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I'm not 100% sure I'm content with this build. I was looking for a clean, antiseptic lab type of design. I thought iron blocks would be right for it, but I couldn't use them on the side walls, or the chests wouldn't open.

Here's the alchemy lab, accessed through the secret door in the enchantment library:

Iron trap doors would have looked better, but they require redstone to open them, and that would have doubled or tripled the size of the build.

I've just had to go through and "reset" a bunch of the redstone in my sorter storage and smelter. Pulling up a redstone and putting it back down is all it took. But apparently the redstone can get confused in Realms. Leave it untouched long enough and it will get locked in a powered or unpowered mode and cause problems.

So, I noticed a Thing this morning. All this time, the maps and the sun have disagreed which direction is North. So when I place my maps, I rotate them so that North is up, in agreement with the rising and setting sun. And when naming them, I've indicated that they're 1East, 1 South, etc.

So this morning, I'm fishing at my dock, watching the Sun set. Ahhh... so pretty..

... WAIT ....

.. that's not West. That's North!

So *apparently* the Mojang folks noticed the problem and decided to fix it. But rather than fix the maps... they fixed the sun!

Bow down to our All-Powerful Gods! So powerful they can re-route the heavens in the sky! Bend reality to their whim! Quick, where are the chickens and cows so I can sacrifice them!?

Fishing like crazy today, hoping for that lightning strike called Mending. So far, no go. I'm also hoping for an Unbreaking to put on my last piece of armor, but that is also eluding me. I've gone through 7 rounds of buying enchantments on the table, and the best it will give me is Unbreaking I. And the problem is that every time I log off and log back in, it resets the enchantments back to the beginning. So to see what's after round 7, I have to enchant 7 items first. I am collecting a decent magical library through this though. And I'm up to 42 levels of experience. And I've nearly filled a double chest with saddles. And I have more than a stack of nametags. And more fish than Bikini Bottom. I'm about to burn out my Luck of the Sea III, Unbreaking III, Lure III fishing pole. But I'm not worried. I have 4 more just like it.

I realized something about Mending this morning... since we don't have a full offhand ability or Sweeping Edge, I don't think we can Mend tools. I suspect the act of hitting or digging will wear down the item faster than the xp will heal it. I suppose we can do it though, through smelting and trading. Yes, that would probably work. OR.. shooting mobs with bow and arrow, swapping to the tool to be mended and then walking over and picking up the xp orbs. So, nevermind, I guess we can mend tools. It's just trickier than armor.

Finally fished an Unbreaking III book out of the lake this morning. Fixed up my pants with it, and headed off into the Nether to slay some Ghasts. I'm in fully enchanted Diamond Armor, so unless I get dropped into a lava lake, I should be okay. I need to go grab some Netherwart so I can make a Fire Resistance potion, but I'm not sure I can get to either of the Nether Fortresses I know of, through the Frozen Zone.

That's the other issue - the area where it freezes up if we go is not just a Ghost Block. It's a whole region, at least a chunk in size, if not larger. No clue what's going on there, but it's seriously inconvenient.

Ugh - I may have overdone the Minecraft today. A little tired of it now. One of the other players thought he may have picked up some Netherwart somewhere, so I traveled all over the map to his various bases (and he has scattered them all over), but never found any. I did go roaming outside his snow base though, and found an Ice Spikes biome, so I took the opportunity to snag some Packed Ice.

Eventually I gave up though and went into the Nether on my own. Carefully and cautiously, I killed several Ghasts and many Blazes. Seriously, many Blazes. I came back with 56 Blaze rods. I also blocked in a Blaze spawner. I have an idea to turn it into a farm that I'll want to try out eventually, but I'll have to protect the path there first. It's wide open to Ghast blasting. At least it seems that Blazes no longer shoot at you, just hand-to-hand fighting.

I've collected some Netherwart and made a small farm:

Getting close to 5000 views on this blog. Anything you want to see from me for that, since I didn't do anything for 4k?

