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All the known caverns have been explored and lit, and the Mob Farm has been reengineered to exactly match the specs from the video (I don't generally like to exactly copy something large, preferring to put my own interpretation on the idea). A few more mobs have shown up, but not many yet. I think my next project will be to connect the zombie and spider spawners to the Mob Farm somehow. And I guess keep searching for more caverns.



Heh. Just had a thought. I've explored this world a few times in Creative, looking for different or useful biomes, and far far away to the east is an ocean. Maybe I should build a railway to it and build a farm in the ocean. Granted, I don't think I have enough iron to lay that many rails. Oo! Or I could just mine a 128-square area all the way down to the bedrock!



Meh. All way too much work. I'm lazy like that.

Well, I don't know how far I'll make it into this project, since it's really large in scope. In an effort to maximize mobs in the Mob Farm under Belhatom, I've started taming the caverns underneath it. Basically I'm stripping the outer layer of rock from every tunnel and replacing it with cobblestone, and running lava chutes along the edges to make sure it's all lit up. I'm still working on the first portion, trying to figure out the best routines and procedures. The lava isn't a necessary part, but is an easy way to recover my torches and if I can arrange it so it's running downhill, it will light a good stretch with only 1 item needed instead of a dozen torches.



The other reason to think about doing this is it will uncover more minerals that were hiding just 1 block away, and any caverns that were separated by a single block. I've found 1 connection to another cavern already, although it was a cave I'd already found, it wasn't lit well enough and had a few mobs lurking in it.

2 months without an update. Actually, more like 2 months without Minecraft. I've been working on other projects, playing other games. I'm not sure right now if I'm done with Arkel and will start a new one, or if I'll come back to this world and resume where I left off. I thought about adding ladders to a few spots along the skyway to make stations a bit easier. To that end I decided to employ the Skeleton Spawner to build a tree farm. I carved out a 5x5x5 cube next to the skeleton drop zone and started out with a couple of saplings. Some bone dust to grow the trees, and now I can make plenty of wood for unlimited ladders if I want. However, I got tired of having to manually whack the stack of skeletons. Took forever and was annoying, *tap* *tap* *tap* on the tablet nonstop until all of the skeletons are dead. Then pick up the mass of bones and arrows.

So I decided to look for a way of auto-killing them. Lava blades don't seem to work in MCPE. I tested it out in Creative, and the skeletons hit the top of the lava and float there, and any drops burn up. I tried landing them on flaming netherrack, but that wasn't any better. All the drops burned up. So I tried cactus, and while *most* of the drops hit the cactus and were destroyed, not all of them were.

Ideally I'd build a water channel around the drop point so that water could carry all the stuff to me, because the skeletons can shoot into those squares. But that would block the entrance, which is behind the vines there. I'll figure something out, I just haven't put the work into it yet.

Just a couple of minor updates since the last post. As I mentioned, I put a water channel around the Skeleton Death Trap there to ferry the pickings to me, and I built myself a full workshop behind where I'm standing in that pic above. I installed mushroom and egg farms around it, and a single wheat square to provide a ready supply of food (one wheat square is all you need when you have an infinite amount of bone dust).

Then, since it's what I like best, I went exploring again. Off to the right from the pic above was a cavern path I hadn't visited yet, just blocked off while I was working on the spawner. So I started down that way and immediately found a *second* skeleton spawner, directly underneath me. So after I pacified it, I built a water path leading upward to the first spawner, so that now skeleton spawns from the lower spawner are transported up to the top one, where they drop down onto the cactus. So drops are now coming twice as fast.

I also noticed that the villager I took such pains to transport from South Fort to the railway junction has disappeared. *sigh* Villagers just aren't worth the trouble, are they?

It'd be neat if you could 'program' a villager to do a specific task, like redstone. Like maybe in this room, 1 Villager to pick up the drops and transport them to a chest. Another Villager to carry arrows to a chest on the surface, or one to turn bones to dust, one to plant saplings, one to cut down trees, etc.

Arkel wasn't really holding my attention, probably because the biggest problems were solved, and it was mostly just made-up large scale projects or little tweaks. I haven't ended it, but I'm not spending much time there recently.

Instead, I'm playing in self-imposed Hardcore mode. My first world was Hardcore 1 (in all cases, the name and the seed are identical). I lived for about 10 in game days, until I was headed back to the safety of my cubby hole from the mines and turned the corner right next to a creeper. I ran past it, it blew up, and the blast tossed me into a pit with ... another creeper. That blast pulped me.

Hardcore 2 I enjoyed a lot more. First off, it was right on the border between the standard forested hills biome and a desert biome. I don't have much experience with deserts, they just don't show up in my seeds for some reason. I dug into a hill right next to the spawn point and began converting it into a nice fortress. I topped it with a temple that was supposed to act as a mob mill, although I never quite got them to spawn up there. I'd actually started on hollowing out the entire hill when I got careless. I was working on the outside of it, replacing the sand with sandstone for stability, and didn't go inside when it got dark. I thought being on the side of a hill with no flat surfaces nearby would keep me safe. I got knocked off the side of the cliff by a spider and into the river below in the middle of a band of waiting zombies. I almost managed to get away, but couldn't see where I was running clearly and they cornered me and ripped me apart. *sigh* I might just post some pics of this world some time.

Hardcore 3 is back to the standard hills biome. I took over a cavern with a flooded floor as my house and walled off the entrance. To get in, you have to swim underwater. And for giggles my bed and all of my chests, crafting tables and furnaces are also underwater. Sleeping is funny. You wake up and have to swim to the surface to get air. The main points of interest are that I've had a hard time finding resources. I had to burn wood to make charcoal for quite a while before I found my first coal ore. The other thing is that I've had to start clearing all the grass from the pasture next door so the creepers can't hide from me anymore. Those little creeps almost snuck up on me a few times out there.

Make that 6 emeralds... so far. And silverfish. In all the work I did in Arkel, I never once saw Silverfish. I had actually thought they weren't in Survival, but Creative only. It took me a while to figure out what was attacking me at first.

Eek. O_O

I nearly lost it in Hardcore 3. I've been working on the gravel pits, converting them from a maze of interlocking blind chambers into a single large cavern, and I accidentally stepped off a ledge and fell down to bedrock. The fall left me with one half of a heart remaining. Caused me to abort my current work and go do what I'd been planning: fill the bottom with 2 levels of water to catch any falls.

I now have 18 Emeralds. ??? O_o Are these things more common than I thought? I'm not sure I ever found a single one in the wild in Arkel, only from Village chests. And I'm struggling to find Gold. I've nearly got enough for two blocks of it. Looking to get to 4 so I can make a NetherRack Fortress. I'm going to place it on top of my hill, to make a fancy hat for it.

I'm up to 25 emeralds, and I finally got enough gold to make 4 blocks to enable the Netherrack generator. This is the kind of things I've been finding: