal = 1512)
Portal block to Obsidian ratio = 5.01 (7938/1584)
Mintutor now works in 1.13!
MrKite & Mc_Etlam ... I salute you!
Haha! Very well, you've won me over!
I'll be happy to use your design, especially since it includes both an AFK killing floor and a switchable collection area for use with a Looting sword.
I'm clearing out an area right now! Expect me to be a source of great annoyance for you in the coming days, Mr. Architect!
You took my quote out of context:
Clearly, I'm specifically talking about large outdoor grass areas—"lawns."
It is common practice in the Minecraft community to use green carpet to create a look of a mowed lawn with alternating light and dark stripes, for example:
I didn't come up with the method; I've seen it on several builds.
Here's the difference:
Like I say, I personally prefer the dark contrast, but I didn't start this thread to compare colors or discuss whether or not there needs to be a method for preventing mob spawning or lighting large areas. Other places on these forums as well as Reddit's r/MinecraftSuggestions is rife with conversation about all that.
My short story-like journals; quick-and-easy reads:
My Quest for Elytra Complete! (Pic Intense, End-Game Spoilers)
[Journal & Pics] After a Year and a Half, I Finally Found a Jungle
FrozenCore: Hardcore Death; 3/20/15 to 5/3/15; Eight Weeks on a Frozen World in Pictures