Fun With Explosives

I've been unsure what to do with myself recently. I've got lots of bases, plenty of non-diamond resources, a rapid transit system. What more do I need?
I tried multiplayer, but the problem seems to be that some other people are just jerks and enjoy killing and destruction which are totally counter to my goals. I played for a couple of hours to build and mine, only to come back the next day to find my house destroyed and my shit gone. meh. I know one of the upcoming updates has lockable chests so at least people won't be tempted to steal my gear. Maybe I'll give it another shot then.

While I was there though, I saw a lot of TNT being used. I've never even made TNT before so I was a little curious. I've seen it create some pretty impressive explosions so I figured I'd see how much gunpowder I had from creepers to make explosives. Turns out I could make about 10 blocks.

I picked a spot near the bottom of my sub oceanic mine that I felt had been pretty much exhausted. and loaded all the TNT into a little space and set them on fire. Good times ensued! But nothing very exciting. The hole it created wasn't that impressive.

So no matter what I do next, I'll probably also be building a monster trap to aid in the collection of much much more gunpowder from dead creepers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzAofFVTTGQ

$#@%#$%#

I discovered recently the joys of using diamonds for armour and tools. It's awesome. I survived a ton of creeper attacks wearing my diamond armour, and cleared away a ton of dirt with my diamond shovel. For example, I obliterated this hilltop. This is the before picture:

Anyway, I ran out of diamonds so I figured I'd head back to my beach front cave system. I was feeling pretty cocky in my new armour and wasn't finding any diamonds so I kept going deeper and deeper. I scored a lot of iron and gold and then I finally found diamonds. Not a lot, but a little. And then I trapped myself in a dark cave. I was trying to claw my way out and a zombie came up behind me and killed me. Boo-urns.

So now I've got to try to remember my way down to where I was and I've got to do it fast. I had my watch with me, my diamond armour and lots of raw materials. Miraculously I found my way down but too late. I lost my shit. So the next time down I grabbed a couple of signs to help me find my way down faster.

I was besieged by creepers and skeletons and zombies and everything. but I had fresh iron armour, I was holding out okay. So fuck you guys:

I dug deeper and deeper and found one piece of diamond. And then eventually a creeper caught me by enough of a surprise that I couldn't escape. I tried so hard to get down there fast enough but I got hopelessly lost. My shit was gone again.

So I rage-quit to write this blog post and now I think I'll go back and build a rail line down to where I was.

Done

I tried all kinds of crazy things with the wiring in the railway hub. I tried having a separate button for each destination but that there were timing issues with the track changes. I built an elaborate system to slow the circuit down and it looked like this:

Anyway, it didn't work. In the end I decided on switches instead of buttons. It's not an elegant solution by any stretch. Two of the three destinations require both switches to be in a particular position.. and sometimes I accidentally hit one of the switches on my way out of the station. As a result I may move the button to the far left with the switches on the right but this is how it looks now:

And that's that. Now I have speedy travel between my:

Spawn Point

Beach House

Hilltop Fort

Floating Island

Castle Pit

For the most part I can travel anywhere at night and gather supplies from anywhere they might be. There are only a couple of dangerous areas where monsters and animals can get too close to the track. I guess more fences come next.

What do I like about Minecraft?

• Surprises. I was digging a tunnel from my train station to my beach front house this evening and I stumbled across several natural caves. One of them was enormous! Tons of charcoal, iron, and even a little gold without having to explore!
• Exploring! In a randomly generated world, I'm seeing everything for the first time. I have no idea what's going to be around the next corner or even under my front doorstep. Remember that expansive cave system under the lake in front of my house? I sure do... even if I'm too scared to visit much because of all the monsters still in there.
• Being afraid of the dark. When I found tonight's surprise cavern, the first thing I did was run away. When I was properly equipped I came back and proceeded to turn on all the lights. I placed torches like a  kid who has just gone home to and empty house after seeing The Exorcist. When I ran out of torches I built walls to prevent any darkness-spawned monsters from chasing me down and exploding. Good thing too.

This is as close as I like to get to creepers when I'm taking a picture

• My Frenemies. Sure, I curse every time a zombie horde kills me hundreds of feet underground when I've been trapped in a labyrinth for virtual days. And creepers blow up my shit all the time, but that just gives me something to fight against. In a world where you can build a skyscraper on your own in a couple of hours, it's important to have something to fight against. My achievements don't mean anything without adversity.
• Building shit. Obviously. =)

Coming Along

Well, the heavy construction is done. In the evenings, the monsters can gather on my glass ceiling and cry that they can't come inside my train station to eat me.

Meanwhile, I'll be safe below. Stopping for only a second or two while I select my ultimate destination.

Of course, most of the destination buttons don't work. I have a couple of tunnels to carve out and I have a whole lot of wiring to do, but everything looks good.

And as long as you're only travelling between the beach station and my floating island, you're totally set. Soon though you'll be able to also choose between all major destinations in either direction. Thanks to this guy for the inspiration and technical details: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvSsSE6MueM

Nearing completion

I hate creepers

Why do they gotta sneak up on me and explode like that?

Glass Ceiling

Construction Begins

Adventure!

Last time we were here, I mentioned I had built a portal in the basement of my beach-front house. "What's that portal for and where does it go?"  I'm glad you asked. It goes to a terrifying alternate world where the screams of zombie pigmen fill the air and giant floating marshmallows shoot fiery death.

"Okay, that totally makes sense. Why would you ever go there?" Well. When you're in this alternate world you're able to cover ground much faster. 8x faster in fact! That makes it easier to go on adventures. For example, I came out of the Nether a long way from home and consulted my compass on how to get back. On my way I found adventure like potential cave-ins!

It looked like it would be pretty epic, and I was pretty sure I was under the ocean so I triggered a cave-in for fun. Hundreds of pounds of virtual sand fell, followed by the ocean. I tried to swim out and couldn't. I almost drowned hundreds of miles from home before realizing I was trapped under ice.

I eventually made it out and came back for a better picture of the place I almost died. Ice is not your friend.

After my long day of adventure I built a boat and sailed home. That's my fire-glass tower in the distance welcoming me home.

What's going on?

Not a whole lot... I started building a massive castle out by my floating cottage. No pictures of the castle yet, but I did find an enormous hole in the ground that I've been adventuring in quite a bit whenever I'm working on it.

A creeper was waiting outside my train station for me. I couldn't run away fast enough to save my house but I made a quick temporary repair.

I built a portal into 'The Nether'. It's spooky as hell in there, and also kind of dangerous. I built another portal hoping it would take me close to my floating cottage, but no such luck. I wandered around for a while trying to find my way back home but eventually just took the portal back. Then I built a compass.

And then I finally finished my glass tower. by this point I was pretty sick of it and I felt it needed something... anything. I added a column of lava down the middle.

I see what's happening here

I was down in my beach-front mine trying to correct the monster situation. Everywhere I went, there were tons of monsters and I couldn't figure out where they were coming from. I finally found some very dark areas up near the ceiling that I hadn't noticed before. I got them all lit up and found this:

Down at the bottom there, you can see some iron ore... but up above my head I saw a whole lot of sand. It may have taken a while, but I know the signs when I see them now. I'm supposed to go in there and pull out the iron ore which is going to cause all that sand to cave in on me. And you know what usually accompanies a sand cave-in? Water. I was almost certainly under the ocean. I figured I had two options:
1. Reinforce the ceiling so I could take out the iron
2. Stand somewhere safe and tap the sand forcing a cave-in.

Since I didn't have any good cave-in pictures, I decided on the latter. Here's the result:

Sand and water everywhere. Turns out I was under the ocean and it took a while to plug the massive hole and clear out the sand. But it got done eventually and I got my small amount of iron ore and a couple of pictures to show the process of a cave-in. Would've been better as a video though...

Oh yeah, I rode a pig

The other night when I was exploring one of my caves I came across another "Minecraft Dungeon" which consists of a fiery box that spawns monsters, with a couple of boxes which usually contain some rare items.
In one of these I found something I had never seen before. I looked around the internet and discovered that it was a pig saddle!
I was pretty excited. No longer would I have to walk everywhere, instead I could ride a pig! Gillian warned me that she didn't think a pig would necessarily go where I wanted to go, but I didn't listen. I threw the saddle on the first pig I found and hopped on... and that was pretty much it. The pig wouldn't go where I told it to go so I just sat there on its back.
Eventually I got bored and decided I wanted my saddle back so I slaughtered the pig... and that didn't work. Apparently saddles are one-use-only. =( Because I wasn't prepared, I didn't take a photo... but someone else on the internet did.

Oh noes!

"Scary new monsters"? Like they weren't already scary? More dangerous as I go deeper? Torches that go out? Apparently I have over a thousand torches. That is some bullshit.

Still, it should be awesome in the face. I can't wait for my underground sundial.

What to build?

 I sort of felt like my train track was a pretty epic project. It had demanded tons of my time, and I was left with something pretty amazing and functional. No longer would I have to spend an entire Minecraft day walking to my floating castle. But because it had been so great, it left me wondering what to do next. So I decided on a glass tower in the ocean. I figured it could also serve as a fast and not-confusing entrance to my most valuable mine. So I went downstairs to one of the largest chambers and started tunneling up. I figured it was under the water because of all the waterfalls. I was pretty confident I'm come up under the ocean but I wasn't worried about drowning. I was absolutely right to not worry about drowning. I didn't realize I'd come up under sand and be buried alive. Harumph.
At this point I figured it would be best to tunnel from the top down. I tried my best to figure out where my tunnel was going to come up, and this was what I decided. This tiny stone marker 10 feet off the beach.

When I was out there putting up the marker, I discovered I was a little off. There was a hole in the sand nearby... which is obviously where the sand collapsed on me. So I built a well.

And then I enlarge the well

And then I replaced the stone walls with Glass

That seemed time consuming... and the end result was the base of a tower not far from the beach. So I tried again a little farther into the ocean. This one was going to have a larger base with the water being deeper. I built the glass walls first and filled it with dirt. That was also time consuming but this is what I ended up with.

I think at this point I decided that this would be my main tower, with the other glass structure serving as an entryway of some sort. I'll get on that soon I guess.

The Trouble with Trains

I don't know how much time I spent trying to get an automated train system working at my respawn station, but it's a lot. Building the delivery part was easy, but I found that I sometimes missed the cart as it flew by the front door which was irritating. I tried to build a system to force the cart back around if I wasn't in it... but that didn't work very well. The system kept getting more and more complicated until it looked like this:

Eventually I'd had enough. I removed the automated delivery system and the "come back if empty loop". I figured I could just push the train down a chute from inside the station and hop inside. That made things much easier... although it doesn't look that much less complex on the surface:

With that taken care of, I was free to move along the length of track making it difficult for monsters and animals from getting on the tracks. I built boosters in every cave for both directions and finally finished off the massive hill bridge that had begun this whole project:

Now the only thing left to do was to add safety lighting to prevent monsters from appearing too close to the tracks. I got that finished and in the near future I'll take a test trip at night to see if I can make it without being killed. I think I'll be okay.

I wonder what I'll do next to entertain myself?

Skytrain

Well, it's done. I've elevated my entire track. It took a bunch of work, but I should be somewhat safer from monsters and general animal interruption now. It also looks a lot more impressive than it did before:

Once again, when the track was all finished and ready to go, I took a test ride. I made it all the way from my respawn train station to the base of my enormous uphill aqueduct and then the train stopped. I turned around and  saw that my train engine had run out of coal! This was highly unexpected. Everything I'd seen so far had made me believe that the train would continue to run endlessly. I guess I was being naive.
This is going to cause some problems for me.
1. My automatic system at the respawn train station requires that the trains be powered. If my engine runs out of steam while it's waiting for an occupant, it won't be auto-delivered. That's not a huge deal, but it's not great.
2. Powered mine carts will travel in the direction you're facing when you feed them more coal... but they can only push other carts. This means during my trips I'm going to be in front of the engine. If my engine stops part way through my trip I'm going to have to get out and re-power the engine. But with my new elevated track, that's going to be a problem. I mean, look how long this thing is!

So, I guess I'm going to have to break down and utilize some of the game's glitches to do what I need done. There's something called mine cart boosting which allows me to use other mine carts on parallel tracks to power my mine cart. This is what my first booster station looks like:

This is in the cave behind the waterfall. It provides one track with boost for each direction. It's impossible to explain in pictures and text, but this video explains things comprehensively.

I'm going to need a lot more iron for train tracks.

Tracks finished!

I finished laying the tracks for my railway. I started building a railway station at my "respawn point" and devised an automated cart delivery system. In an ideal world, every time I respawn there will be a train waiting to take me back to my floating castle. However, this world isn't ideal.

I knew I'd have to do something about all the animals at some point. They seem to be abnormally attracted to the train tracks. Rather than being crushed if they're hit by my train, they just stop progress. This was my biggest worry as I took my very first train trip from beach to castle.

The sun was setting as I left, and by the time I reached the waterfall tunnel it was dark.

What comes out of the dark? Oh yeah, monsters. Skeletal archers, actually... about five of them.

I wasn't too worried at first. It seemed like they were having trouble hitting a moving target, but as I emerged from one of my many tunnels, an archer somewhere above me hit me with several arrows and killed me.

As soon as it was light, I ran out to where I had died. All my gear was gone, and so was the train engine - only the passenger car remained. I searched all along the track and didn't find it. I think I'm going to have to elevate my tracks and provide some sort of protection for myself.

Another day, another new cave system

My railway now reaches all the way back to the first house I built in Minecraft. I was over there building a railway station and filling in holes in the beach (holes I had created acquiring sand for windows). While I was doing that I bassed by a piece of sand underneath my front steps that had been bothering me for a while. I took it out and was extremely surprised to discover a new cave right in front of my house!

Obviously I went down to explore. I was running low on rail tracks so I was going to need more iron ore anyway. I was in the cave system for a very short while before I came across a bunch of monsters. I couldn't quite get at them so I started digging a narrow path to come at them from the side. It seemed like the reasonable thing to do... but no. Cave-in!

Unlike the previous cave-in, this one was serious. I was completely buried and couldn't escape. I died and when I re-spawned my first thought was for all the equipment my corpse had left behind. I quickly ran back to see what could be salvaged and saw a complete mess of sand and ocean. After several minutes I managed to stop the flow of ocean water and had recovered my gear:

While I was excavating, I heard monster noises. A lot of them.

Because of the recent cave-in I was very careful about where I was going to dig and I eventually managed to find a room filled with monsters of every kind. After dying a few times I managed to clear them out and discovered the most expansive cave system I've found so far. There are several enormous caverns:

And they're sometimes separated by very narrow openings. I barely explored down here at all because I was carrying a lot of stuff that I didn't want to lose. I tried finding my way back to the entrance but that proved extremely difficult. A few times I thought of just digging straight up and out, but I was worried I was still under the ocean somewhere. Eventually I found my way out and went to finish my railway.

Ore Collection

This post has too much text. I thought about taking screenshot of my spelunking adventures, but I'm pretty sure most caves look the same and won't give you a good sense of just how quickly I lose sense of direction. Instead, I'll randomly insert fun pictures.

Here's lunch!

I'm running out of iron. Time to head back down into my massive mines to see what unexplored caverns I can find.

Nothing much showed up in the first couple of branches. Maybe 9 bars total? I did find a dungeon that was spawning lots of zombies. I tried to get close, but I just ended up dying a lot.

Eventually I gave up and went back in search of more iron. I figured I still had lots of lava fields I hadn't explored so I went deep deep deep into my mine to see what I could find. What did I find? Paydirt! It seemed like every cavern I found led to tons of iron and at least two more caverns! I even found lots of gold and diamonds!!! Not that those are much use to me.

Here's a small army of goddamn monstahs waiting outside one of my homes.

At one point I was holding about 40 chunks of iron ore on my person when I found another patch of lava. I filled in the lava and walked past when suddenly I caught fire! I guess my filler had melted. I started to panic and ran back toward the closest water but knew I wouldn't make it. When I respawned, I panicked a little. If I had died standing in lava all my precious iron would be gone! Fortunately, I eventually found all my gear and resolved that now was as good a time as any to head back to the surface and build some train tracks:

I stood on my roof and waited for sunrise which is potentially my favourite time of day: