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(I had no idea the F2 key would also show the fraps fps number, so sorry about that). Nevertheless, here's the place I spawned in. As you can see, the witch hut is directly in front of me.



Just getting the basics together, decided to use the witch hut as a temporary house.




Gathered some food, as well as started to dig out a small mine right next to the hut.



First diamond vein! That was about 6 diamonds in total I believe. I lost a couple hearts as well because of surprise gravel and a spider. Ah well, gold's not too tough to find.



At the bottom there's a cave. I explored it a bit, turns out it's much larger than I thought. I closed it and went back to mining.



Really needed more food, so I took some cows from the savanna nearby.



Overall look of what the place looks like after the first session. Not too bad, 6 diamonds, proper food, etc.

Enchanting table! It's ridiculously easy to get levels now, but it's pretty tough to get the leather for the bookcases in the first place. So I suppose I won't have maximum enchants that soon.



Getting ready to build, I set up a small cactus farm to produce dye for the hardened clay.



Made up a nether portal just to check out what the nether will look like on the other side.



...next to nothing, really.



Darn, there's a lot of caves down there - pretty much means there's a lot of work I have to do.



Time to start the first build. Needed a small place to live other than the witch hut, so I took some inspiration from hobbit holes.



A small piece of detail - tripwire hooks as coat hangers.



A proper bedroom with a nice view outside and more chests for organization. I can finally store all these blocks that I've only been keeping in my inventory.



On the other side we have a small work table. (Note, the new orchids look amazing on the small clay pots).



Through the small door to the left is a furnace room, with some more storage chests. I also use bricks for the floor for a change.



And the main 'room'. We have a small table to the left that will eventually house the brewing stand that I'll hopefully get next update. As you can see I also moved the enchanting table here.

Note that I also died during (burned, fell in lava but managed to climb back out during branch mining) this update, but the screenshot I took was terrible - a small blue-ish tint that looked horrible. On the other hand, I also ate 3 golden apples thus far.

We're back in the nether again, an this time we're on a quest to gather up potion ingredients. Of course the basics of a brewery require nether wart and blaze rods - both incredibly difficult to acquire. After creating a treacherous cobblestone path, I found the fortress I was looking for.



A bunch of fall damage later, I managed to dig in the fortress. Before we explore further though, we need proper gear. I stored all my things and killed myself to return to full health (is that cheating to you guys?)and geared up to look for the ingredients.



Wow finally. Nether wart. There are two chambers of this stuff though, yielding me about 40 pieces of wart in total.



Blazes hurt a lot. Furthermore, the first 3 that I killed didn't even drop a single rod. This one was either the fourth or the fifth blaze I killed.



Back home, mostly intact. Finally able to create a brewing station, but we're missing one key ingredient (for healing pots that is). Melons.



Using a small x-ray machine by exploiting a trick with redstone blocks and fences, I managed to find a mineshaft rather close to my base. This is the first thing I see when I dug down to the area.



First spawner! I didn't capture most of the caving experience because it was mostly stress, panic and hectic placement of blocks to run away from those little cave spiders.



About an hour later and ~5 chests later I'm finally able to find melon seeds. Note I ate ~3 golden apples and died about twice in that period of time.



Healing potions! That was a successful trip, albeit a rather insanely difficult one. Ultra-hardcore mode is really just a whole 'nother level.

Time to start some proper automation, as the area will be the main farming district anyway. To start with, I've decided to go with a melon and pumpkin tower.



The redstone below it. Originally I wanted to use a daylight sensor to create a pulse everytime it turns nighttime. It turns out however, that the redstone needed to turn a permanent signal into a pulse is larger than creating an ordinary hopper clock - so that's what I did. I installed a hopper clock later on with 4 stacks of blocks inside it. (Also note I've been using a texture pack with smooth glass).



Building up the layers. I forgot to mention that the design is originally by xisumavoid, but I edited it a little bit so it's not a 1-1 copy.