I've accomplished a couple of minor tasks over the last few days: I've renamed the bulk of our maps to account for the new path of the Sun, since I'd used the Sun to determine which way was North when naming the maps. That also changes the primary direction of our exploration from East-West to North-South.

I've also started installing safety rails on one of the Nether Fortresses so that I can try to work on this Blaze Spawner in *relative* safety. I'm going to have to experiment to see if I can prevent Blaze spawns while I'm working there.

Since I have no desire to swim in lava, I'm installing my safety rails the coward's way - by never sticking my head outdoors. 0:) I'm using pistons to push the walls and ceiling out over the walkway. And I've built myself a little cubbyhole for smelting netherrack, with a semi-automated loader.

Man, it is so nice to feel *safe* in the Nether again. The swarm of Ghasts has had me running very nervous in the Nether, except in my pacified paths. I actually did get knocked into the lake of lava last night by a Ghast, but was able to swim over and chip out a staircase from a Nether Fortress pillar and escape. Word of Warning to everyone: If you're going to go to the trouble of manufacturing Potions of Fire Resistance, you might want to bring them with you to the Nether instead of leaving them behind in your home base in the Overworld!!! Fortunately my armor was strong enough to keep me alive while I figured out how to save myself, although I was down to 2 hearts by the time I stopped burning.

I'm in the process of building a covered walkway across the top of the Fortress so I don't have to worry about it any more. No pics yet, we'll wait until it's finished. It's mostly just more of the piston-pushing system, although I do it manually where it's safe.

Blazes do still shoot fireballs apparently. In MCPE you just have to be closer. According to the wiki they shortened the aggro range on Blazes.

And I have an idea what to do for the 5000 views special. I need to do some research, and a lot of planning and prep work.

I'm thinking I might have to disassemble my smart storage system. I think that many hoppers all in one place is causing the lag I've been experiencing. I know my son can't visit the base on his tablet because of them. I'm working on a nanofarm design, and I think the lag is causing the redstone clock not to function properly. I'll have to try other designs and see, but what I've currently built seems to be exactly the same as what I've got in my creative world, but doesn't function like it does there.

Eek, already at 4600 views. I'm going to have to really get busy with the 5k project. I've started clearing space, but that's it so far. I got distracted with the nanofarm because I discovered 2 witches in one of my villager bays in the iron farm, and they killed all the villagers there with splash potions when they attacked me. So I'm trying to produce a lot of bread so the replacement villagers will breed.

Ok, I officially give up on trying to have a fancy build of some sort finished in time for the 5K views landmark for this thread. Sorry. I'm on my 3rd or 4th idea, and while I think this one will work, there's still a bunch of work left to do on it, and I've left you all without any updates for over a month now.

So, here's some of the highlights from the last month of Minecrafting:

Atmosphere

I realized yesterday when reading my old threads in preparation for crafting this post that one of my old habits that I hadn't carried over to it was giving all the places proper names. It definitely added something to the world. And so, today we'll start with the Realm itself, and slowly work our way down to bases and villages as we get to them. The Realm is now called Eranil, to stand alongside Arkel and Rhageos. I'll go back and change the title of this thread later, if I can.

Travel

I'd started to address this one a couple of times, but I've never finished building roads to connect the various areas, in either the Overworld or in the Nether. Spawn and Spire bases have most of a safe passage between them in the Nether, but all other Nether travel is through ugly raw Netherrack tunnels, or occasionally running across exposed plateaus. In Arkel especially, the overland road was a fairly major piece of the world design, with the two-tone wood slabs leading you either toward or away from spawn. So I sat down and created the layout design for the overland road system I want to use in Eranil to connect the settlements.

The original bridge that I modeled everything else after:




The Overland Path (might change some once coarse dirt becomes an option)





The roadside campsite, which will be placed about a day's travel by foot all along the roads:

Exploration
I discovered a Cartographer villager lurking in my iron farm, and purchased a map to a Woodland Mansion from him. My thinking at the time was that this might be a viable 5K landmark. In trying to find it, I've expanded the map of Eranil from this:


to this:


and I still haven't found it!! The white dot on the Woodland Mansion map (posted at the bottom right of the new map image) never budged from the top left corner. I'm going to be seriously annoyed if it turns out to be a bug in the Woodland Mansion maps about that.

