Okay! it has been a bit longer than normal since my last update, I did many things! most of which were quite small! on their own none of them really warranted an update, but after all this time and so many little things I think it is time for for Tales from Alumantia part 5!
A place for the sheep to meep!
At the start of my next session I had spotted some sheep, and decided I had better section a few off to start a farm to save myself from searching for them later, I tied them up next to my cows while I built a little sheep pen, I had no reference for this and may refine the design in future, but for now I was happy with this!
Rock and stone!
I had continued to trade with villagers and had acquired what I needed to set up a basic silk touch pickaxe, combining this with stone masons I could now essentially print money just by mining plain old stone! problem was I didn’t really have anything that needed digging at the time, so I carved out a room in the side of a small hill, not really sure what I will use it for, but hey it’s there now.
I also went spelunking for a bit, explored a mineshaft, and found some pumpkin seeds and glow berries! then I went home and got some stone masons set up to make use of the stone I had gathered.
The Garden of greatness!
At this stage I was honestly starting to feel a little aimless, I had made quite a few of the practical builds that I wanted, and was not sure what I wanted to make next, I loaded up an old server I used to play for for inspiration, and inspiration I found! I was going to make a garden! it would mostly serve as eye candy, but would also be a place I could go to bone meal copies of plants for dye and decoration.
The first step was to start clearing land!
I may have gone a little overboard, but hey that’s the danger of having a good podcast going while you play minecraft, and I will use all this space for something!
You may have also noticed that I am building this farm elevated from the rest of my base, my friends are always bullying me for building everything on the same level encouraging me to built with verticality! and honestly I did not want to dig out this hill so it was a perfect opportunity to try it! the hill was a bit steep to naturally blend into my main base level though so instead of making a weird looking mound I decided to build a retaining wall!
It adds a nice little border to the garden and I think it works rather well! when I was done with this I moved on to starting to mark out the border of the garden, again I am going into this with more of a blank canvas approach rather than a specific build in mind, so I just kind of winged it, after I marked my borders I added some flower beds!
I was quite pleased with how these flower beds were looking, but you may have noticed from the fence post in the last image that I was intending to put a cover over the plants, gotta keep em safe! I messed around with a couple designs before ending on a simple leaf and slab checker pattern, I then got my Gregory (my happy ghast) for a view birds eye view (more for fun than anything really) the garden had increased the footprint of my base by quite a lot and I was feeling very pleased with how the overall area was looking!
Mooshrooms!
There was more work done on the garden which you will see before this post is over, however before then I took a side quest for a flight around, I was already on my ghast so I may aswell, on my travels I found some ice spike biomes, and going a little further I saw a mooshroom island!, I normally use a seed inspector to find these but on this world I decided not to use anything like that so discovering it naturally felt really good! a few trips back and forward from my base were required, but I eventually managed to safely transport a couple mooshrooms home! they will live with the sheep for now, but plans for a soup kitchen are brewing in my head.
To the nether! (again)
I really wanted to start brewing some potions in my world, mostly speed potions, but also I wanted some for zombifying and curing villagers to get better trades, this meant traveling the nether for a LONG time (hours of my life), I found a lot of structures including bastions, but struggled for a long time to find another fortress (the original I had found was very small and lacked any brewing ingredients), my travels led me into a bastion, which I felt like I could take on in full diamond armor right?… anyway I got 2 shot by a axe dude.
Thankfully I had taken down the coordinates for this place before I died, and managed to recover my stuff being a tactical retreat (I ran away).
Eventually I did manage to find a nether fortress!.. which in typical minecraft fashion was right near my nether portal, just a lot lower and hidden by trees. I wasn’t mad though, I was honestly just happy to have found one and to have it easy to travel to, I battled some blazes and gathered the materials necessary to start doing some brewing in the overworld!
Back on the garden grind!
Okay time to relax! I had done my nether adventure and now I wanted to spend some time working on the garden! but first I needed some materials! luckily I had noted the coordinates for a lush cave many sessions ago so I headed over there to see what I could get! the cave ended up being rather small, but there were still enough resources there to make the trip worth it! When I returned home I worked on integrating some of these new materials into my garden, and adding some more components, another set of flower beds! and bees!!
Some cherry blossoms between the 2 shelters were a nice touch, and a practical place to put some bee boxes as the bees could go between the flower beds! made the whole place feel a bit more alive. It was starting to get a bit annoying going from the garden to my main house every time I wanted some more dirt or foliage, so I decided to build a little garden shed in the garden! I also added a little pond.
Horses!
While I had been working on the garden I decided that I would very much like to breed the perfect horse! I have never done this before, but I knew it was possible and I thought it would be a really fun project, Spoiler alert: I have not done the breed the perfect horse part yet, but I did build a set of stables and a single horse unit carved into the garden retaining wall near my house to house my main horse! I could not have these empty though so I did go ahead and tame one horse, their name is Dusty!
This stable is my own design I came up with in creative mode, however I did take some loose inspiration for the front facades of the build from this reddit post so go ahead and check it out if you like!
An update from the trading floor!
We are coming to the end of this catch up post, but first a few things of note from the villager trading hall, I have been slowly working on gaining additional villagers trades in between all the other tasks I have been doing in this post, and also set up a simple villager zombifier, this system is okay but is not without it’s flaws, I will likely work on making an automatic system eventually. I am not going to recount every trade that I got here, but as you can see from this screenshot I did get a lot of them.
I also set up some fletcher villagers to trade sticks for emeralds with, to complement this I set up a little auto bamboo farm, 2 actually, one at home and one in the spawn chunks to be always loaded
While working on the spawn chunks one I learnt that Mojang had decreased the size of the spawn chunks to a 3x3 for performance reasons, however the absolute legends have also added a game rule that allows you to change the radius, I will likely end up using this game rule just once to set it back to what it was prior to this update as making it any larger than that would feel slightly cheaty (only for myself, you reader please do whatever you want in your own world).
With these trades avalible I was able to start making myself some nicer gear!
Yearning for the mines!
The main cave I dig in had been starting to run dry, thankfully there was another one open from the ground nearby, I went in, travelled very deep inside, found a lot of iron, got loaded up with resources, and got destroyed by an army of skeletons!
I had never been in this cave before and not even left any torches so I was pretty ready to say goodbye to the gear and resources I had on me, but I wanted to at least try to find it, so I headed back in, and despite the endless amounts of turns, managed to trace my way back to my stuff pretty easily, playing minecraft without a mini map or waypoint map installed has genuinely improved my sense of direction!
I also discovered on my way out that this new cave actually connects to my current one! via a massive ledge very far up, so that was a cool discovery.
Ending notes
that pretty much brings us to the end of this update, just a couple things I had not mentioned that you may have mentioned in screenshots:
- I at some stage built a bridge over the pond for future expansions.
- I gathered the materials to make a couple of ender chests for extra storage on the go.
- I started work building a mossy path that runs throughout the garden.
And finally, I updated the world to minecraft version 1.21.8 (I skipped 1.21.7)
That’s it for this post! thankyou for reading, here is a nice shot of how my base is currently looking to end on!
You can read the whole Tales from Alumantia series here