So I have a recurring rage deletion/i'm bored of this world problem. My solution, a progress log on here to force me to keep the world (I actually want to build something grand which is hard to do when you start a new world every two or three days. I have always had the intention of building a roughly 1000 block x 1000 block city in minecraft with an underground rail system, several districts pinpointing different building and roles in the city and roads (and now we have concrete this is even better). So that's what I'm going to try and do with this new world, literally called "Don't Delete The World This Time". This may actually work or I may disappear after deleting my world in a few weeks lets see. I can envisage what it looks like in my head, although whether it comes out like that is another question.
I haven't started building anything yet but I've got a two-bob mineshaft set up and a few farms ready to gather resources for this project.
I've went with chicken, cows and wheat to start off
The informative stuff - this world is in 1.12.1 and the difficulty is set to hard. It is pure vanilla with no mods and default resource pack.
By the way you're writing this, it already seems you're extremely annoyed and angry at your world
That's absolutely not the intention or vibe I was going for. It's a great little world so far, I wrote this in a tea break from playing so it's rushed; as my little scatter brain wanted to go back to playing - to me that's a damn good sign i'm loving the world. Landed in a taiga biome with some plains and little hills nearby and set my little farms up in the corner of the plains biomes with a lovely view out onto the horizon with a mixture of variety, which is perfect for my city plan; I can see the different districts in my head and am excited at myself. I'm annoyed at my own ability to stick with worlds that generally have nothing wrong with them; I quite like this world. I've been playing since 2012 so the early game stuff is incredibly "going through the motions" but still quite fun to do. That's why I want to keep this world for far longer than normal; to get to the reason I started playing minecraft in the first place; grand builds I saw other people make and wanted to make myself. I'm definitely not annoyed or angry at it, in fact I'm positively looking forward to playing in it. The Don't Delete This World This Time stuff was primarily a joke at that expanse.
The farms are up and running, and there's enough food to help me survive gradually growing up.
So here's the chicken farm, simple but effective for now and started collecting eggs for an automated farm down the line;
And here's my lovely cows (or cow and bull; how else would they have made a baby moo moo), who need a name Daisy and Dan perhaps with the wheat farm in the foreground.
And the loot from my mining, minus a few diamonds and some other stuff I lost in an incident with some lava! Teach me to go caving with only an iron sword and no armour for protection.
I feel the need to point out that this is not my primary mineshaft. Or if it is to turn out to be so; it very much must be decorated a little bit, and expanded so chests can go in the middle.
The next step is constructing a base. Every good Steve needs somewhere to live outside of his mine shaft and this Steve is no exception. But it follows the same format that I've tried and tested over the years; down to Level 12 with a 123 strip, 123 strip system going. Took rather longer than normal to finally hit upon diamonds, but when i did there was two large veins with in a few blocks of eachother.
So after several hours of clearing a bit of land, mining and trying to build a house that looked good a large number of deaths by mobs in the process lead me to do what I should have done in the first place, built something functional to hide in until I can go and find some sheep, a task rapidly creeping up the priority list.
So I cleared away the area and put a little hut in her.
It's not quite finished as it needs a path to go up towards it. That said it has all the functionality and space I need at this stage in my game, although no doubt will either be demolished at some point or incorporated into a larger housing structure.
And lastly just a reminder that if you're ever in your mineshaft and a tunnel hits water a few blocks or so in it's still worth lighting that tunnel up;
Strange goals for a survival world. But understandable.
You seem to skip a lot of detail. The things you write per post, I feel, are a bit short. I understand that you are trying to skip over the boring bits, and it does look like you do spend an awfully long time mining, but this makes the content for everything else relatively small. Many survival journals I've seen are a bit bigger per installation.
However, I do look forward to what you have planned to build. Also, feel free to disregard anything I just said.
Strange goals for a survival world. But understandable.
You seem to skip a lot of detail. The things you write per post, I feel, are a bit short. I understand that you are trying to skip over the boring bits, and it does look like you do spend an awfully long time mining, but this makes the content for everything else relatively small. Many survival journals I've seen are a bit bigger per installation.
