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You know, I myself wondered when I was going to tear down the giant lava dispensing machine that I used to make this hole in the middle of ocean.

Now I wonder no longer!

Getting all of the lava buckets out was really the task at hand; I didn’t want to dispose of them so I had to plan on making several trips to and from Aftermath’s canopy.

Here’s a problem… some of the items that ascend quickly fall backwards on the ice rink.

Thankfully, this was an easy fix – I just moved the sign one block back.

Today I want to actually build a proper array of pathways to and from Aftermath that will make navigation somewhat more manageable. This mostly includes two main pathways: one from the bottom layer to the top layer, and one from the guardian farm itself to the canopy I built on the shore back in session 202.

My thought is to make transportation throughout Aftermath mostly vertical; this means lots of water elevators and the like. Thing is, I need a proper hub for which to connect all of these elevators together. So before I work on the pathways, I need to fix the roof of the farm!

Though my block choices are admittedly not the most coherent, I think you’ll agree that anything looks better than the ugliness that existed before. Besides, the blocks match in general – it’s just the design that’s a bit awkward. To be honest, however, I’m not especially concerned with aesthetics. The theme here is aftermath, as in this is literally what I conjure up after I get kicked out. Fitting, isn’t it?

Here I’m illustrating a slight carrot of creativity with the glass panels.

Half an hour later and my hub is finished. The guardian spawn rates won’t decrease since I have a roof over the top, despite the spawning spaces being covered with glass.

Next I need to work on the elevators… which I need cyan glass to make. This means I need cacti.

Cacti achieved!

Here’s an interesting turn of events.

This is how I want to do the tubes. From the hub, you will be able to drop down to the bottom layer (right tube) and throw items down to activate the Nether portal (left tube).

I also want to be able to throw items in from the bottom layer of the farm, so I’ll open up the tube there as well.

Now we need a way to get back up.

For sake of variance, I’ve built an addendum to the landing platform that will hold the water elevator to get back up to the hub. This is because I don’t want all the tubes on the same side of the farm.

So with these tubes done, we need to work on the second transportation pathway: from the farm to Aftermath’s canopy on the shore.

I want to break a hole in the box and build an underwater tunnel that will crash right into the shore.

Here’s what the landing pad looks like; we’ll need a separate transport tube to access it.

I ran out of light blue glass, so I had to go on a bit of a rampage.

Some other aesthetics to finish up the runway are added here.

This is just a temporary pathway to and from the farm’s landing pad as I need to build a separate water elevator for our canopy runway.

To get the tunnel to Aftermath’s canopy appropriately, we need to built it diagonally. First step to doing that is to break apart this gravel mound.

In digging into the shore, I ended up at the ravine that I discovered on my Savage Quest at the beginning of Season 2 (sessions 108-109). A quick staircase brought us up to the entrance of Aftermath!

I used glass to enclose essentially the entire tunnel. After all, why build an underwater tunnel without explicitly taking advantage of the fact that it’s underwater?

This brings me back to the Aqua Lounge.

Dear Quintropolis gods: What the hell is that?!

I needed packed ice to finish the runway.

Take a look at our underwater tunnel... from the water!

I found a problem in the farm: our Nether portal trigger has remained active since we finished it, meaning that it has not worked properly at all. Problem? These two slabs that were here above this torch acted as a full block, causing conflicts with the signal.

Now here’s an idea: using the same tube for both the elevator and drop!

And voila: completed Aftermath, sort of. I think it looks exactly as it should – a blob of random tubes and things. That’s literally how I will market its description.

I had a random thought of building a reliable ice farm even though I’ve never needed to use regular ice in my life. This should be a sign that I’m beginning to feel purposeless.

I found this idea from xisumavoid or however you spell that. The idea is that the slabs keep the water source blocks in the center, meaning that when you tear down all the ice the water will fill the arena automatically.

What a necessary project, right? Though, this ice farm does make for my first construction in the Ice Realms.

Question is: What’s next? This project has taken a lot out of me over the past several months, and I can’t help but wonder whether or not it has all been worth it. After all, this project’s purpose is somewhat deceptive – I didn’t build this base to be an addendum to my home. No, I built it because I had to survive. When I was forced out of Starlight HQ, my options were limited: kill or be killed. I chose the former, which is what led me here. But I’m not sure that this is what I want. Sure, I’ve made some mistakes along the way to reach this point, but those mistakes are what make me human. My fallibility is what helps me develop, and with this project I think I’ve proven that.

But is this how I’m going to spend the remainder of my days? Am I going to be here forever?

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life aimless, trying to survive. Working on this farm has been a lot of fun for me, sure, but completing it now has left me with a void. It has taken my mind off of the inevitable, and now I have to face the reality that I am here only because circumstances led me here. The achievements I made at Starlight HQ in regards to the potential they bring about Quintropolis are ones I cannot let go to waste. I miss Starlight HQ. I want to go back.

This array of hoppers has proven to be very unnecessary, not to mention a huge waste of iron. I don’t have much iron left after the giant railway I built last session, so if I can salvage it elsewhere, I’m going to pursue that. In this case, I don’t need this extra array of hoppers, so I think I’ll take it down. I could use these for the item sorter we’re going to build.

The item sorter will be the first part of our storage unit for guardian drops from this farm. It will begin with a pulse generator that activates when items enter a dropper.

Now initially, I set up the item elevator in such a manner that worked prior to 1.11. However, now that things are easier, I can just face a dropper upwards.

Items will ascend to this ice rink, where they will skate around to one of six pods. Each of the three drops (fish, Prismarine shards, and Prismarine crystals) will have two chests.

I encountered several problems while trying to build this, whether it was because my proportions or wrong or the items wouldn’t enter the hoppers or something else. I just had a lot of problems.

I did get all the items in, however, and thus the item sorter was done and working.

I used the rest of the hoppers and iron I had to make this. So until I gather more iron, this is all the storage space we will have for right now.

The item sorter and storage unit was just the first of many small projects today. My main focus is on completing the farm itself – in other words, the XP function.

Let us revisit the Nether hub for Aftermath to see how this XP farm is intended to work.

You drop down this hole from Aftermath’s portal, which will send you down to where the guardians will be collected.

The guardians will be just around the corner, and some will be suffocating due to the new game rule added in 1.11.

A poison potion will bring their health to a minimum, at which point I will toss a potion of harming to kill them and collect their XP and drops.

Now, this is all currently hypothetical; we still have to build the circuit that will allow activation and subsequent de-activation of the Nether portal back inside Aftermath.

This circuit will be primarily activated by items, which means a wooden pressure plate will be the desired input of choice.

There are two towers: one for each dispenser. When the pressure plate is pressed, the portal will turn on. When the pressure plate is released, the portal will turn off. So, breaking this down, when the circuit is on a pulse will be sent to a dispenser igniting the portal with flint and steel. When the circuit turns off, two pulses will be sent to a second dispenser to dispense and retract water, turning the portal off. Now, this water should only be dispensed when the pressure plate is released. This will require the input to also prepare the portal to turn off (via an RS NOR latch).

To achieve this, I used a repeater as input to the RS NOR latch, rendering it dependent on the signal rather than independently operative. This will allow me to create a manual override from the output of the latch that will reset it.

After some trial and error (like all things in life), I used this monostable circuit design to achieve the two pulses I was after.

The latch will not generate a pulse when the input is activated. But it will generate a pulse when it is deactivated after having been activated. This is possible due to the change in state that only occurs when the signal turns off.

Simultaneously, the generated pulse will also trigger a wire (pictured above) that keeps the latch activated for just a second longer to allow generation of a second pulse (which is what we are after – one pulse to dispense the water, and another to retract it).

With that, I tested the system.

It works! And the hassle was minimal – even better! Though, the water did flow down and destroy my lava...

Thankfully, the solution was just as simple.

I also installed some slabs and additional glass roofing to further stabilize the velocity of the guardians as they travel about the system.

I did a few runs. On the other side, the hassle was less minimal. Unfortunately, I was not able to circumvent the new game rule in 1.11 and therefore lost a lot of guardians prematurely.

This is not a situation I wanted to tackle today, however. My goal was just to get the system working; we’ve done that. So now I would like to complete the aesthetics.

First was the hub. It looks cozy, doesn't it?

In regards to the guardian farm itself, there are two phases to the aesthetic renovation. First, I need to fix the Prismarine texturing on the farm itself. See where I ran out of dark Prismarine?

After some vigorous squid hunting, I made more and completed the entire trim of the farm with dark Prismarine. It looks much cleaner now.

The second phase of the aesthetic process is a bit more involved. I want to cover all of this up:

But first, I need to design the landing pad that will serve as the viewing and storage space for the guardian farm.

Blue and light blue clay are vital ingredients in this build, as I feel they contrast the Prismarine delicately.

I’ve utilized the new behavior of glass panes in creating little supports.

This is what I’m after. The landing pad will encompass the entire viewing stage, which means that the box I need to build around the glass factory will connect to both ends of this stage.

I’ve used a variety of blocks to build this aesthetic box. It almost looks like a present… that you don’t want to open.

For the item sorter, I just need to cover up the redstone. I’d like the ice rink to remain visible so that I can still monitor the items flowing through the system.

Glass panes were used here to emulate glass tubes circling the constructs of the machine. This does fit in with the theme of the build – a rudimentary factory with items being transported around and such.

I think that’s a wrap for today. A lot of functional and aesthetic progress was made on our farm, and we’re closer than ever to seeing the light of day here at Stonewall.

But what will become of this place at that point?

I kicked this session off by fully decorating the Nether hub for Aftermath’s portal.

Recall that there are two portals kept separate from each other – one for Aftermath itself and one for the guardian farm. To create a sustainable

system, we would have to connect the two seamlessly.

Above is the hub for the portal into Aftermath itself.

I designed a vertical drop into the chamber wherein guardians from the guardian farm will be vivaciously murdered. This is because when I enter the Nether to kill them, I want to be able to access them very quickly in the event that they begin suffocating.

Of course, we don’t have this part of the farm set up quite yet, but right now I only wanted to prepare the hub such that when we do set it up, there isn’t much hassle.

For this session, however, I wanted to conquer a bigger project – a Nether expressway. This has long been something that I’ve wanted at Starlight HQ since I first discovered new lands beyond. But now since Starlight HQ is no longer a factor and we don’t have much going for us here at Stonewall, having a safe railway to multiple resource outposts was absolutely necessary.

The railway itself would be simplistic in nature, but would allow three possible means of travel: 1) by minecart, 2) on foot, and 3) by horse. As such, it needs to be wide enough and tall enough for each.

This railway will attach to two different portals. The first is the portal to the Ice Realms. In the aforementioned video, you can see that the portal to the Ice Realms is on the way to Candyland, suggesting that they are both in the same general direction (Candyland portal is roughly 800 blocks south of Ice Realms portal).

Andesite would be used for the railway, while packed ice would coat both sides. This would make travel on foot much quicker. By covering this with slabs, pigmen will not spawn inside the railway (they won’t spawn on the rails).

I first had slabs on the diagonal, but that impeded the flow of minecart so I removed them.

Light blue stained glass is used as the walls of any section of the railway that allowed a view of the Nether.

Slabs were used on the roof so as to allow horse travel. I won’t suffocate in slabs which is why this will work.

For these diagonal sections, I used a combination of glass blocks and glass panes to achieve the desired look.

Now you can see the new hub for the Ice Realms! It’s decorated with snow and stuff to remind myself that this is in fact that Ice Realms.

I encountered quite a few ghasts while building this thing, but thankfully I did not die at any point.

I did manage to get Capricorn all the way up here to test travel through the railway, and indeed it was perfect!

I can even see up above the slabs while on Capricorn!

With the initial railway complete, now we have to build a second railway off of the Ice Realms portal south towards Candyland.

About half of this was inside netherrack.

I had to figure that I would encounter a lava lake at some point, and admittedly this part made me just a little anxious!

It seems my anxiety was justified.

In the distance you can see our old Candyland portal that I used upon its initial discovery.

And here you can see our new one. The reason I build this new one (aside from convenience) is that the old one actually takes us a bit further south than where I’d like to be. So, this portal would put us right inside the mesa.

Indeed, it took us right to our main excavation site.

Hmm, after traveling again it created a new portal over the mountainside. While strange, I’ve decided that keeping this area would be alright given the location is somewhat desirable.

I finally made a hub for Candyland out of a few materials, just to serve as a safe haven for storage and when we travel here.

So, did I complete the railway? Well, yes and no. I did have enough iron to make the actual railway, yes (though my supply has now depleted). But from the Ice Realms to Candyland, I still have yet to completely enclose this railway as I did from the Ice Realms to Stonewall. This will be for another

day, however.

I’m happy that we now have convenient access to two of my favorite outposts in this world; this will immensely help our development here at Stonewall as we complete the aesthetics of our guardian farm amongst much else. Candyland is a beautiful place, and now I will get to see it more often without the perilous journey that was initially required.

The video portion of this session features a little Easter Egg that the text does not! Though if you'd like a little fun, you can probably figure it out just from the pictures.

After exploring the ocean monument roughly (without doing any significant damage), I came to find one unfortunate reality: there is no sponge room. That’s just wonderful, and in fact meant that this took a lot longer than I initially anticipated. See, I had to completely alter my play style for this session because of how long this would take. I’d have to mine out literally everything inside the wall I just spent about four hours putting up. While I knew this project would take a lot of time, I did expect a sponge room to help me out. But I should lower my expectations. After all, look at Starlight HQ ended up…

Fortunately, at this point the mining is completed, so allow me to show you how the past month went.

Before I could even think about mining anything at all, I needed to first build a machine that would make my life a lot easier (since that’s what machines do, right?). This machine would be comprised of dispensers that would drop lava such that it would cover the entire area of the ocean monument. Now I know what you’re thinking: I said that Stonewall would not have fancy and efficient redstone devices out the wazoo.

Well I never said this was going to be fancy.

To build it, I took whatever blocks I had left in the cellars of Aftermath and plotted them up in several lanes four blocks apart. Then I made a mass amount of redstone torches and made a mass amount of redstone repeaters before plotting those as well.

The dispensers were a little more time-consuming. First I needed a lot of bows, which meant I either needed to kill a city of skeletons or farm a village of spiders. The village sounded a bit more feasible in my head, especially since I actually found a spider spawner roughly 400 blocks east in session 201 if you recall.

I collected enough string such that I could make a stack of bows and then some, before building all the dispensers one-by-one and plotting them on my machine.

Next was the lava. I used a lot of the iron I found in session 201 to make the buckets needed for this. Thankfully, having access to the Nether meant gathering stuff like lava was very easy, so from here it was just hop, skip, and jump.

With the machine completed, it was time to start mining, right?!

Wrong. I have mining fatigue… still.

Okay, so originally I’ll admit that I wanted to kill the elder guardians off-camera and just forget about them playing a role in this session given that would be an insignificant detail compared to the monster of a project this would be. But then I thought about the future – what kind of token would I have to remind myself and others of this project? What trophy can I display at some point that will document all the hard work this caused? The answer then became clear.

The rail would have to be more than fifty blocks out so that way I wouldn’t get mining fatigue at the portal (since you get the effect if you’re within fifty blocks of the elder guardians).

But to ensure that I’d be able to accomplish this task efficiently, I needed milk – a lot of milk – so that I could quickly reverse the effects of mining fatigue when it would be necessary. This meant I first needed to find a cow from another island and bring it back. Nothing like preparation, right?

You’re probably wondering why I didn’t bring two so I could breed them. Well, breeding cows is not my goal – there is your answer.

Getting the guardians through the portal was actually a fun spin on a traditional monument excavation, especially since I’ve never really transported any kind of mob before (aside from Mooshrooms, which don’t count because they’re forcibly submissive).

Two elder guardians were right beside each other, so I tried very quickly to make my portal in a spot that would work for both and dug around the area to give them room to swim into the portal. This worked.

Elder guardian two:

I separated the three spots where the three guardians would sit with small posts, and put a marker fifty blocks from the closest post where exactly the cutoff block was before mining fatigue would be possible. Thankfully, it was just enough space to work around the portal.

The third elder guardian put up a bit of a fight... and he took a slight detour...

Alright, so the machine is built, my cow is set, and my three elder guardians are safely stored for later transportation to somewhere else (hopefully not lava, because that would suck). We’re ready to begin mining, right?

Wrong.

After I covered the first layer with my machine, I realized that I really screwed up:

So I decided that I would just fill in all those spots that the machine missed with sand. But that meant I needed a sand – a lot of sand.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

This was actually a good move, because I’d have had to mine it later anyway to accommodate the glass framing that will make up parts of the farm itself. Now I’m just repurposing it early.

I was able to fill in every spot nicely, so now I can begin mining the layers!

As for how I did these, well, let’s just say by the time I got to this, I decided to mine just two layers per day. This is because mining roughly two layers destroys one diamond pickaxe with Unbreaking III. I went through a lot of pickaxes – after repairing at least four of them several times, I’d say I went through the equivalent of at least twelve. But hey, you have to spend some to earn some, right?

I wanted to dig out each layer differently to see if there was any way I could expedite the process. The results? There were none – there was no getting around the fact that each layer takes a little more than half an hour to remove. If I had a beacon, this would have been significantly sped up, but I’m smarter than to repeat my mistakes.

I spent the first few layers just mining in a progressive fashion, but when I started tearing into the monument I found that working from the center outward was the best way to go.

As I removed more and more layers, more of the monument became exposed such that “the center” ended up being most of the area. When this happened, I moved to doing the outer layers first and then the inside.

The further down I got, the more densely packed the guardians were. As their spawning spaces decreased, the frequency increased. This is a good sign that this will be a profitable farm, but it was definitely annoying at those last few layers when they just wouldn’t leave me alone!

A lot of guardians made their way into the portal I made to push the elder guardians through. Yeah, maybe I should have torn it down.

I did almost die in fact when I got to the last layer they could spawn in.

After this layer, they pretty much stopped spawning except at the monument’s entrance because guardians need the block above and below to be water (i.e. three blocks of water vertically). By the time I covered up the monument wherein only two layers of water remained, they couldn’t spawn. So that was relieving.

Gaurdians also do not spawn underneath the monument, which meant I wouldn’t have to go this far down!

I finished up the quarry by leaving the floor of the monument as the base for my base.

Layer-by-layer gallery:

Wow, what a hell of a month it’s been, right? I hope a session never takes this long again… actually, I do. This has been a fun break, and doing nothing but mining layers for an hour each night over the past month has given me the opportunity to think and reflect especially as we close the year of 2016 out. It’s actually been a fun experience, and I look forward to seeing how the rest of the project pans out.

We’re just getting started.

Welcome to Aftermath. Yes, that is a title – the name that I’ve elected to attach to our new base over here at Stonewall. I’ve done so because I feel that whatever we do to this place needs to hold some sort of symbolism as a reflection of what and why it exists. This place literally is the aftermath of my escape from Starlight HQ, and as such I felt it best to treat it like a circumstantial construction rather than one I spend a lot of time planning. In regards to the build style of our new base, well, I’ve decided that I’m going to build it around the circumstances. For example, the chests that I’ve placed here at the end of last session…

…I haven’t moved, and won’t move. I want to showcase that they were here, as a reminder of why they are here. The build will be very archaic, comprised of stone materials, which I suppose is a nice play on this place’s title being Stonewall. I’d like to show you a few things that I’ve done off camera.

As you can see, the enchanting room is ready to go – this was the first piece of the puzzle that we effectively finished at the end of session 201.

The next big piece was the storage room, and I had a lot of options here. I don’t want it to be super organized like Starlight HQ because that’s not the goal here. I just need to create a room in which I can comfortably store my stuff without worry of crowding the place.

I made some different design choices with the storage room. I’m using fire as a light source, along with high walls to give the build more room. The building materials themselves are basically just whatever I’ve been able to obtain from digging out the base. This includes such materials as stone (which is turned into stone brick), andesite, diorite, gravel, and the like. There are of course some exceptions – I traveled to a swamp not far south to gather vines so that I could make mossy variants of stone blocks. But these blocks are only used to add accentuation to the construction.

The storage room is still a work in progress, but basically I have two walls so far. The first wall is labeled, and features ample storage for all ores. Outside the ores, nothing else is really separated into individual chests. Instead, I have all Nether blocks in one chest and all stone variants in another (and so forth). I didn’t spend much time here because the goal isn’t to make a fully-fledged base – at least not now. Starlight HQ was the same way, for those of you who have taken the liberty to look back on its history throughout Season 1. When it was first conceptualized, I focused on building the framework first before diving into the contents. It’s like gathering all your materials first before building a construction – makes it easier to build since you already have everything in place.

Here you can see the big gaping hole that I’ve made on the other side of Aftermath – I think this will be the official entrance. Additionally, I don’t plan on putting any kind of fancy redstone doors here or even any doors at all. This is an archaic-themed build, which means that not only is redstone use going to be limited, but even my design choices will be made with a Paleolithic approach in mind.

The potion brewing room further utilized the tall walls, but I’ve also used a magma block that I found last session to keep the room properly lit (it is sitting underneath the brewing stand). Apparently these blocks reflect light, meaning that they technically act as light sources assuming they aren’t tampered with after placing.

In my off-time, I’ve been doing lots of fishing, mining, and enchanting. I’ve been trying to work on my combat skills ever since combat changed, and that has only been somewhat of a success. In terms of mining, I’ve developed a strange new method of mining that so far has proven to be very effective.

Because I need a lot of stone brick for today’s project (and I mean a lot – think several double-chests worth), I thought the quickest way to do so would be to mine out the stone in chunks so that way I can avoid mining blocks that aren’t stone. This is far faster than mining in rows/columns because when I do that my inventory fills with many different kinds of blocks. Since I only wanted stone, I just mined the stone and left everything else. In the process, I got a sense of what my underground chunks actually look like in terms of ore distribution! I found several diamond veins which I happily mined out with my new Fortune pick.

Oh yeah – meet Capricorn.

So what is today’s project? Are we going to continue expanding Aftermath?

Hell no! Speaking of hell…

Aftermath actually has another purpose. In fact, its only purpose from the time I started digging it out was to be a resource base camp. That’s why I’ve been so fast and robust in its construction; I just needed to get all the essentials set up. Now I have the essentials – a mine, decent storage supply, around 100 stacks of stone brick, enchanting room, a horse, a potion brewing room, and an adequate arsenal of enchanted diamond picks.

So what is this base camp designed to sustain? A wall.

A very big wall.

A stone wall!

I know I’m crazy, but tell me that this isn’t the best way to take full advantage of the cards we’ve been dealt. Am I happy that we’ve returned to hell on earth? Well, since arriving here I’ve definitely taken a step back and reflected on a new approach to life. You see, back at Starlight HQ I had almost everything (not really, but you know what I mean). I feel like perhaps that is what ultimately resulted in my downfall – I took for granted my life in luxury. While I earned that by building that entire base from the ground up, I also became consumed with greed. As I attained access to more resources, I started to want more wealth. And the more I built, the more I wanted. It was never enough.

Here at Stonewall, I don’t have many resources at all. So maybe tackling a project as big as this guardian farm is exactly what I need to do to prove to myself that I don’t need a big arsenal of resources to make something of myself. Maybe I can recognize that while a lack of proper resources will make the task much more difficult, it is still possible. And as you know, I’m all about living on the edge. I want to find new inspiration, and I feel this is the best way to do it. After all, having limited options means there is more room for creative thinking. Endless options can sometimes become the enemy.

That’s why I’ve been collecting stone and fishing for pufferfish. Friends, enemies, frenemies – today we’re going to build a guardian farm, as the first project of this season!

I have limited but enough knowledge on how to build one of these. I know that first I need to remove all the water surrounding the ocean monument before I can even think about building a farm out of it. This means I’ll need to get intimate with the monument, and you might have noticed that my fear of it has been preventing me from getting anywhere close!

But I’m all for confronting fear as well.

Because stone is not affected by gravity, I’ll need to build the entire wall laboriously, layer by layer. So I’ll be fending off lots of guardians and probably die several times. Oh well.

The first part of this process was probably the most difficult because there were no safe spots. I built the first corner before building a line of stone bricks across to the second corner. The line, positioned approximately in the center of the proposed wall, would serve as the foundation upon which I would build the wall. I figured that by making a skeletal framework first, I could easily move around and work on different sections all at once.

I completed the first wall with relative ease, which was basically a signal that the rest of this wall would not be difficult to build, just time consuming. By the time I finished the first wall, my fear of the monument had severely diminished and I simply focused on getting all the blocks placed, because there was a lot left to do!

I began composing frameworks for each side so that if a guardian escaped the boundaries of the wall (therefore getting in my way and preventing me from working safely), I could simply move to the other side and work on that. This worked out, and by the time I finished the second wall I was already working on the last two walls at once.

I tried a few different tactics while making this wall since I was dealing with blocks not affected by gravity (i.e. if I used sand to build this wall, I could easily just stand at the top and place the blocks, letting them do all the work). Initially I built upward, four blocks laterally at a time, keeping hidden behind the completed parts of the wall. But this became inefficient especially towards the end when more guardians kept escaping the boundaries. So I wondered how I could effectively and quickly complete the wall with these limitations…

I thus started from the top on the last stretch and built downward, moving across the perimeter as I did this. In this way, I was constantly moving such that I wouldn’t be in range of any one guardian long enough for it to hurt me. This proved somewhat problematic on the corners, so I went ahead and made the pillar for the final corner so as to circumvent that safety hazard.

I did complete the wall in two sittings on two different days, which I’d say is good considering that I only really play in Quintropolis at the end of my night, after the rest of my day is already done with. This wall looks absolutely beautiful if I do say so myself, and a wonderful way to spend my nights! Coupled with a glass of tea, this wall was an admittedly therapeutic project.

The big time trial is yet to come however; I still need to actually remove all the water. And that’s not even getting into the construction of the farm itself! Who would have thought that I’d be so stupid? I have almost no resources for a project this big, but I’m going into it anyway. I guess that’s what happens when your entire survival base of several years gets invaded and you’re desperate to get back on your feet.

I hope I don’t have to make an aftermath of this aftermath. That would suck.