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I've been visiting Cowton and am now on my way back to spawn, riding along Alpha Trail. I've just upgraded my world from 1.18 to 1.19 and for the first time ever am running it in a modpack, "Fabulously Optimized". I was reluctant to do so as I valued Ancient Days' vanilla purity but circumstances have made it inevitable if I wish to play Minecraft with increased world height at a tolerable FPS.

I pass Cowton Tannery. Ahead of me now is the Explorer's Guild (1.4.7) and the Burned Hound Inn (1.2.5). I know this ancient road so well that I steer by muscle memory, guiding Dredd smoothly around the turns with no conscious thought. My mind is elsewhere, focused on the task ahead.

The road rolls on beneath me as I ride past the Burned Hound without slowing. Next is the Alchemist's House, the house of Urifaren the Druid (both Beta 1.3) and the barrow mound of the first High Lord, then a hard left turn to enter the castle stables. I walk Dredd into his pen, give him a friendly pat and exit.

My destination is one of the oldest and most historically significant places in the world: the mine, ANCo Alpha. Specifically, I want something from the office of the mine overseer.

This place was founded in Alpha 1.0.5. The furnace, the crafting table, the worn wooden planks underfoot, they're all Alpha originals. The sheer weight of history in this humble little underground chamber makes the air feel heavy in my lungs.

The small chest at the back of the room contains curiosities.

Most rare items are kept in Fortress Alpha, but a few especially strange objects remain here, either because they're too fragile to be touched without destroying them, or because nobody could decide what to do with them. There are uncraftable tipped arrows, a stack of uncraftable potion bottles made in 1.12 by a mad scientist with questionable ethics, some fireworks so antique that they have no flight duration value, a bow with more enchants than a bow should have, and a minecart engraved with the incomprehensible phrase entity.minecart.rideable.name. There are also some leaves.

It's the leaves I've come for. In the modern era they're just plain old ordinary oak leaves, but they weren't always so. Before "The Flattening", they were alpha leaves, odd relics of deprecated code that displayed in inventory as black and purple missing texture cubes. I mean to use one of them as my tree's heart block.

I drop one of the leaves into my Project Box, then leave the overseer's office and return to the stables to fetch Dredd. My next stop is Tekkit Hall in the Betalands. It's not far, but there's not a lot of light left in the day and I'll need Dredd's speed.

The sun is setting as I approach Tekkit Hall. I realize suddenly that I've not brought any bonemeal with me, and mutter a curse. It's okay, there's plenty of bonemeal in the farmhouse, it's just annoying to have to make a detour when I'm already pressed for time. I tie Dredd to a lamppost and hurry over to the farmhouse to fetch the bonemeal.

My objective here is the nylium plots on the low ridge behind the house. Tekkit Hall is the only place in Ancient Days' overworld where shroomlights are farmed.

I filch nine warped nylium, then fill the hole back in with netherrack and apply the bonemeal to cover it over again. The harvested nylium goes into the Project Box. The leftover bonemeal is returned to the storage box in the cellar at Tekkit Hall.

It's full dark as I mount up and turn Dredd's head homeward. Riding through the Betalands at night is a little dangerous so I switch to third-person mode to give us a better chance of spotting and evading creepers under the trees that line the road. Tonight, the only hostile that attempts to approach is a baby zombie, which Dredd easily outpaces.

Back at spawn, I visit the Redstone Development Lab beneath Fortress Alpha and convert a stack of glowstone into redstone lamps. These, too, go into the Project Box. Then I make one more stop at ANCo Alpha to raid the minerals stockpile. The mining company possesses incredible wealth. There are stacks upon stacks of iron blocks, diamonds, gold, emeralds and lapis stored here, amassed over more than a Minecraftian millennium. But there is one mineral which is far rarer than diamond.

No, not netherite.

As yet there are no ANCo mining bases in regions containing copper, so most of what little there is in Alpha Prefecture's mineral stockpile was acquired from killing Drowned in the Parched Ocean off Bastion Island. But I cheerfully spend three of those ingots now, because I've made enough repairs to wooden structures over the years to know the risk posed by thunderstorms if I'm going to be spending a hundred days living in/as a tree.

I place the Project Box down and glance over its contents one more time. I think that's everything... It's time to go.

Once again I take the southward road from spawn, riding down through the Betalands to Tekkit Hall. From here, I turn westward and follow Tekkit Way to its terminus at Wolfpack Mire. The road continues on westward, and I keep riding--slowly, cautiously, with numerous pauses.

I have to take it slowly, because the last time I traveled this way was before the world height expansion and my laptop is not happy about having to generate 64 new y-levels of underground terrain on the fly for each fresh chunk rendered.

The road to Bunnybury Ferry was built in 1.9, but the land here is much older. For much of the westward journey I'm riding along the very edge of the Slip, the chunk border between Beta and Release. It's so named because, in a boat, you "slip" down a one block waterfall as you cross over. It makes for some picturesque sights along the way.

I'm nervous as I trot along the final stretch of road. I can't help worrying that the update to 1.19 will have broken something. At last, the remembered walls of Bunnybury Ferry rise before me. I cross the last bridge and enter the village by its east gate. Everything seems normal. I drop Dredd off at the inn's stables and stroll along the main street.

Oh, they've made a golem. I don't remember that! Neat.

I pass straight through the village without stopping and exit on foot via the west gate, now heading for the ferry terminal.

When I hop into the rowboat that sits ready in the shallows, I get a toast, "New Recipes Unlocked". What? What do you mean new recipes, it's not like I haven't used a boat befor--oh yeah, chest boats are a thing now, aren't they? OK cool I shall proceed to ignore their existence forever.

My next interim destination is just a short boat trip away. Bunnybury Island--the originator of the name.

I first came out here in 1.8 to farm rabbits. The island, two thousand blocks west of spawn, was the closest place that they could be found. So I built a house out here, and some farms for crops, and then began trading with the village across the sea because I wanted glowstone... and so Bunnybury Ferry came to be.

I'm not intending to make my world-tree here, but it's the most convenient place from which to start the final leg of the trip. After checking over the house and grounds and finding nothing amiss, I step outside to look for trouble. I don't want to continue my journey while it's dark, because I'll soon be passing close to another unprotected village, so I figure I'll amuse myself until sunrise with a spot of good old ultra-violence.

But where are all the mobs? I'm not sure exactly how the 1.18 changes to hostile mob spawning work, though I've been growing more and more concerned about my music disc farm at Cowton that doesn't seem to be producing creepers any more. I walk around a little, but I can't see anything nasty anywhere on the island, and there's plenty of spaces with zero torchlight. What's going on?

Oh--there's a zombie. Okay, they are spawning.

And there's another. And...

Augh, I shouldn't have complained!

At first light I set off again, sailing south from Bunnybury Island. From here on out, there are no more roads or bases or waystations to guide me. I'm going off folk tales and dim recollections, searching for a legend.

First I need to locate a village in a savanna that should be directly south of the island.

Yep, there it is, just as expected. Now land the boat at the village, then continue south-south-east from here keeping watch for a certain terrain feature.

There!

Where I'm standing right now is 1.8 generated terrain. That chunk border with spruces in the distance marks something different.

I proceed, crossing over from the savanna into the greener mystery country. A passing glance up at a large oak tree confirms that I'm in the right place: its logs are all aligned vertically. According to f3, this green turf I'm walking over is an ocean, if I needed any further proof that I'm in very old terrain indeed.

Now there's one last thing I need to find. It's something that was thought lost forever, searched for fruitlessly on many occasions, before being miraculously rediscovered by sheer accident in 1.12. I want to find it again.

Even having a fairly good idea of where I need to go, it still takes some work. At last I spot what I've been seeking. It's just as the ancient legends describe: a small round hill, with a couple of trees on top and a murky pool before it.

At the base of the hill, there's a door. I open the door, and the first thing I see is a sign.

I've found it.

I am standing at the endpoint of the First Grand Expedition, which took place twelve real-time or 1,200 Minecraftian years previously. Beneath this unassuming little hill is the first abandoned mineshaft ever found in this world. This is where I mean to build the mightiest and most magnificent tree this world has ever seen.

I have one hundred ingame days to do it.

It's almost time to begin. I start stripping off all my gear and stashing it in my deposit box.

I've had most of this stuff for years. My main netherite armor set used to be a diamond set that I was wearing at least in 1.7.10 and likely even before that as I used the rename trick back then to be able to repair my stuff infinitely. I know for certain that one of my swords dates back to 1.3.

I feel very vulnerable as I exit the shulker box's GUI.

Almost everything goes directly into the Ender Chest which I've placed in this old hidey-hole, not to be touched henceforth until the hundred days are done. I reserve only the Project Box shulker containing the aesthetic goodies I've picked out for myself, and two bones I picked up from killing a skeleton on the way out here. Six bonemeal won't do much but it might give me a little head-start for the early grind, which I know will likely involve a lot of tedious AFKing waiting for trees to condescend to grow.

The very last item I box is my primary pick.

Day 5725 - 99 Days Remain

There are no hostile mobs in sight as I exit the ancient burrow. That's something, at least. I would not have appreciated a visit from a creeper right now.

I ascend to the top of the hill and start punching down the duo of scrubby trees. The challenge says to pick one tree and use that, but my circumstances here are a little different. I'm pretty sure that I planted these little oaks on the hilltop back in Beta 1.8 to give me local access to wood while I was exploring the mineshaft, so they're technically not natural in the first place, and they've grown so close together that they might as well be one tree.

For my purposes, they'll be my tree.

Having removed the two scrubby oaks and collected their saplings, I dig down two blocks in the ground and place a log midway between the trees, then set my formerly-Alpha leaf block on top of that.

This is my tree's heart-block. If it gets broken, my tree is dead and so am I.

And now... we're stuck with each other. If I step off, according to the rules, I die and so does my tree.

OK, let's go. I stick one of the collected saplings down nearby and start hitting it with bonemeal. I use up five of the six bonemeal from my two salvaged bones before it condescends to grow, but it does grow.

Only into another small oak, unfortunately, but hey, it's better than nothing!

I embed some logs in the ground to "root" my way over to it, chop it down and collect the saplings, then spam all the saplings I've acquired so far all around me. I apply my final piece of bonemeal to one of them but it doesn't grow. That's another advantage Beta players would have had--bonemeal used to work instantly, bringing anything to full maturity with one click.

With that much done, I... find myself at a loose end. Is there anything else I can even do right now, or do I just have to wait around for more trees to grow? Idly I start punching the grass that's within my reach.

--A wheat seed dropped! I need that!

I manage to grab it, and spend another couple of precious logs making a crafting table and then a hoe so that I can plant it. It'll grow very slowly without water to hydrate the ground, but it should eventually grow. Getting wheat going would be a huge help as I'd be able to use excess seeds in a composter for bonemeal.

Behold the fruits of my labor thus far. A "tree". Hahahaha wow this is pathetic.

On the plus side, the oaks I've harvested so far have yielded two apples, so I'm not entirely destitute of food. My world is in hard mode as it's always been, and I'm more than a little worried about starving to death. As written, if I die my tree dies and the challenge is over but I've not decided yet whether I'll abide by that part of the ruleset. I suppose it'll depend on the circumstances when/if I die. If I do die and choose to continue regardless, it'll be a long slog to get back here from spawn, especially since Dredd is currently stabled at Bunnybury Ferry so I'll either have to walk the full length of Tekkit Way or grab a skeleton horse rental from Kirkbridge.

RNGesus smiles upon me, and a couple more small oaks grow before the advent of night. They furnish me with sufficient logs to get a tiny little one-block refuge built so that I'll have somewhere to retreat to if a skeleton wanders up here. I've also doubled the size of my wheat plantation since I managed to get a second seed from punching grass. Amazing.

Night images are post-processed to increase visibility

Nothing else is going to happen now, other than me potentially being menaced by hostile mobs. The planted saplings and my sad little wheat plot won't continue to grow without daylight. I reluctantly retreat to the refuge, close the door and go AFK, though it's strongly against my natural habits. I make a mental note: my next action, if possible, must be to get a root down into stone so that I can make a furnace and in turn craft some torches so that stuff can grow at night.

Day 5726 - 98 Days Remain

~Here comes the sun, do do do do... here comes the sun~

~It's all right~

Ah--another tree just grew! It is going to be all right.

I absolutely do not want to spend another night standing on a leaf in the dark bored out of my mind and chewing on the fact that no progress can be made until sunrise. My top priority for today is getting a taproot down into stone.

I start digging down, making a spiral stair through the dirt and placing logs as I go. Within a couple of blocks I hit stone, and the first block of stone I dig reveals something incredible...

What the--? The hill is hollow. The hill is hollow! And there's a murky pool right underneath me! I had no idea!

This is amazing. It handily solves the wheat issue. I'll just drive a taproot down into here and plant up the wheat next to the water with some torches to provide light. I can make torches now since I can easily get enough stone to craft a furnace. And never mind spending precious logs on charcoal, I can see a block of coal ore right there. Things are looking up!

By the time I've relocated the wheat to the murky pool and made myself a handful of torches, a couple more trees have spawned topside. I can save myself significant time by making an axe to chop them rather than using my hands, and I can save significant material by making tools out of stone rather than wood.

Keep your hands and feet inside at all times, this challenge is about to take off.

I had to upgrade to a stone pick to get the coal, but that's just fine. More torches please!

Now to light up the hilltop so my trees will be able to keep on growing through the night.

It's getting dark and I don't even care. I've still got stuff to do and I intend to keep doing it. As I'm spamming torches--whack-oof! What the--what just happened and why can I see nothing but leaves?

...Ah. A tree grew on top of me and smacked me flat on my face. Beta players didn't have to deal with this sort of indignity. ...Actually I think Beta players just suffocated in such a situation, so plus one to the modern era there.

By the next sunrise, I'm starting to get something that almost looks like the start of a tree.

I'm surprised and maybe even a tiny bit disappointed that nothing has attempted to approach and menace me so far. I've seen a few hostiles spawning but they've always been far away--not even zombies have come to visit me yet. Perhaps that's again to do with 1.18's changes to hostile mob spawning. I really don't understand how that side of things works. I still get swamped by annoying mobs at spawn all the time, or along the roads when I'm traveling, but out in the wilds I seem to be left entirely alone more often than not.

Day 5727 - 97 Days Remain

I'm hopeful of getting plenty of tree spawns today, because I really want to expand my tree's footprint so that I can start turning the internal space into a living area. It won't all have to be log flooring within--I'm ruling that as long as I'm inside the tree the rule about always having to touch a log is suspended, since I'm, y'know, inside the tree. I've knocked a temporary hole in the wall in the hopes of getting grass to spread into here so that I can eventually have a pretty naturistic interior. I'm thinking flowers, water pools, hanging sparkly things, all that stuff.

There's a couple of matters that I want to take care of as soon as possible. Firstly, I want a more direct means of accessing the wheat plot, because navigating the annoying log spiral every time is going to burn hunger. I figure it'll be acceptable to have a ladder-shaft running directly down there if the ladder is affixed to logs. It'll be effectively a taproot that I can climb.

Secondly, I want a better way of farming saplings as it's proving awkward to retrieve their drops scattered about on the flat ground when I have to stay on the roots--and I want every sapling, apple and stick that I can get my hands on right now. The most obvious method of keeping the drops conveniently close to home would seem to be to plant them on top of the tree.

Shortly after I clamber up to start placing dirt and planting saplings, it starts to rain.

Ugh... I don't like this. I don't like this at all. Is it time to get the lightning rod out of the shulker box and set it up? It's not a thunderstorm right now but if it does turn into one I'll move quickly on that. I'm more concerned about the rain muffling sounds, as I rely on directional hearing to warn me of the approach of hostile mobs. Nothing's come anywhere near me yet as long as I've been here, but this is the exact sort of situation where a creeper in the right place at the right time could quite easily take me out.

After planting up a bunch more saplings on the roof, and harvesting a couple of small trees that sprouted in the meantime, I spend a little time installing a taproot ladder then shimmy down it to take a look at the wheat planted up in the underground pool.

It's still not grown to maturity, but that middle one must surely be on the second to last stage by now. I dig out a little more ground and lay dirt to expand the plot in preparation to receive some more seeds.

When I climb back out--ah!

My first large oak spawn. It's about the smallest a "large" oak can be, but I'll take it! I use my windfall of wood from the large-ish oak to place some more logs around the exterior of my tree-stump, padding the walls. By the time I'm done with that, it's starting to get dark again. I double-check that every sapling currently planted outside is receiving light from a nearby torch, then step inside my tiny little tree-hollow to do some interior work.

The rain continues falling steadily all through the night, which is highly annoying but there's not much I can do about it. I've expanded the trees diameter by building more logs on the outside, which means there are now unnecessary extra logs taking up space in the interior. I spend the first part of the night cutting these back out to give myself some more working area--and also reclaim some valuable wood. The grass has now spread through, so I can patch that hole in the back wall. I retrieve the furnace from its original spot down at the murky pool, place it alongside my shulker box of prettiness-to-be-unlocked-later, construct a ladder to get up onto the dirt roof where the saplings are planted, and finally, use some of my remaining logs to craft a chest.

There are two items in the shulker box that aren't subject to restrictions: the lightning rod, and a batch of scaffolding which I threw in because I felt I was already going to be suffering enough--being forced to nerdpole every time a large oak spawns is just a step too far. I pull out the scaffolding to keep on hand.

I step back to admire my work. A fraction of a second after I take the screenshot, a sapling previously planted just outside grows straight through the wall and gives me an unexpected faceful of leaves.

Day 5728 - 96 Days Remain

I've got plans--big plans.

And the first item on the agenda for today is expanding, big time. I've amassed a little over a stack of logs already, and I mean to put them to immediate use. Firstly, I'll build outwards to increase the trunk's diameter--ah, the rain finally stopped, thank goodness.

Then I'll put dirt blocks on top of each log and plant saplings on top of the dirt blocks, so that the tree will grow itself upwards with minimal input from me. Work smarter, not harder, right?

My clever scheme requires a certain amount of climbing up and down the tree, and at this point it's now gotten tall enough that I'll take a little bit of fall damage if I just walk off. Being so used to having Feather Falling IV boots on and a stack of cooked steak in my hotbar, I don't think twice about it, until I notice that my hearts are dropping along with my satiation and decide I probably should be thinking about it quite a lot actually. I chow down on some apples to refill my hunger. It's the first time I've needed to eat since I got here, so perhaps my worries on that front were overblown.

And from now on, memo to self: use ladders or the scaffolding blocks that were brought along for this exact reason, don't keep walking off the edge like an idiot.

Ok, let's give it a little time and see how well this vertical planting strategy works.

I've spent quite a lot of my wood stockpile on the trunk diameter expansion, but I still have a good half-stack of logs left. I decide to spend some of it on an item that I suspect will be very powerful later on.

Although not so much right now as I don't yet have a surplus of organic matter to feed it. I'm still waiting for even one of my wheat to mature, and the only other things I can put in the composter are apples or saplings. The former is my only available foodstuff at the moment, and as for the latter, I really want to be planting all of those that I get.

Hm... leaves would probably work quite well as composting material, if I could get hold of two iron to make a pair of shears. Even better would be pumpkins. I'm able to see a pumpkin patch some distance to the west of here, actually, but I guesstimate that they're about fifty blocks off, and it's currently far too big an investment to consider building a rootway over to them.

It's getting dark, so I retreat to the interior of the tree for security. A few of the saplings I planted on its crown have indeed grown.

This does seem to be a viable tactic. I can tell that there'll be a significant amount of "fixing" required, getting rid of excess leaves and trimming back trees that grew into or through each other, but it looks like a reasonable way to increase the height of the tree without much active investment on my part. The somewhat arbitrary first milestone I set myself was to grow my tree at least fifteen blocks high in order to be able to use the dye plants I brought with me.

In that shulker box is a rose, a sunflower, a peony, a lilac and a cactus, the latter coming with a single piece of sand on which to plant it.

The cactus interests me primarily, as I wouldn't need bonemeal to spawn more of it, and cactus can also be composted, and it can be fairly trivially passive-farmed. I wouldn't be able to amass much of it in a reasonable time frame with just a single sand block to plant on, though, and I haven't been able to spot any sand within easy reach. The murky pool beneath the tree doesn't have sand.

Before calling an end to the session, I make one last check of the wheat farm in the murky pool.

All right! My first wheat!

Harvesting, I get one wheat and three seeds. I immediately till the other dirt blocks I'd installed and get all the seeds planted. I need to think about how I'm going to expand wheat farming in the near future, because this will surely be my most lucrative source of bonemeal.

Ugh, I wish I had a bucket. And a pair of shears. But primarily a bucket.

Day 5729 - 95 Days Remain

Oh look, a hostile mob!

Just one. Burning in the morning sun, about a million blocks away.

This complete lack of hostile spawns in this area is starting to cause me some genuine concern. I thought I was engaging in a test of raw survival skills when I set up to do this, but I'm practically playing peaceful here. I double-check my settings to ensure that I'm still on hard mode--yes I am, as I've been ever since my world was generated.

My current working theory is that there's some sort of new gigantic cave system below y0 and that's where all the spawning's going on now. This creates a significant challenge, in a somewhat different way to what I'd expected to be dealing with. Because I am going to need certain mob drops, especially string from spiders. If they're not going to spawn at night on the surface, I'm going to have to think of an alternative way to get their drops. First option--I know there's a mineshaft down below. It might be viable to send roots down and explore the mineshaft until I locate a cave spider spawner (eww) and construct a grinder (eww). I hate working with cave spiders.

Second option is to extend roots aboveground and expand my site to the point that I can move back and forth at a sufficient distance to attract attention from the surface hostiles that do spawn. That'd be safer, but likely less lucrative.

Third option is to get down deep enough to find whatever cavern it is that's hogging all the hostiles, light that thing up and return to the surface to, theoretically, enjoy increased surface spawns. Let's call that one operation endgame, because it'd be a lot of work for a level of reward I probably wouldn't even need any more by the time I'd cleared the cavern.

In the meantime, I'll start trying for some bees. It should be a 5% chance of spawning a bee nest on any freshly grown tree if there's a flower within two blocks. I won't be able to start working with said bees until I can get enough string to make a dispenser so that I can set up a sting-proof harvesting system, and I'll need honeycombs to be able to craft apiaries, so getting bees going properly is dependent on me managing to find and kill some spiders. But having even one populated nest would be a start.

The remainder of the day is spent playing a game of arboreal whack-a-mole as trees pop up one by one in variously inconvenient spots and I rush to chop them down. Maybe I shouldn't have planted so many saplings.

...Wasn't there a door there a moment ago?

As the sun goes down, I retreat to the interior of my tree to do some underground work.

I start digging down from the wheat spot by the murky pool, placing logs and ladders as I go. I'm working with oldschool ore generation in this region at least as far down as y0, so to find iron is theoretically a simple matter of getting below y63 and poking around. However, I'm not sure what y-level I'm currently at and would prefer not to look at
f3. I tell myself I'll sink the taproot deep enough to use up all the ladders I've made, and then just start digging outwards randomly and see if I can find anything.

Well, that was lucky! Two ladder blocks left in hand and there's iron right here.

Excavated, the deposit yields six raw iron. Enough for a pair of shears, and most crucially a bucket, meaning that I can relocate water sources from the water in the murky pool, which in turn will let me plant up fully hydrated wheat anywhere I like. This is a huge upgrade.

On my return to the surface... I'm no longer happy with the way the tree construction process is going.

It's a solid mass of leaves up there now. Several of the oaks have grown big and generated into and through each other, producing a cloggy mess. It makes for an interesting effect, but it's going to generate a huge amount of work for me to make this into a good looking giant tree. And this was only supposed to be an interim stage--I intended to grow my tree concentrically larger over time, mimicking natural growth.

I think this will all have to come down so that I can rebuild in a more controlled manner. Bummer.

Day 5730 - 94 Days Remain

I split the day equally between chopping...

...which involves a substantial amount of punching around blindly to find stray logs in the huge mass of leaves so the darned things will decay on their own...

...and marking out new bounds for a more substantial trunk, which may or may not end up as my final one. In the existing structure, which had been done in rather a hurry because I didn't want to die in the dark, the leaf-block "heart" wasn't centered. That was annoying me intensely, so I begin the new build expansion by counting out an equal number of blocks from the "heart" in each cardinal direction. Eleven blocks, specifically, making for an eventual diameter of twenty-three blocks. That's a big tree.

By dusk, I've gotten rid of most of the leaves, and the remainder are decaying rapidly, aside from a few suspiciously persistent clumps where I strongly suspect I've missed a floating log. I'll hunt those down tomorrow.

Now to make the outer trunk into a decent approximation of a circle. I'm aware that there are convenient pixel template guides knocking around, but I've always just done this sort of thing by eye, building a curve and tweaking it until it feels right.

Hm... no...

A bit awkward with the two-and-two, but it seems to work better than any other configuration. I'll go with this one. Just need to repeat it three more times to close the circle.

Day 5731 - 93 Days Remain

Having continued working through the night, by dawn I have a complete ring of logs for protection. Nothing will get in here now other than a spider, and I wish a spider would come in, because I want some freakin' string! It's raining again but once again I've seen no hostiles anywhere nearby throughout the night, so I'm not particularly worried any more about getting a surprise creeper to the back.

I'm regrettably starting to suspect that one or more of these performance mods are at least partially to blame for the lack of hostile spawning, as I've occasionally been able to spot hostiles far off in the distance, not moving and not burning in daylight. I recall that happening on servers in the old days: mobs spawning outside of actively modeled render distance then not despawning, filling the mob cap and preventing anything from spawning closer to players. I'll look through all the configs later and see if I can find the culprit.

For now, let's try the sapling growth method again...

I wasn't keeping track of the precise dimensions, but I've used nearly a full stack of saplings getting the whole ring planted up. This is going to be a big tree.

Barely a second after planting the last sapling, they start springing up. One here, another there--I start rushing around to replace dirt blocks beneath grown trees with logs and clear away leaves, but I can't keep up with the rate of growth.

The interior space is very up-and-down due to my having settled on the top of a hill. I'd like it to be all level ground inside, but that's going to be troublesome as I don't have enough dirt to fill in the holes, and I can't relocate the heart-block down to a more convenient y-level because that's illegal.

I come up with a solution...

If I can't have a single solid ground floor, I'll make multiple floors. Keep the heart-block where it is, and have a lower-ground floor at the level of the murky pool that I can use for a more substantial wheat farm. Excavating this lower space will also give me more dirt and stone based building material. I like that. The best sort of building project is the one that leaves (heh) you richer than you were when you started it.

Day 5732 - 92 Days Remain

I've spent most of the day working on my plan. A new level floor area on the level of the heart-block will be created by building with slabs; over the top of the slabs I'll lay dirt which will eventually become grass. Down below, on the level of the murky pool, I'll excavate to create a basement level. The material removed from this excavation--especially the dirt--can be used to complete the construction of the upper level floor.

By late night, I've got most of the upper level built and I'm continuing to clear out dirt and stone from the lower level when I hear something outside. It's not a hostile mob.

I cut a hole through the trunk to peek out.

No way... A sheep! It's so close! I have to have it!

That's it... in you come...

Regrettably, I don't see any other sheep around, but I'm able to lure the one in and trap it in a hurriedly constructed fenced enclosure, though it takes a little damage in the process. I'm very happy even though I've only acquired the one, because I'll now be able to get renewable wool for decoration.

The sheep is not to be my only visitor tonight, either.

After so long spent getting absolutely no interactions with hostile mobs, I'm now finally starting to see them approaching the tree. I'm even able to lure and kill a skeleton, scoring two bones--though regrettably he drops no arrows or leather armor. I'd have liked a bit of armor.

I believe I understand what's going on with the hostile spawns. Up until now, I've been very much stationary, effectively stuck in a single spot. Mobs don't spawn within twenty-four blocks of the player. I believe hostiles have been spawning just at the edge of range, then not despawning, likely due to one of the performance mods doing something or other to reduce lag. That issue is being at least partially mitigated now that I'm able to move around more and "jiggle" the spawning-capable regions of my tiny little mini-world.

Case in point: after dealing with the skeleton I go back to work on my excavation. A little while later, I hear something else outside. A sound that's usually highly irritating, but for once I'm relieved to hear it.

A zombie! Only one. I'm hopeful that killing him will attract others so that I can kill them in turn, as they're a potential source of carrots and potatoes--not to mention iron. Unfortunately, he's the only one that comes.

I make a point of ranging around more for the remainder of the night, going back and forth through the tree and occasionally hopping outside onto the external roots, hopeful of attracting a spider in the same way, but I'm not lucky.

Day 5733 - 91 Days Remain

It's another clear day, and I'm close to completing the upper level. The slabs are all in place and all that's left to do is finish laying dirt over.

I've got a number of saplings planted within the perimeter, and they've been growing up at random intervals here and there as I've been working. When planting, I made sure to put down some flowers near the saplings for a certain purpose. In between bouts of placing dirt I've been pausing to chop any tree that sprouted in the meantime, but then I hear something I'd been hoping for.

--That's a bee!

Most of my builds and bases in this world, even when they're newer builds, are located in old terrain for ease of access. The reason this is a concern is that I steadfastly refuse to use beds, so I'm not keen on settling ten thousand blocks out from spawn given that I'd have to travel all the way back there from worldspawn every time I died or used an End portal. Central Alpha Prefecture is old Alpha, Southport is mid Beta, Mount Silverfish is Release 1.5 and that's considered new-ish. Angeveren's Farm on Bastion Island (base built 1.15, terrain generated 1.6-1.7) was, up until today, the only place where bees were farmed, and it's a strange feeling to see a wild beehive show up in Beta 1.8 countryside.

Acquiring bees was one of my primary goals for this build and I'm happy to have achieved that so early--though I won't be doing much with them just yet. I won't be able to automate collection of their honeycombs until I can make a dispenser, and that will require both string and redstone so I may be out of luck on that one for awhile yet, unless I get lucky killing a witch.

Speaking of which... witch... whatever... it's getting dark, so let's see if there's anything out there.

Skeletons. Man I'd like to get them to come over and say hi for the possibility of getting a bow drop, but I don't think it's worth the hassle of building roots out that far. Another night, perhaps.

Day 5734 - 90 Days Remain

The day passes without any incidents of note. I work patiently on clearing out the basement area, digging out all the remaining dirt and stone to make it level.

It's a nice big space I have in here now, and it's pretty much safe. I decide to use it to set up a bigger and better wheat farm, and hopefully I'll be able to lure some more sheep in and start breeding them so that I can get wool for decoration. I've also spotted a cow some distance further off, and wow I would like to get hold of that, if I can root out far enough to attract its attention.

Day 5735 - 89 Days Remain

My day begins with a depressing encounter. Did a llama just bleat?

Aw. Well, that sucks. I'm not even going to bother to talk to him, it'll make me annoyed at all the cool stuff he'll probably have that I won't be able to buy. New flowers? Moss? Dripleaves? I will never know.

I briefly consider killing the llamas for leather and leash drops, but it's too much of a jerk move for a benevolent tree spirit to countenance. Anyway, I've never been in the habit of bullying wandering traders, or Testificates in general. I did kill one trader once and am still a little salty about having that on my stats since it was a genuine accident while trying to KO the zombie that was menacing said trader... I'm waffling, I need to refocus.

So, ignoring the trader, I retreat back inside and spend the day cleaning up the basement, digging out all the bare stone and resurfacing with dirt.

Then I till a patch of ground to make a new and substantially bigger wheat plot. I've high hopes of this crop, both for wheat to breed sheep with and for spare seeds to convert into bonemeal.

By the time I'm done with all of that, it's late evening again. I decide to have a go at getting one more sheep into the tree with the last of the light.

That's it... come on...

It's in! But this is the upper level, and I want it on the lower level with the other one.

Ok, that's a problem easily solved. I dig a hole in the floor and push the sheep through it, strategically ensuring that it lands safely in the murky pool below.

And I can hear that the wandering trader is still around at the moment. Well, it's nice that he's not been eaten by zombies yet, I suppose. I hope that if he does get eaten by zombies tonight, they'll be considerate enough to leave me some leather and leash drops in a conveniently accessible location.

...Hey, just because I don't like to bully Testificates myself doesn't mean I won't take advantage of Unfortunate Accidents...

Day 5736 - 88 Days Remain

The concept of growing the tree naturally rather than building it was an intriguing one, but now having given it a more extensive field test, I come to the conclusion that I'm too much of a control freak to be happy doing it that way. It requires a lot of fix-up work in terms of removing leaves and replacing dirt substrate with logs, and for the amount of fiddling I'm going to be doing I might as well just build the tree myself by hand.

Cleanup is painful. I spend the whole day punching leaves and scrambling to collect drops, from morning to late afternoon.

But then, about halfway through the work, I'm interrupted.

Oh great... there goes the neighborhood.

I absolutely want to kill the pillagers, because of the chance that they might drop crossbows. This development is bad luck for the wandering trader, who might otherwise have gotten away from here safe and sound once his timer ran out, but my needs take precedence over his. I step outside and extend my roots further and further until I'm able to catch their attention. They advance at once, busily winding their crossbows as I retreat to the tree.

Taking on the whole patrol is a risky proposition, to say the least, as my world is in hard mode and I've currently got no armor at all. Getting hit by just one bolt will mess me up significantly.

Four hearts down? Ouch!

I make the useful discovery that if I can lure them over to the fence gate, then crouch, I can swing and hit them over the top of it but they can't get enough of a line of sight on me to shoot back. For the most part. Sometimes they get lucky, back up a little bit and tag me anyway.

The battle runs on long into the night. I take out the captain first. A few days of Bad Omen isn't going to be a problem as the nearest village is a few hundred blocks away and has no residents anyway. As an historical note, that village is a location of immense archaeological significance as it was generated (also during the First Grand Expedition) in the specific Beta 1.8 prerelease that added the village structures. Testificates were not implemented yet in that version, so my world has a village that was generated before villagers existed.

Unfortunately for the wandering trader, I don't manage to kill off all the pillagers before they find him and mercilessly pincushion him. Sorry buddy.

Since the trader is dead now anyway, once the remainder of the patrol has been dealt with I step outside and kill his llamas for their leather. They'd have despawned eventually anyway and it's not like he can take them with him now.

Well, that all worked out all right! Sure, I nearly died a few times, but I came out with two leashes, three leather and a captured pillager banner to flex with. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get a crossbow, but the leashes are a great acquisition.

I spend the remainder of the night pacing back and forth between the north and south roots of the tree, which both now extend outwards far enough that I'm generally able to attract a hostile mob or two each time. I kill my first creeper, receiving a couple of pieces of gunpowder. I can't think of anything I'll actually do with gunpowder (there's no sand nearby to make TNT even if I wanted to) but I'll stash it anyway.

Day 5737 - 87 Days Remain

I spend the day working once again on cleaning up the leaves left by the previous growth session, and also plant a bunch of saplings on the ground so that I can make a start on refilling my depleted timber stockpile.

By late afternoon I'm finally done pruning leaves, and only need to wait for the detached remainder to decay on their own. I've been thinking meanwhile about how to proceed with the tree build, and decide that I'll go for the first "milestone". I set myself the arbitrary goal of getting the tree to five blocks wide and fifteen high in order to access the dye flowers in the shulker box. I've hugely exceeded the five blocks width requirement, but I've got a way to go yet to hit fifteen blocks height.

I put up a scaffold to give me a visual progress guide.

Around halfway there. Okay, I'm going to need a lot more wood.

Night falls. I've taken to using the night hours to hunt hostile mobs. I'd especially like to kill a spider or two because I'm desperate for a fishing rod--it could theoretically get me a whole load of cool stuff including bows, more rods, string, leather, enchanted books. All right, so there's not much I'll be able to do with an enchanted book unless I can get the iron for an anvil, and anvils ain't cheap, but right now I could make good use of pretty much anything that comes off a fishing rod, even the junk drops like leather boots and lilypads.

So I step out and follow one of my roots to its terminus, but then spot a chicken on the hillside where I previously found and lured the sheep. Okay, forget hunting spiders for now. A chicken! I must have it!

It's still a way off from my position, and as I begin extending my root towards it, it wanders even further off, which is highly irritating. I'm worried about being snuck up on by creepers, too, as it's now full dark and I'm far enough out from the tree that I could end up getting cut off and trapped. I put a couple of seeds in my offhand and eventually manage to sidle close enough to spark the chicken's interest.

That's it... come on... come back with me...

Yes! You're mine!

I've somehow come by a free pig as well as apparently I left two fence gates open when I left to catch the chicken, and a pig spontaneously wandered into the tree in the meantime. I guess that's okay. I can't breed pigs until a zombie deigns to drop a carrot or potato, but he'll be company.

Since I'm constantly planting and then cutting trees on this level, it'd be theoretically possible for one of the new arrivals to get crushed by a poorly timed sprouting sapling if they're allowed to remain at large, and I'd rather that didn't happen. I repeat the "dig a hole in the floor and push 'em through" trick with both animals so that they'll be confined to the safer and more secure lower level, and immediately corral the chicken in a pen of its own. The pig can free-roam. I'll keep an eye on the chicken, collect and throw eggs whenever it lays one, and sooner or later one of those eggs will spawn a chick and then I'll be able to start breeding them.

Day 5738 - 86 Days Remain

I've got roots extended out to the north and south currently. It would be useful to have a root going in each cardinal direction so that I can range more widely at night and potentially get to more hostile mobs. I start running another root line down the hill, heading eastwards. This brings me down to the door and murky pool of legend.

...There's a reed growing by the murky pool. Was that always there? How did I not notice it before?

Sugar! Paper! I need that!

Getting to it is easy. I've got more than enough logs to root my way over. I gleefully trim off a couple of reeds. That's another Minecraftian staple item acquired. I'm doing pretty good.

The murky pool is a good spot to get an overall view of the tree. I suspect I'll be coming back here quite often in future to evaluate the build.

I climb back up the hill, plant my reeds around the basement pool, and spend the rest of the day setting up an organized storage area. This allows me to free up more space on the top level by moving my chests, crafting table and furnace down. I'll need as much room as I can make on the top level for planting trees now anyway, if I'm seriously going to build this whole thing conventionally, block by block via manual placement.

Crafting all the chests uses up almost all of my current stock of logs. Unfortunate. I'll have to hope the trees I planted topside will grow quickly, or start spamming excess saplings into the composter to get more bonemeal and force it.

There's still a little night-time left so I head outside to look for hostile mobs. It's raining again, so not the best conditions to be doing this. Just as dawn begins to brighten the sky, I spot a spider...

And it's close enough for me to aggro! I rush forward.

The spider drops a spider eye, and a string! A string! But just one. Bummer. I need two to make a fishing rod.

When I get back inside with my precious bit of string, there are a couple of zombies wandering close to the north gate. I lure them in too.

How about dropping me a bit of that nice gold armor, friend? No? A potato then, or a carrot? Also no? Just rotten flesh? Oh, fine, be like that.