Minecraft: Second Mine

I’d gotten a little overwhelmed by the size of the cave I found the last time I went mining, but after my recent house work, I decided it was time to head back down to the mines. (Among other things because I wanted access to more ores – I hadn’t found any gold, redstone, or diamond.) So I went down to the basement of my house, and started digging in a different direction.

Second stairs down from basement

After a bit, I hollowed out a workroom, and then kept going.

A workroom I built partway down the stairs

MOAR STAIRS!

Eventually, I hit a natural cave, and put a workroom there as well:

Natural cave at bottom of stairs

Workroom in natural cave at bottom of stairs

In that second picture, you’ll see what looks like a hole in the back of the wall. I didn’t put that there: it was a natural window looking out onto another pre-existing cave. And when I wandered over to look through it, this is what I saw:

What's that waterfall cave doing here?

Purely by chance, even though I hadn’t paying any attention to where I was digging, I’d ended up at a cave that had a view of the earlier waterfall cave! I’ll have to admit, it was very odd to look through that window and see torches there: I’d thought I was digging through new terrain.

It was odd, and it was also a little frustrating: the whole point of this digging was to do mining in a way that ran into less overwhelming caves. So I did a U-turn and started digging from that room in the opposite direction, back under where I’d come from.

Turn around and dig some more

After going not too far, I hit a nice little lava flow:

A small cave with a lava flow

And then a large natural cave:

A large natural cave

If I’m remembering correctly (I wasn’t in the habit of taking pictures at this time), this is where I found my first gold! And it was a large cave, large enough that I didn’t end up exploring it all: instead, I went back to where I’d been digging stairs and continued doing so.

Down, down, down

Eventually (you can imagine another long stairs picture here), I hit redstone! Again, no picture of the stone, but here’s where I mined it out:

Here's where I found redstone

And, a little ways beyond that, I hit bedrock:

We're at bedrock

So: success! I still haven’t found diamond, but redstone and gold meant that I could build a compass and a watch, which were the two main items that I wanted. And that view of the earlier waterfall cave, was really something: I can’t imagine having created a view like that if I’d planned it myself, yet the world just gave it to me.