The farm doesn't output much with just 5 layers, but it should do for now.



Creating the aesthetics. I wanted to go for a different style than my previous builds, but still maintain a proper block palette that fits the swamp. So, here it is. A more modern touch but with the clay-log-wood core still in place.



A look from the side. Notice I also use leaves at the bottom to add a bit more detail.



Another picture from the front. Again, it's a similar palette but a different style.



With that tower done, I decided to make another tower. Same design, but another layer to make it a bit taller.



The redstone below the tower. This time I used a hopper clock pretty much the same as the one used on the other tower. It's only different by location.



Just a great picture from the trapdoor that leads to the redstone of the second tower. I'm not done with the aesthetics yet, but I believe I should put out an update anyway.

To begin with, a picture of what the base currently looks like. If you look closely at the bottom there are small paths, as well as lamp posts. I aim to make the spawn base have this general design.



Finally decided to go and dismantled the witch hut. I want to get this up and running as fast as possible, so that I can go and build everything else around the witch farm itself.



This farm design is different from the last one I used - it is rather more efficient, but it does use quite a bit more resources (read - pistons). It doesn't use as much hoppers as the one before though. The design is by JL2579.



You have no idea how happy I was when I saw this little guy spawn. I thought that my farm broke cause I accidentaly opened it in 1.6.2, but it seems not to be the case.



..and the bottom portion is finished. It's rather bulky, which is why I decided to build this first. Since you can't move a witch hut, I decide to build all of the other farms around it, making it the center piece of the base.



Of course, we need tripwire for this farm. I need quite a bit of string for it too, it has to connect from one side to the other entirely, which I believe is about 15-16 blocks. Multiply this twice and to the side, and that equals a hell of a lot of string.



What it looks like right now. I do plan to pretty it up later on, but first I have to make the stack of hoppers required to be at the bottom of the farm. It's nothing in my old world, but in this world, it's about half of my iron supply.

There goes my iron supply. I had about 3 iron left after all that. I did cave a bit later though, and got 4-5 stacks from that alone.



Even the bottom part needs some form of decoration.



What the collection room looks like. I decided to go and use the theme of quartz, red stained clay and spruce wood, just as a challenge for myself. I don't use modern palettes often, so this is a first for me I suppose.



At the very top. You can see the spawner on the right as well as a larger-than-usual nether portal on the left. It's connected directly through a short nether walk to my main base.



On other news, the witch farm is pretty close to being complete - the roof is probably the only major thing left to build. Note that I still have to do a lot of lighting up the area and caving.

I didn't want the ceiling of the witch farm to be this ugly square - after all, it is the center of spawn anyway. So, a circle will suffice. It is rather massive though.



Another perspective, I think just the circle outline looks good from afar.



Marked, filled in, flooded.



With the entire thing being filled in, it is rather gloomy on the inside with the lights turned off. But that is exactly what we wanted. I forgot to take pictures in between, sorry about that.



Right below I did something different to save a bit on hoppers. Water streams lead the witches to a smaller hole in the middle.



The bottom section is the usual, with half slabs covering up hoppers connected to a chest. This of course is temporary and a storage system will be implemented later on.



I also worked on some of the aesthetics. I will not cover up the entire witch farm of course, but I will put up some 'pillars' per say.



I think the light switch looks pretty good too.



In other news, I needed to connect the hobbit hole with the main path through an underwater tunnel. This is because the top portion is below the roof of the farm and therefore must eventually be removed.



Another picture of the tunnel, all a work in progress of course.

After making the light switch I had no proper way of going there by foot. So, I made a walkway (at least the start of one).



Fenced, boarded up and fit with lights.



It turns out a massive section of my house was under the roof of the witch farm, and that's a no-go. Therefore I removed the hill first, exposing my house fully.



Redesigned a lot of it - destroyed large portions of the old staircase and the bulk chests at the bottom. Also removed one small room at the top.



With the whole thing exposed I had to design an exterior for the structure. This is what I came up with using the all new stained glass.



It actually feels even cozier on the inside.



The finished product. I think it looks great, the leaves add a lot of detail into the building as well as the black stained glass.



Other than digging down to the area, there was no proper way to get to the chest at the bottom of the witch farm either. Time for an elevator.





This is a design by MumboJumbo. It's very simple as it doesn't even require any repeaters on the redstone. It works by placing a redstone block next to the pistons and a solid block on top of it. Step on the solid block, press the button and you're on your way up.




The entrance to the witch collection area. It has the same colour scheme as the spider farm.



At the edge of the walkway on the outside, i placed a bridge. Not too sure how it looks at the moment to be honest.



On this small patch of land I want to place my villager breeding cells. However, let's get into some vegetation first. Here I extended the land a little bit by placing a small walkway.




My first ever custom tree. I based this off one I found on planet minecraft, but not too sure how it looks still. The leaves look rather awkward.



As a bonus, I found a mesa biome! Look at the coordinates. It's very very far from my home base. However, I did make a portal and connect the two together. It still takes two minutes with speed II potions to get there from my spawn though.



To get you an idea of how far this actually is, here's the map in AMIDST. The coordinates shown are in 1024 block increments.

Continuing with the automation in the area, an infinite villager system has been constructed. It's a design by TangoTek, and is probably the most famous infinite villager cell out there.



The system consists of 6 doors at the bottom that has one villager, and at least two villagers on top. The series of pistons and redstone is only there to transfer the baby villagers to the other side.



It might seem a little ridiculous to make a structure this big for something so small, but oh well. There is going to be a trading array afterwards inside the structure anyway. I tried for a more modern style in this one.



I didn't even consider the hole the baby villagers are going up until later on. So I had to destroy it and rebuild it again about 10 blocks downwards. This makes it easier for me to build the trading array, and to build the structure around it.



I needed some ice for the water systems so I went to the nearest ice biome (which unfortunately, is across a 1500-block ocean). You might notice the blocks and wonder why I didn't just go for a small pond. The thing is, ice can only form when it is right next to a solid block. This pattern is the most efficient pattern out there so that ice forms the fastest. You can use this same pattern too for sugar cane farms. The difference is, the solid block is the water.



A full month late to go for the ender dragon. The first stronghold had an incredibly hidden end portal, so I gave up looking for it. When I went to the second portal ... what a sight.



Finally, that took quite a bit of time. Unfortunately, I died right after because an enderman took me from behind. I lost quite a bit, including Multiplier, my fortune pickaxe and my Power IV bow. However with the levels I got I am able to retrieve my fortune pickaxe back as well as another silk touch pickaxe.

Also notice the name of my sword - Europa. I'm not too sure where the original word comes from, but I did name it off Jupiter's largest moon. From now on I will probably name my tools off other astronomical objects.



With all that said and done, I connected my main base with this end portal room with a nether portal. Since the entire thing is submerged underwater, it's a really good spot for a future build. Hmm..



After the ender dragon fight I immediately went and fought the wither. Took a long time to find the skulls, but managed to after a couple hours. Originally I wanted to use a bedrock trick to kill the wither, but I accidentally pushed the lever back down and well, this happened. I managed to kill it eventually, but it's much, much harder.



Finally, the first ever beacon. I already have an idea where I want to put this, but first there's something important we have to do.



I decided to place the beacon in the mesa I found last update. With an efficiency five pick, I am able to instamine the clay. Already at a double chest at the moment.



After two months, I have decided to turn natural regeneration back on. It was fun while it lasted, but I think that at this point ultra hardcore mode is pointless - considering how easy it is to get health potions. Thanks for the support the past two months, you guys have been awesome motivation for me to keep doing this

It seems to be a constant problem for me that over time, the terrain of my worlds become very flat. Literally all the trees within 200 blocks disappear. Instead of planting them back again, what's an even better solution?



But let's rewind a little bit. How did this happen?



In my opinion, anything organic is the bane of my building skills. I simply cannot make something that is organic yet still looking good. Nevertheless I did try my best here. It's similar to the other tree, but I tried to make the branches stick to the walls of the building to make it look a bit better.



My main point to do this is swamp restoration. Cutting out all the trees in the area makes it look very plain. This is one step of that. Placing leaves all around the place helps a ton.



The last two trees were very similar to one of the trees in the tree depository from Planet Minecraft. This tree is probably the very first tree that I make completely myself.



I just love how this tree is connected to the building somewhat. The logs are placed on top of the red stained clay, making it seem as if the tree grew on top of the structure.



With the swamp growing back to life outside, the underground needs a lot of polishing up. Surprisingly, the two chests of the witch farm is starting to fill up so I need some proper storage. I also need a proper furnace array because the manual one isn't very efficient or nearly as cool.



First thing to do is to make that furnace array. I'll be doing the exact same thing as what I did in my last world - Tango Tek's Synchronised Furnace Array.



See the similarities? (Those of you who followed my old world). Notice how I changed the color scheme too. Instead of the brighter oak wood, I decide to use the new darker oak and the orange acacia wood.



It is complicated. Well, sort of. The furnaces are connected to 3 hoppers - Input, output and fuel. That's about it.



There are three chests that connects to the array. 2 input chests and 1 output chest. The chest on the top left is the input for items to be smelted. The chest on the top right is the input for the furnace fuel. The bottom chest is the output. Note the lever. What it does is that it changes whether you want to gain xp from the farm or simply the items.




On the other side comes a storage system. It's very similar to the one I use in my old witch farm as well. It's a design by queenkinghappy but it is actually very easy to replicate. Simply use the normal sorting system design and tile it. Then, add an overflow line at the end of the hoppers.

Oh, I also killed a wither.

Sorry for the incredibly delayed update, I haven't had time to play minecraft until about a week and a half ago. Nevertheless, in that time I did a couple of different things (then again, I always do different things each update). So let's begin.

Before I build anything more I should do something very important first. As some of you might have guessed, I want to build all of the farms within my spawn chunks. This is to assure that everytime I play the game, all the farms are loaded and functional. To do that, I have to figure out exactly where my spawn chunks will end.




And done! That wasn't too difficult but it did take about 15 minutes. What I did was I took a couple stacks of blocks, ran one direction and idle for about 5 minutes. The moment the blocks despawn is the exact border of the spawn chunks. Also, notice how I only took 2 different points instead of all 4. The reason for this is because I can find out the other borders using math. As the spawn chunks construct a square, it is very simple to find the other coordinate by finding the distance between the known coordinates and the center of the spawn chunks. I hope that makes sense.

With all that said and done, we can continue building. One of the farms that are missing in my base is a sugar cane farm.



For once, I don't feel like making an automatic version of the sugar cane farm (for now at least). Therefore, I made this little design. This design incorporates the most efficient placement of water possible, i.e, every single water block is surrounded by 4 sugar canes. This farm is incredibly efficient, incredibly quick to build and outputs too much sugar cane. Only issue is it's not automatic. For now.



The first step to expanding a base is obviously to create roads. This is a small path that I made circling around the two towers, and I think it looks great. Notice how these lamp-posts have redstone lamps that are always on. Where did the power come from?

Well, these lamps are exploiting a trick with falling arrows that is discovered (at least where I saw it first) by Xisumavoid. To create a permanently on lamp, place a pressure plate above the lamp and use a dispenser to shoot an arrow onto the lamp. This arrow gets stuck inside the lamp and will never despawn.



Some may find it inhumane, but oh well. I finally made a cow farm that's much easier to use than my older one. The cows are contained in the top portion while the babies get pushed into the bottom portion. Just push the button on the right when you're willing to breed the cows. The button powers a dispenser that deploys water in front of it, making the cows float. This makes it such that the baby cows are pushed to the bottom part.



One very significant part of construction is the use of different colours. Sheep? They can give you 16 different variants of colours. So a sheep farm is the farm I'll be building next.



The farm is looking impressive so far, I really like how it looks from this angle right now. I used my previous towers as a base, but I tried to combine it with the design of the trading house. The modern influence can be clearly seen from the multitude of columns and the use of black stained glass.




I think the inside of the farm looks great as well. These floors are where the sheep will be. Each floor contains sheep of different colours, and there will be dispensers on each floor with a water bucket inside. When activated, the water will flush the wool onto the bottom.

Note: I know the sheep's able to jump on the railing, I already fixed that later on.






Yep. With the sheep farm complete, I installed another farm in the base - a wheat farm. It outputs very little wheat in comparison to my other farms, but it is enough for my needs. The redstone behind it is very simple. There is a button that's connnected to a comparator-based pulse-extender. This creates an output long enough for the water to flush all of the wheat down into the hoppers. The hoppers are then connected to a small dropper elevator.



With all that said and done, I decided to extend the other side of the base. A large portion of this landmass is within the spawn chunks, but there is nothing inside it. This is actually connected to a door behind my old furnace array.




As there is going to be a path there, railings are needed. This place also gives quite a good view on the witch farm. Notice how I decided to add some water vegetation as well. Not sure if it's too much though.



To finish this entry, a chicken farm! It doesn't look too great though to be honest, I will probably redo all of the aesthetics again later on.

This will be my last update of this year, unfortunately. I will be going off to Europe for the holidays (2 weeks to be exact) and will only be returning home on the 6th of Jan. Of course I will have some time then, but I obviously have to get over jet lag, exhaustion and other things like that. Nevertheless, merry christmas and happy new years for everyone!

As I get farther along into this world, I will eventually need stacks upon stacks of hoppers. While iron is not too hard to get from caving, it's all manual and doesn't feel as automated as I want this world to be. So the iron foundry is my choice of farm.



I checked back to the coordinates of my spawn chunks again to see where exactly I can place my iron foundry. When that's done, I built the basic structure.



The satellite structures are up and the villages are in place. Time to actually place the doors.



...and it doesn't work. When I was placing all the doors together, I decided to go back to 1.6.4 with the villager mod to see if I did anything wrong. And as it turns out, I did. Somewhere. Nevertheless, I kept trying and trying.



As it turns out, the west satellite villages seem to merge together whenever I'm building the north satellite villages. This seems to only occur in 1.7.2 and not in 1.6.4. Very strange indeed. So what I did was I decided to only make the 28 village version instead of the maximum 44. Sure, it's a little bit less iron but it's still much more than I will need.



With that problem sort-of-fixed, I went on to build the storage room and the casing of the nether portal. This is what I ended up with. I went with a stone-brick and dark oak palette, similar to the one that I'm using over on the eastern side of the base.



Anywho, with all that said and done let's go work on something else. I found a Savanna Biome ~3000-4000 blocks away from spawn. It's a Savanna Plateau M, and I think the terrain makes for a really cool place to build.



I think I got a little carried away by the building. This large house is pretty much my building shack, so where I place all the storage, my bed, furnaces etc. The structure to the right of it will be connected to the main house and will serve as an extension. I also place a full beacon at the bottom to try and find some diamonds (and I found about 20 diamond blocks worth)



When I finished the buildings, I think it doesn't look steampunk enough. So how about some aqueducts? I eventually changed the stone brick to ice to serve as a transportation system for items.



To finish it off, an overview of our new project! You can see at the very top there are 2 wheat farm platforms. These flow into the aqueducts that we made earlier on. Also note the detail in the chimney. I used an anvil at the very top and some cobwebs to represent the smoke.