However, I do look forward to what you have planned to build. Also, feel free to disregard anything I just said.
No, I'm all for constructive criticism. I'm not intending on spending quite this much time mining as the world progresses but as it starts it's nice to have a bank of stuff ready at the moment. I'll try and include some of the more "boring bits" if people are interested in them. One of those I've noticed is some of the local exploration and terrain so I'll throw that in the next update. (I'm going on a sheep-hunt soon so will have the opportunity do so).
I don't think my goal is as simple as build something, the city I've planned includes a variety of different districts. With a sort of tale of two cities affect trying to go on with it. I find it a bit hard to explain when it's the fruits of an idea; especially as I want the freedom to go and work away from the primary project for a little while - I'm not interested in this but lets going make a guardian farm or whatever and then come back to it - but I'm sort of looking at a rich area where businesses are primarily city centre types like large national banks and trading markets alongside contrasted with an area where the more blue collar industries such as warehouses and factories are located - and the residential districts varying between modern suburban house and plush apartment block districts made out of more expensive looking blocks and the build and a much more impoverished and run down sort of area where the farms are elder style cut and grabs and the builds are very rustic in their appearance (lots of patched over roofs, mossy cobblestone, wooden shacks, and weeds growing around them). I'm also really keen on getting the minecart transport system to work as a kind of london underground/subway where it links well between the districts on circular lines that occasionally intersect eachother. but enables people to get from the different areas of the city effectively. So I need to plan the areas effectively in order to avoid running under a basement for a house I've built. Hopefully this sort of background to the story in my head when approaching this world helps you somewhat in picturing where this might go. For me this is loose enough to provide a lot of freedom with what I build in this world but still provides a mechanism to avoid getting bored with the world, in having an end goal. (I know I could have chosen one of the more common ones like kill the ender dragon, but whatever). Also black concrete provides such a wonderful opportunity here for a trunk road/dual carriageway cutting through or round the city. I think part of what I need to do is sit down and hammer out little parts of this project to focus on to make this a bit clearer.
The best comparison I can think of two what I'm trying to build in terms of a real life city is your London or Beijing, where the extremely rich live alongside some of the poorest people in the country just a few miles from eachother - although this is true for many many more cities London and Beijing are well-known examples is a well-known example (although nowhere near to the extent this was the case just twenty or thirty years ago with regards to London). The build hopefully will end with a contrast of areas like these.
I've been laying off updating for a few days as I've been busy mining much of the time, and as exciting as finding a few good ores is for me whilst I'm playing the game it's not the most interesting of things to put into an update; especially as I took my eye off my level and mined just above diamond level for a few hundred blocks. Derp. Almost a rage quit. However some things are starting to come together in this world now. I've decided to build my functional areas underneath my base as this provides an easy way to hide it should the city expand towards this area at all, as it could well do. The first of these functional builds was the necessity of an industrial furnace. Due to the plan to use a rail system I am going to need an absolute motherton of ironing and don't exactly relish the idea of manually loading it into furnaces. As I've yet to dip my toe into the nether I needed a system that didn't use any comparators so I scouted around online for a good design. The least resource heavy of the designs I could find is the minecart with chest system using 8 furnances on each side and powered rails to function. Welsknight of hermitcraft did a ; whilst I'm sure there's other similar ones out there this is the one I used for my reference point.
Once the basics were built we were left with a good working system that was functional but by good are minecraft mechanics in dire need of covering up - the hopper has to be one of the worst culprits for not working in most builds (of the mechanical blocks before anyone shouts sponge at me) ;
Thankfully that was incredibly easy to do, I did experiment with blocks in front of the furnaces but stairs definitely work better;
Finally the work-horse needed a roof and the back of house needed tidying up a little bit. Tidying up the back areas of builds isn't something I'd normally do as often I've liked to take a - even you are rarely going to be in here attitude, so putting floor and roof in isn't much but it just lifts the area quite well.
The most frustrating part of this build had to be gathering the gold and iron for the build; especially as I was smelting it the good old fashioned way. Not very fun at all. The only major flaw in this system is the sheer noise the mine carts with chest make as it runs up and down smelting your items, for an early game smelter it's reasonably efficient - and at this point I'm thankful of anything that smelts items whilst I sort out my incredibly untidy chests - but I intend to replace it with something much more industrial in it's scale later on in my world. (Hidden inside a warehouse build within the city in the same manner I plan to disguise a number of my redstone contraptions to make them accessible and fit the surroundings). However it burned through a double chest of cobblestone into stone to be used for stone brick (more on that in a future log) in a not to shabby 10-15 minute period. Another pain the rear end in the build progress was that I initially built the entire system from north to south which obviously didn't work very well.
Another thing of note is I made a bow and crafted my own arrows. This might seem not worthy of a mention to many more high-level players but as someone who usually just plays with a sword it was a nice change of pace for me. The combat aide it gives you left me wondering why the hell I hadn't started doing this as soon as 1.9 came out; how many headaches I might have saved over the years. The ability to bounce a creeper back, take out zombies from a number of blocks away and not panic completely every time I see a skeleton (but enchantments might be needed to take away any fear; another area I haven't dabbled in too much and plan to this world). I feel like this world is becoming more about unlocking the joy of the game in things I've never really made use of before, and it's adding a fresh take to it. Keeping it exciting. Here's me proudly crafting an arrow, the first of many I hope. It was also immediately put to use to dispatch a skelly as there was a area above me they could spawn in.
The next step is to change the make shift storage area up so she's a bit more pleasant to look at; although I don't see much need to automate it yet as there isn't too many resources in there yet and so much iron would be required to put the system I want in. I also need to add ladders between the chests as they grow up the rooms walls. I'm not a great fan of the blanket stone brick here, but know it's going to be covered by chests so don't see the need to fix it. However certainly reminds me a need some more inventive ideas for actual builds.
(Btw I changed my resource pack when I was playing earlier which is why there's a mixture of default and the DokuCraft The Legacy Continues Dwarven 32x pack in the images above. )
The initial getting sorted area to gather up some resources - i.e my personal base is, bar the house and animal pens I built at the start ( quite like the idea of a crappy minecraft starter house leading to a rather more polished base hidden beneath the surface). Once I move to my main area for the city (I need to do some exploring); then many builds will be above ground but many will also be below.
",palatino,serif">It's looking awesome so far! Personally, I still haven't managed to fix my problem of deleting worlds not long after creating them. I always get bored and want something new, thinking it'll be better with a new location and fresh thoughts. (Sigh...) Maybe I should start an Adventure Log like you to keep me from repeating the same thing.
Thanks. It's certainly helping so far as those moments where I feel like I'm not doing much I can come and read through this or flick through the screenshots I saved for this (far more numerous than the number I actually put in posts). And my multiplayer server time has completely dwindled since starting this world as well.
So what have I been up to?
Well firstly I switched back to the default resource pack, me and dwarven concrete didn't get on in the test world and it doesn't fit what I want. I might try and find a 32x faithful one but on the other hand my frames have gone up a bit since changing back as this computer isn't the most powerful on the planet.
But in terms of the world; there's been steady, plodding progress. I did a little bit of wandering about to see what was nearby. There's some extreme hills a mere few hundred blocks away, as well as a river and some plains/forest biomes. Given the new generation mechanics I'm happy with this level of variety among my local areas, but it does mean I may have to travel a considerable distance to locate a much needed desert for making all the concrete I plan to use in the big build and for another project; can you guess what that might be?
I built a nether portal next to my farms - which now include sugar cane - on the surface and managed to gather my first quartz and first magma blocks of this world; from the wiki magma blocks don't looks as impressive as they did when I saw them, but I'm sure there damage dealing powers can be utilized in some form of mob trap down the line; although by the looks of it you'd need to position them below the mob rather than in front due to pathfinding away from them, something to knock up in the test world when I've cleared up all the donkeys and filled in the tnt holes or just ran away a few hundred blocks (don't ask, got rather carried away with the donkey spawn egg and attempted to throw tnt at the problem which sort of but didn't really worked.) That nether portal naturally required obsidian making in the mine;
I've done rather a lot of dying as well. However that's calmed down a hell of a lot now that I've managed to find myself some sugar cane and start making the enchanting set up. It's short a few book shelves but she's pumping out some decent starter enchantments, and I managed to get Looting II from a book I found in a spider spawner dungeon in my base. So I've got a sword with knockback, looting II and a pickaxe with Unbreaking I and Efficiency II. There I was casually digging down a route for my minecart track to the mineshaft to go, when I noticed a heck of a lot of spider noises underneath me, a few seconds later I notice the mass of spiders protruding from the dungeon. The majority of the loot wasn't too great, however there was plenty of string (meaning I can finally craft a bed as I didn't find any sheep on my exploration and gave up). The exception to the not to great was a Looting II enchantment book and a saddle and lead.
With the discovery of the spider spawner the next task surely has to be an xp grinder, given that it's literally in my base. I've found a decent design on line that requires absolutely no redstone knowledge and very little in the way of resource investments - the only one I can think of is hoppers that I'm going to add so I can collect the loot when I'm killing them as the original design doesn't allow for that. However I now have about eight or nine stacks of iron, so I can probably spare that. I managed to get a screenshot while fighting the spiders off;
Also I've decided I'm going to need sea lanterns at some point - as no other lighting works with my futuristic design for the underground rail network. Which means building a guardian farm. May take some willpower to get through that task, but the rewards will certainly be worth it as I can see a use for prismarine within the city as well.
I haven't deleted the world. I'm currently in the process of deforesting the city limits - a 1,000 block by 1,000 block square; there's a number of large taiga and forest biomes in the area. After that I will need to flatten a few extreme hills biomes and rebuild the landscape. This is obviously extremely monotonous and as I only have a couple of hours a day at most to dedicate to minecraft at the minute slow process, i'll try and keep some before and after picks going, but while I'm clearing this area down for the city I don't really see the need for long detail posts that boil down to "I made an axe, i used an axe" When there's some proper building work to show i'll be back.
So I have a recurring rage deletion/i'm bored of this world problem. My solution, a progress log on here to force me to keep the world (I actually want to build something grand which is hard to do when you start a new world every two or three days. I have always had the intention of building a roughly 1000 block x 1000 block city in minecraft with an underground rail system, several districts pinpointing different building and roles in the city and roads (and now we have concrete this is even better). So that's what I'm going to try and do with this new world, literally called "Don't Delete The World This Time". This may actually work or I may disappear after deleting my world in a few weeks lets see. I can envisage what it looks like in my head, although whether it comes out like that is another question.
I haven't started building anything yet but I've got a two-bob mineshaft set up and a few farms ready to gather resources for this project.
I've went with chicken, cows and wheat to start off
The informative stuff - this world is in 1.12.1 and the difficulty is set to hard. It is pure vanilla with no mods and default resource pack.
I'll post screenies later.
By the way you're writing this, it already seems you're extremely annoyed and angry at your world
That's absolutely not the intention or vibe I was going for. It's a great little world so far, I wrote this in a tea break from playing so it's rushed; as my little scatter brain wanted to go back to playing - to me that's a damn good sign i'm loving the world. Landed in a taiga biome with some plains and little hills nearby and set my little farms up in the corner of the plains biomes with a lovely view out onto the horizon with a mixture of variety, which is perfect for my city plan; I can see the different districts in my head and am excited at myself. I'm annoyed at my own ability to stick with worlds that generally have nothing wrong with them; I quite like this world. I've been playing since 2012 so the early game stuff is incredibly "going through the motions" but still quite fun to do. That's why I want to keep this world for far longer than normal; to get to the reason I started playing minecraft in the first place; grand builds I saw other people make and wanted to make myself. I'm definitely not annoyed or angry at it, in fact I'm positively looking forward to playing in it. The Don't Delete This World This Time stuff was primarily a joke at that expanse.
The farms are up and running, and there's enough food to help me survive gradually growing up.
So here's the chicken farm, simple but effective for now and started collecting eggs for an automated farm down the line;
And here's my lovely cows (or cow and bull; how else would they have made a baby moo moo), who need a name Daisy and Dan perhaps with the wheat farm in the foreground.
And the loot from my mining, minus a few diamonds and some other stuff I lost in an incident with some lava! Teach me to go caving with only an iron sword and no armour for protection.
I feel the need to point out that this is not my primary mineshaft. Or if it is to turn out to be so; it very much must be decorated a little bit, and expanded so chests can go in the middle.
The next step is constructing a base. Every good Steve needs somewhere to live outside of his mine shaft and this Steve is no exception. But it follows the same format that I've tried and tested over the years; down to Level 12 with a 123 strip, 123 strip system going. Took rather longer than normal to finally hit upon diamonds, but when i did there was two large veins with in a few blocks of eachother.
So after several hours of clearing a bit of land, mining and trying to build a house that looked good a large number of deaths by mobs in the process lead me to do what I should have done in the first place, built something functional to hide in until I can go and find some sheep, a task rapidly creeping up the priority list.
So I cleared away the area and put a little hut in her.
It's not quite finished as it needs a path to go up towards it. That said it has all the functionality and space I need at this stage in my game, although no doubt will either be demolished at some point or incorporated into a larger housing structure.
And lastly just a reminder that if you're ever in your mineshaft and a tunnel hits water a few blocks or so in it's still worth lighting that tunnel up;
So, your mains goals are:
- Don't delete this world.
- Build something?
Strange goals for a survival world. But understandable.
You seem to skip a lot of detail. The things you write per post, I feel, are a bit short. I understand that you are trying to skip over the boring bits, and it does look like you do spend an awfully long time mining, but this makes the content for everything else relatively small. Many survival journals I've seen are a bit bigger per installation.
However, I do look forward to what you have planned to build. Also, feel free to disregard anything I just said.
You can just call me Canary.
How not to look like a total fool in the forum games
No, I'm all for constructive criticism. I'm not intending on spending quite this much time mining as the world progresses but as it starts it's nice to have a bank of stuff ready at the moment. I'll try and include some of the more "boring bits" if people are interested in them. One of those I've noticed is some of the local exploration and terrain so I'll throw that in the next update. (I'm going on a sheep-hunt soon so will have the opportunity do so).
I don't think my goal is as simple as build something, the city I've planned includes a variety of different districts. With a sort of tale of two cities affect trying to go on with it. I find it a bit hard to explain when it's the fruits of an idea; especially as I want the freedom to go and work away from the primary project for a little while - I'm not interested in this but lets going make a guardian farm or whatever and then come back to it - but I'm sort of looking at a rich area where businesses are primarily city centre types like large national banks and trading markets alongside contrasted with an area where the more blue collar industries such as warehouses and factories are located - and the residential districts varying between modern suburban house and plush apartment block districts made out of more expensive looking blocks and the build and a much more impoverished and run down sort of area where the farms are elder style cut and grabs and the builds are very rustic in their appearance (lots of patched over roofs, mossy cobblestone, wooden shacks, and weeds growing around them). I'm also really keen on getting the minecart transport system to work as a kind of london underground/subway where it links well between the districts on circular lines that occasionally intersect eachother. but enables people to get from the different areas of the city effectively. So I need to plan the areas effectively in order to avoid running under a basement for a house I've built. Hopefully this sort of background to the story in my head when approaching this world helps you somewhat in picturing where this might go. For me this is loose enough to provide a lot of freedom with what I build in this world but still provides a mechanism to avoid getting bored with the world, in having an end goal. (I know I could have chosen one of the more common ones like kill the ender dragon, but whatever). Also black concrete provides such a wonderful opportunity here for a trunk road/dual carriageway cutting through or round the city. I think part of what I need to do is sit down and hammer out little parts of this project to focus on to make this a bit clearer.
The best comparison I can think of two what I'm trying to build in terms of a real life city is your London or Beijing, where the extremely rich live alongside some of the poorest people in the country just a few miles from eachother - although this is true for many many more cities London and Beijing are well-known examples is a well-known example (although nowhere near to the extent this was the case just twenty or thirty years ago with regards to London). The build hopefully will end with a contrast of areas like these.
I've been laying off updating for a few days as I've been busy mining much of the time, and as exciting as finding a few good ores is for me whilst I'm playing the game it's not the most interesting of things to put into an update; especially as I took my eye off my level and mined just above diamond level for a few hundred blocks. Derp. Almost a rage quit. However some things are starting to come together in this world now. I've decided to build my functional areas underneath my base as this provides an easy way to hide it should the city expand towards this area at all, as it could well do. The first of these functional builds was the necessity of an industrial furnace. Due to the plan to use a rail system I am going to need an absolute motherton of ironing and don't exactly relish the idea of manually loading it into furnaces. As I've yet to dip my toe into the nether I needed a system that didn't use any comparators so I scouted around online for a good design. The least resource heavy of the designs I could find is the minecart with chest system using 8 furnances on each side and powered rails to function. Welsknight of hermitcraft did a ; whilst I'm sure there's other similar ones out there this is the one I used for my reference point.
Once the basics were built we were left with a good working system that was functional but by good are minecraft mechanics in dire need of covering up - the hopper has to be one of the worst culprits for not working in most builds (of the mechanical blocks before anyone shouts sponge at me) ;
Thankfully that was incredibly easy to do, I did experiment with blocks in front of the furnaces but stairs definitely work better;
Finally the work-horse needed a roof and the back of house needed tidying up a little bit. Tidying up the back areas of builds isn't something I'd normally do as often I've liked to take a - even you are rarely going to be in here attitude, so putting floor and roof in isn't much but it just lifts the area quite well.
The most frustrating part of this build had to be gathering the gold and iron for the build; especially as I was smelting it the good old fashioned way. Not very fun at all. The only major flaw in this system is the sheer noise the mine carts with chest make as it runs up and down smelting your items, for an early game smelter it's reasonably efficient - and at this point I'm thankful of anything that smelts items whilst I sort out my incredibly untidy chests - but I intend to replace it with something much more industrial in it's scale later on in my world. (Hidden inside a warehouse build within the city in the same manner I plan to disguise a number of my redstone contraptions to make them accessible and fit the surroundings). However it burned through a double chest of cobblestone into stone to be used for stone brick (more on that in a future log) in a not to shabby 10-15 minute period. Another pain the rear end in the build progress was that I initially built the entire system from north to south which obviously didn't work very well.
Another thing of note is I made a bow and crafted my own arrows. This might seem not worthy of a mention to many more high-level players but as someone who usually just plays with a sword it was a nice change of pace for me. The combat aide it gives you left me wondering why the hell I hadn't started doing this as soon as 1.9 came out; how many headaches I might have saved over the years. The ability to bounce a creeper back, take out zombies from a number of blocks away and not panic completely every time I see a skeleton (but enchantments might be needed to take away any fear; another area I haven't dabbled in too much and plan to this world). I feel like this world is becoming more about unlocking the joy of the game in things I've never really made use of before, and it's adding a fresh take to it. Keeping it exciting. Here's me proudly crafting an arrow, the first of many I hope. It was also immediately put to use to dispatch a skelly as there was a area above me they could spawn in.
The next step is to change the make shift storage area up so she's a bit more pleasant to look at; although I don't see much need to automate it yet as there isn't too many resources in there yet and so much iron would be required to put the system I want in. I also need to add ladders between the chests as they grow up the rooms walls. I'm not a great fan of the blanket stone brick here, but know it's going to be covered by chests so don't see the need to fix it. However certainly reminds me a need some more inventive ideas for actual builds.
(Btw I changed my resource pack when I was playing earlier which is why there's a mixture of default and the DokuCraft The Legacy Continues Dwarven 32x pack in the images above. )
Is the whole complex underground?
The initial getting sorted area to gather up some resources - i.e my personal base is, bar the house and animal pens I built at the start ( quite like the idea of a crappy minecraft starter house leading to a rather more polished base hidden beneath the surface). Once I move to my main area for the city (I need to do some exploring); then many builds will be above ground but many will also be below.
Thanks. It's certainly helping so far as those moments where I feel like I'm not doing much I can come and read through this or flick through the screenshots I saved for this (far more numerous than the number I actually put in posts). And my multiplayer server time has completely dwindled since starting this world as well.
So what have I been up to?
Well firstly I switched back to the default resource pack, me and dwarven concrete didn't get on in the test world and it doesn't fit what I want. I might try and find a 32x faithful one but on the other hand my frames have gone up a bit since changing back as this computer isn't the most powerful on the planet.
But in terms of the world; there's been steady, plodding progress. I did a little bit of wandering about to see what was nearby. There's some extreme hills a mere few hundred blocks away, as well as a river and some plains/forest biomes. Given the new generation mechanics I'm happy with this level of variety among my local areas, but it does mean I may have to travel a considerable distance to locate a much needed desert for making all the concrete I plan to use in the big build and for another project; can you guess what that might be?
I built a nether portal next to my farms - which now include sugar cane - on the surface and managed to gather my first quartz and first magma blocks of this world; from the wiki magma blocks don't looks as impressive as they did when I saw them, but I'm sure there damage dealing powers can be utilized in some form of mob trap down the line; although by the looks of it you'd need to position them below the mob rather than in front due to pathfinding away from them, something to knock up in the test world when I've cleared up all the donkeys and filled in the tnt holes or just ran away a few hundred blocks (don't ask, got rather carried away with the donkey spawn egg and attempted to throw tnt at the problem which sort of but didn't really worked.) That nether portal naturally required obsidian making in the mine;
I've done rather a lot of dying as well. However that's calmed down a hell of a lot now that I've managed to find myself some sugar cane and start making the enchanting set up. It's short a few book shelves but she's pumping out some decent starter enchantments, and I managed to get Looting II from a book I found in a spider spawner dungeon in my base. So I've got a sword with knockback, looting II and a pickaxe with Unbreaking I and Efficiency II. There I was casually digging down a route for my minecart track to the mineshaft to go, when I noticed a heck of a lot of spider noises underneath me, a few seconds later I notice the mass of spiders protruding from the dungeon. The majority of the loot wasn't too great, however there was plenty of string (meaning I can finally craft a bed as I didn't find any sheep on my exploration and gave up). The exception to the not to great was a Looting II enchantment book and a saddle and lead.
With the discovery of the spider spawner the next task surely has to be an xp grinder, given that it's literally in my base. I've found a decent design on line that requires absolutely no redstone knowledge and very little in the way of resource investments - the only one I can think of is hoppers that I'm going to add so I can collect the loot when I'm killing them as the original design doesn't allow for that. However I now have about eight or nine stacks of iron, so I can probably spare that. I managed to get a screenshot while fighting the spiders off;
Also I've decided I'm going to need sea lanterns at some point - as no other lighting works with my futuristic design for the underground rail network. Which means building a guardian farm. May take some willpower to get through that task, but the rewards will certainly be worth it as I can see a use for prismarine within the city as well.
Hey just a mini update,
I haven't deleted the world. I'm currently in the process of deforesting the city limits - a 1,000 block by 1,000 block square; there's a number of large taiga and forest biomes in the area. After that I will need to flatten a few extreme hills biomes and rebuild the landscape. This is obviously extremely monotonous and as I only have a couple of hours a day at most to dedicate to minecraft at the minute slow process, i'll try and keep some before and after picks going, but while I'm clearing this area down for the city I don't really see the need for long detail posts that boil down to "I made an axe, i used an axe" When there's some proper building work to show i'll be back.