A couple plays Minecraft

Just punching some trees.

[greatpandanate]

This has been sitting in the drafts for a few months so let me write about it real quick. I know that Ali and I spent almost ALL of our experience and diamonds to build a sturdy armor set. I even got an infinite ammo bow enchanted to cover Ali. We also brewed many potions in preparation for this excursion. Ali actually found this temple like one chunk away from our beach house which was lucky. After spending almost half hour play session just prepping, we took a dive to the monument. The next few hours were spent with Ali yelping in surprise every time one of those Guardians popped up out of nowhere. Anyways, we got an AWESOME haul and LOTS of experience back. It was a tough journey, but one worth pursuing.

[greatpandanate]

Sorry for not logging on often! Real life can really get you down. In our continuing adventures. We explore more! Ali has an uncanny ability to find things. And she found a desert temple! As many of you minecrafters know, in the dead center of the temple is a hidden room that contains four chests, but also a trap! A pressure plate with TNT under the floor. In the above picture you'll see a giant hole in the ground where a zombie was in it and it EXPLODED, almost killing me. I had half a heart left! All is well. We may have lost the contents of it, but we also found a lot of the biomes we were missing in Ali's trip out. We got cactus from the desert, lily pads and new flower colors from a swamp, a new tree type from a Savannah and we also a hooded forest! A good find.

On our way home I also fell into a hole and looked up to see Ali staring down at me, giggling hysterically because I got surprised. Anyways, we continue to prep to find an ocean monument, we have a lot of ocean to cover before we find one!

[greatpandanate]

So, to hell and back we go. using the massive amount of cobblestone we've accumulated to blaze a trail. I knew I had to go almost straight east but I still wandered a bit half lost in the nether. I did eventually find one of my trail markers and recognized it as REALLY close to my first nether base! Of course the problem was that it was almost a straight shot up from where I ended my trail, so I made a bunch of ladders to connect the bases! I am always surprised on how quick the nether makes travel. 

In order to make the travel less...explodey...I took the areas that where most exposed and made an enclosed tunnel. Also, instead of going around a large wall, I bore right through it since it is safer and netherrack gets knocked down very quickly with an iron pickaxe. Took me most of the time to boor holes through it. I had to use the debug info to get my XYZ coordinates correct, and to help keep my bearings as I connected my bases. I may have also added a lava fall over my glass tunnel, because glass apparently is stronger than lava in this world. Also I think it looks cool.

I come back to our ocean side base to see Ali had really built up the base. The last picture is the end result, it was a house designed by Ali. I only helped with finishing touches and details (those stair roofs can be tricky sometimes for a newer player). Man, it's starting to feel like we are getting a strong foothold in this game. Hopefully next adventure is exploring the ocean biome for one of the new Underwater Fortresses! I know that I am excited!

[greatpandanate]

We are never getting out... I feel like the dwarves trapped in Moria: 

We have barred the gates ... can hold them long if ... horrible ... suffer ... We cannot get out. We cannot get out. They have taken the Bridge and second hall. Frá and Lóni and Náli fell there. ... went 5 days ago ... the pool is up to the wall at Westgate. The Watcher in the Water took Óin. We cannot get out. The end comes ... drums, drums in the deep ... They are coming.

We seriously wandered this mine for hours though. the thing was huge. and we only explored about half the cave complexes we found. On the bright side, we pulled in quite the haul. We made an earlier venture out, what is shown in the last picture of the chest was what we found on the SECOND TRIP only. Minus the watermelons, they were there as backup food.

Needless to say, even though our iron armor was worn thin, we got more than enough to make up for it! Anyways, It's a long way back to home base, so we started to build up our remote base. I'm thinking of making the trek to the nether to create a nice little shortcut. I probably won't take Ali because she does not like the dimension of hell that much, things do tend to pop up out of nowhere, and lots of fire and death. Not to mention I have to NOT get lost whilst trying to find my way back to home base!

I guess we really might just delve too deep and awaken the shadow.

[greatpandanate]

Haven't updated in awhile because we haven't played in awhile! On this adventure of ours, we decided to follow Ali's map to the ocean biome! We created a path by placing a 1x1x3 Cobble stone block with a torch on it, had plenty of cobblestone to burn. Unfortunately, in a few of the taiga forests, the trees were too dense to effectively marker it, and it was taking me too long to chop them down. So I decided to burn it down. MWAHAHAHAH. Ali stayed far away from me.

The ocean biome happened to be directly east of our base with a village almost half way in between, so we stopped there and built a few cheap houses (forgot to take screenshots of this part) and then continued upon our way to the ocean!

We finally got there and Ali had started setting up our base of operations. Right on edge on a neat little outcrop, Eventually we'll make it cool. Since it was so far, I built a bridge to a hole I found and started digging it deeper to place a nether portal. In the process, I fell a great distance into a large chasm (also forgot to take a screenshot, I did NOT do well this adventure) But in that chasm we found an abandoned mine! We explored the mine for awhile, but as it was getting late, we didn't fully flesh out the mines. We'll take care of that tomorrow, and collect all those free rails! We did manage to snag a few diamonds and a lot of ore! A good start.

The last thing I did that night was quickly built a little base in the nether to (hopefully) easily find it when I try to traverse the nether. I want a nice path in the nether from our ocean teleporter to our home teleporter.

[greatpandanate]

So, to start this one up, as I was gathering lots of wood and glass for my next major project, Ali comes up to me and asks if she has any arrows in her. I Added the photo and I'll let you judge for yourself whether she got hit.

Anyways, I haven't done any BIG projects yet, I always have ideas, but gathering the resources for them take quite a bit sometimes. In this case, I wanted to make some tree houses! What we have here is the groundwork for my tree house project. There will be more details added in soon, This is just the basic framework. Not sure if I should have glass windows or leave them open but blocked by wooden fences. I also have a collection of different color wood, vines, etc that I want to add in to give it a more of a Swiss Family Robinson kind of feel.

Anyways, any suggestions on decorations? I usually like doing things myself and not just copying something I saw on the internet.

[greatpandanate]

This last play session was mostly doing chores! I set up an underground melon farm that is directly below my normal farm. Already have more melons than I know what to do with. Took some of them and combined them with the large stack of gold ingots we got after Ali pissed off the hordes in hell. Made some regeneration potions, both of us will carry one now in case of the worse. Never had to use a potion before.

Anyways, most of the play through this time was feeding and breeding the animals to replenish our used stock (I am pretty sure we slayed like 100 chickens) and clipped the sheep. Who knew doing chores could be so fun. Those farmers who complain about milking the cow so early in the mornings are just whiners. I can fill a bucket of milk in less than a second. I also grew and cut down quite a few trees to replenish our low supply of wood;

Anyways, Ali continued to mine a bit whilst I was out working on our supplies. She then stated that she wanted to tame a horse. One of the nearby biomes was plains, so I said they'd probably be some there. The problem was, we only had one saddle from our Nether Fortress run. So, I enchanted a fishing pole with some Lucky, waited till it rained (both increasing chances that I might get one). As luck would have it (and my luck in games is usually impossibility bad), the first pull from the waters was a saddle! According to the minecraft wiki, the fact that I pulled that the first time was 1.33%, even with luck of the sea enchantment level two, So that was awesome.

With saddles in hand, we departed our home to track and find a fine pair of horses. It actually did not take long to find, less than 5 minutes. So, to tame the horses, we jumped on them repeatedly until they liked us. Ali managed to do it on the second try. Me? Probably ten (I guess it balanced my fortunate luck with the saddle find) Anyways, we brought the horses back to a ranch that we built out of a lumpy part near our extreme hills home. We had flatten it out, and replaced all the stone on the ground with dirt. Took us about 8 stone shovels and a few stacks of dirt to do. But our nice, large, and open horsey ranch was done! We grabbed some of the horse armor we got from the nether fortress and also made a few hay bales for them to eat (and decorate). We named the black and brown horse Brownie and the white and brown horse Blondie after some sweet desserts.

Oh, and I made a waterfall for a "secret" entrance later. Sweet.

[greatpandanate]

On this episode, we plunge into the very depths of hell itself. Using the obsidian we mined, we created a portal to go twisting, turning through the nether. I was excited about using my new "forge" and eagerly crafted a lot of needed equipment. I used a lot of our enchantment levels and almost all of our diamonds (I think I had like 3 left after all of this gear) to gear ourselves for the nether. We went out in iron armor first to scout around, and lo and behold, there was a Nether Fortress! Now, I've played since early beta, and remember them adding the nether fortress in the first place, but I've never actually visited one!

So, after finding the fortress, we quickly made our way back to our portal to supply ourselves (marking the way of course with cobblestones and torches because it is WAY too easy to get lost in the nether). We equipped our enchanted diamond gear (managed to get mostly protection and fire protection on some) and our diamond swords (she managed to get Striking II and Unbreakable III and I got the opposite Striking III and Unbreakable II) and I also enchanted a bow for good measure (got to use the two stacks of arrows we had JUST from killing skeletons, most of those from Ali's hunting days).

Minecraft sure can be a beautiful game. Coming around and seeing the fortress was really exciting, I had to actually burrow into a support beam and make a spiral like staircase up into the edge of one fortress. From there, I covered Ali with a bow, and she kept things off of me. Those were to fight the Wither Skeletons in there. Blazes, we usually just charged with diamond swords gleaming with the eagerness of the hot blood of the fire elementals. We managed to get quite a few blaze rods in the fortress thanks to our daring charges. About halfway through though, Ali got scared by a zombie pigmen that fell in front of her and hit and killed it, so for the rest of the exploration we also had to drive back the zombie pigmen as well as the enemies contained within the fortress.

Overall though, we found lots of netherwart, nether bricks, blaze rods, one iron and one gold horse armor, a saddle, and even a rare whither skull! With the blaze rods, I was finally able to set up a brewing stand, something I've never used before.

All in all, not a bad day in hell.

[greatpandanate]

Ali and I got some wanderlust in us, so we grabbed food and a bunch of swords and ventured to the furthermost reaches we could. I cooked about 50 pieces of raw chicken in preparation of our adventures. We delved into any caves we found, including one that had about ten zombies waiting at the bottom for us. We saw many cool sights, and ventured deeply into areas unknown.

One of the important things we found was a whole jungle biome! Needless to say, we collected a bunch of things unique to the jungle. Welcome to the jungle, we got beans and cats. Also collected some trees to add to my tree farm! We looked for a jungle temple, but no luck on finding one. We also hid out in a little underground square we made nice and homey.

 On the way back, I finally captured and tamed my own wolves, something Ali had already done on one of her many solo exploits out into the unknown.

We fought our way back through hordes of zombies, but managed to keep skeletons off of us because our doggies chased them away. We did encounter a witch that hurt me a lot, but we killed it. We then dumped a bunch of our stuff, prepped some more swords ( I had half a sword left because of how many wild animals I killed for meat) Went back to the jungle to tame some cats!

Our adventures continue!

[greatpandanate]

We decided to dig deep today. We descended into the depths of the very earth, min the most fun way possible! We built a nice little pool of water at the bottom of the long drop. Although physically impossible to survive a drop from that height, our minecraft avatars scoff at such things as bone crushing impacts. Our mine is extensive and near bedrock, and I excitedly found my first group of diamonds, a whole set of five of them. I turn excitedly to Ali to tell her the great news, only to discover mining up her 28th one. Drat. I guess diamonds really are a girl's best friend.

Whilst digging our our mining tendrils, we discovered a large chasm deep underground. Feeling adventurous, we grab a bunch of torches and quite a few pickaxes, armor up and head out. Two minutes into the adventure, I get shot by a skeleton and fall into lava and slowly burn to death. Could not get my water bucket out quick enough. Oh well, Ali manages to recover all my stuff and is slightly on edge as I left her in a dangerous situation, alone. I work my way back down to Ali and we explore the chasm in relative safety. We managed to get a BUNCH of diamonds and emeralds, and various other niceties. We also turned some lava pools into obsidian, soon it will be time to dine...IN HELL.

[greatpandanate]

So, i'm writing the blog on a bit of a delay, but a few days ago we lured animals into our trap. The trap of a fenced in area! Ali managed to lure some chickens whilst I built a chicken coop and some fences! I was surprised at the increased cost of fence building! It takes much more wood than I remembered. Ali then managed to get a whole horde of cows and sheep to follow her. She requested my help to gather them as it was a lot to handle alone. Sure enough I come out to her to see a large collection of animals watching her intently as she waved the temptation of wheat in front of their faces. We managed to finally rodeo them up into their respective fences, after much tempting and teamwork.

Another surprise came during this playthrough. Ali decided that she wanted to collect bones to be able to tame some wolves lurking in the nearby taiga woods. The surprise was, before when we played, she did not like the zombies and skelotors that roamed at night and usually avoided them at all times. Before I knew it this time, she crafted some iron aarmor and a sword and started actively HUNTING down skellies at night. She managed to collect 12 or so bones during her nightly hunts. She did manage to tame some wolves, and now has a pack guarding her as she ventures forth from our hidey hole. I need to get some of those.

Anyways, next time we improve the farm and dig deep for diamonds!

[greatpandanate]

As we look off into the beginning of our world, we knew that we shall conquer all of this land. Fortune has smiled upon us as we look out onto the convergence of three biomes that we now call home. As we first spawned, we instantly went to punching them trees to get our wood. Making a bench, we started out getting those basic stone tools. I collect the food as Ali digs the holes. She likes mining, doesn't get bored of it at all. Weird. The first couple of days was spent exploring and setting up a base of conquest! Will post more of our adventure as we have it! We decided to try and blog our adventures as we have it! Next time, we are going deep, deep down into the depths! Also capturing all those animals!