During my explorations, I have discovered a few new places: A Desert Temple, an igloo, and a villager selling Frost Walker books among other things.

Again, I apologize for not posting anything for a month. I was misguidedly trying to keep the view count on this thread under 5K so that I could have something to present right at that time. As it is, I'm still working on my latest idea, and I hope it will pan out.

The Lag Is Real!!

Spire Base is currently mired in lag from too many entities. I don't know if the issue is caused by the servers not being powerful enough to do the calculations, or the bandwidth involved in communicating with my local PC, or some combination of the two or something completely different. If v1.2 doesn't address the lag in some fashion I'm guessing there will be a lot of unhappy players out there.

As it is, Spire Base was supposed to be something like a super chunk, with all the needs in one loaded area, operating together. I've had to remove the Sorting Redstone for my Sorting Storage, and that worked for a bit. I'm not on wifi anymore, but connected directly to the cable modem, and I didn't see much improvement, if any.

I'm sure the people at Mojang know the problems and fixes way better than I, so I'm not going to waste time giving advice or guessing solutions that won't work. If it doesn't get fixed in 1.2 I'm going to have to start splitting the pieces of Spire Base out into multiple places. I'm already going to see about a sheep field and/or cow field in the forest nearby and get those out of here. I can probably delete the mob spawner too.

Well, we'll just have to see what happens in the future. I'm still making progress, I think it'll look awesome when I'm finished.

Greetings! I'm going to call the 5K Project finished!! I tried 3 times to record this as a YouTube video, but even with downloading the world to my local machine it lagged out the recording. Obviously, my machine isn't quite optimized for video recording.

Technically speaking, I still have things I'm going to do to it, but it's all extra stuff.

The project I wound up with is an upgrade to Spire Base iron farm. The original was a standard iron farm, with 4 villager pods, and it generated a fair amount of iron.

The standard iron farm has got 1 layer of doors surrounding the central water pit. I put up 3 more layers of doors around it and doubled the size of each of the villager pods. The villagers immediately multiplied massively.

And, finally, it deserves a real name - The Oshewani Sanctuary.

SO MANY of the new villagers are librarians, I'm actually going to try and flush them down into the basement so I can sort out any useful trades before sending them back up into the pods. That's why the bottom channels are unfinished - I have to design a flush system that won't kill them. Once I'm done with that I'll sculpt the mountain top so that it looks more natural. (-ish)

One other change I made: In the original iron farm design, the drain the iron golems fall down is a 2x2 shaft, and occasionally iron golems get themselves stuck there. So I tried some modifications to reduce that. For the upper level of the water pit, I opened it up to a 4x4 opening, although I've never actually seen a golem spawn up there. The lower level I cut grooves of different depths into the sides of the 2x2 shaft, and put water flows at the base of each groove to try and drive the golems into the regular shaft. The idea was that they'd get staggered around and not bump into each other. Of course, within 24 hours I had a traffic jam that required some effort to break up, but what are you going to do?

A few things accomplished over the last couple of days.

First off, I've confirmed that the Nether Chunk that freezes up my MCPE still exists. I have to shut down MCPE completely and re-login, and then *immediately* run backwards from the area I froze in. If I can get out of there fast enough I won't crash again.

Second, I've finally gone back and put the finishing touches on the Nether Passage from spawn to Oshewani Sanctuary. The iron trap doors didn't work right (you couldn't walk through them when they were open), so I replaced them with iron doors. They don't give you the one block of protection, but you can walk in and out, and the Nether is turning out to be less dangerous now than it was when I was first exploring it. I'm finally pacifying it somewhat.

Third, I've started doing something I said I'd do a few months ago. BluJay built me a subscriber's house in his Survival world (), and I said I'd build a copy of it in my Realm. Actually what I'm doing is building one version of it in the Nether, putting in a Nether Portal, and then cloning it n the overworld. So that I'll enter one of the houses, go through the portal, and still be in the same house, but in the other realm.

Any suggestions on what to name it when I'm done?

Finished the outer shell and landscaping around the BluJay House (yeah, I figured why go for some obscure made-up name when the name of the designer is perfectly applicable ).

I haven't done the interior design yet, so far it's only the outer shell, and the hidden door to the basement where the Nether Portal is. Next step is building the Overworld copy of the house.

Nothing much significant achieved, other than finishing the Overworld version of the BluJay House.

It links directly up to the version in the Nether.

I've started working now on pulling villagers out of my extended iron farm so I can trade them up. I think I've got figured out how to get them out, but I need to build the catcher and storage for them before I start pulling any of them out.

So, I stayed up late last night after helping some friends retrieve their lost cows (no, really..), and decided to try out my concept for pulling Villagers out of the Extended Iron Farm in the Oshewani Sanctuary. It involves dropping a minecart into the villager chamber. One of them climbs in and is dragged by the current to the center of the room, where they drop through the water into the tunnel underneath. The other villagers don't fall down because they prefer to swim on the surface. The villager rides the minecart over 2 waterfalls to a safe drop zone where I can check them out for trading suitability.

It worked perfectly, the first time. O_o Seriously... how often does that happen? Aaaaaand.... this is what I got:

Really! So now I've bought and applied 3 Mending books to my equipment. *happy dance*

I still need to build the Villager trading area, and a way to move villagers back up into the farm or off to some disposal center. And a way to make the villager extraction process maybe a bit more automatic? I don't know about that.

I've been keeping a vague eye on my stats for this thread, and I seem to get about 25 hits a day for 3-4 days after an update, so it seems the ideal update schedule for me is something new about every 5 days.

So last night I realized it had been 4 days, and I hadn't done a single thing that was worth taking pictures of for here. I'd spent all my time farming and trading so that I could buy Mending books for all of my gear. All of my armor, 2 picks, and a sword, are all Mending capable now, and the Librarian has locked the Mending trade until I bring him some paper.

In order to do this trading, I built myself a new auto-farm. My previous attempt hadn't worked because the lag from the Iron Farm (even before I extended it) interfered with the redstone timing. But I saw that DaphneElaine had built a working one in their Unity Realms, so I knew that it *could* work in Realms. I just had to move it far enough away from the Extended Iron Farm. I built it down the tunnel I'd made as a possible villager trading center far enough not to interfere with the Iron Farm.

Well, by itself, an auto-farm device is not picturesque enough for an update. So I tried to figure out a nice decoration for the passage to it. This is not yet finished - I need to do the ceiling still. But the rest of it turned out rather nice, I think. For the most part I think these will be decorative only plants, but the option will always be there to harvest some of it if I need to.

Here is possibly the finalized Plant Passage:

I'd thought about adding some wear and tear to it by adding leaves or vines, but looking at this, I'm not sure if that would improve it or not. Unlike stone, it's hard to weather wood in Minecraft. There's no broken planks, or mossy wood, etc. All you can do is add leaves and vines, and in a build like this, which is one single long sightline, all they'd do is clutter it up. I always have the option of adding them later though, so I can give this a try for a while, then play around with additions. Oh, I could do some cobwebs above the crossbeams too, I suppose.

So....I learned something new last night, from my 9 year old son. Villagers can be turned into witches...

I did NOT know that was a thing.... I'm going to have to figure out what to do with them, and then how to get villagers back up there. I configured all of the water pipes for pulling villagers *out* of the farm, not putting them back. I'll also have to figure out if there's any good use for a live witch, or if I should just whack all the whitches.

I'm trying to decide what to do with the villagers I'm pulling out, if I should leave them underneath the Sanctuary, where they will contribute to lag, but be convenient, or ship them off to a remote location, where they won't.

And, finally, I decided to go find my Ender Portal. WAY off and gone, but still within explored boundaries: