VGHVI Minecraft: May 26, 2016

Jun 11 2016

At the end of the April Minecraft session, I had a few ideas about where to improve the cave next; for May I decided to dig up and out through the cave on the left.

That grey area is a graphics glitch, not the sky

So I started by wandering around, seeing where I thought it would come out, repeating the survey from April. There’s a pretty high snowy hill that I think goes pretty much straight back from the cave; I think if I went up at a 45 degree angle, I’d come out in the middle of that, but I’m not completely sure.

This is behind and above the cave

Here’s the view from the outside back towards the cave

The entire view from the cave to the castle

That seemed non-ideal but workable, and maybe something interesting would come out of the shape of the hill, so I decided to go forward with my plan and start building stairs up and out of the back of the cave. But I ran into a surprise when I did that: not only was there a passage right behind the back wall of that cave, but it was lit by torches. So I’d been there before, I just didn’t realize it.

A surprise visible through the wall

I wandered around; I found some areas of cave that were new (there are a lot of caves and passages here), some that I’d been to before and some that were new, and eventually I managed to make it back to the furnished area of the cave by following through the passages. I still don’t have a complete view of things, but basically there seems to more or less be a ring of cave passages around the large central cave, though it’s twisty enough that it’s hard to put together a mental picture.

Here’s a pit I fell down

Light through a crack

An underground waterfall

A cave with mushrooms

I recognize that stair

At any rate, I kept on going back, and ran into a second set of caves; there was a passage that was going up and to the left, so I followed it for a while, but eventually it turned too much so I decided to just build my stairs out in the appropriate direction, and I didn’t run into any more surprises.

The exit to the surface

Lava right ahead of me

A pond and a duck past the lava

Let’s build a hot springs

It turns out that, because of the jog to the left from following the existing passage, I came out just barely to the side of the hill that I thought I would be up: the exit is in a really nice position, actually. Nice not only in terms of coming out right at the edge of the hill, but also nice because there was a lava and a pool right there, so I decided to treat the pool as a hot spring.

Cleaning out the inside of the pool

Finishing up the back

Maybe dark brown stairs would work better?

Or grey stairs?

Nah, let’s stick with light oak

That’s the inside; looking at it from the outside, there were some safety problems, so I added railings.

People could fall in!

Attempt one at a railing

That was too overwhelming, light oak is better

The first attempt at a fence around the lava didn’t work so well

A nether stone fence seems better, though we’ll see if it’s still intact this month

The view back towards the floating castle

I also tidied up the route from the cave to the hot springs, adding signs and proper stairs.

Improving the route out, now that I know what it’s doing

Here’s the cave entrance

The next place I decided to work on was the upper room in the back. First I tried a podium, but that didn’t look so great, so I decided to use a couch and bookshelves, similar to the room beneath it.

Here’s the experiment with the podium

Nah, let’s stick with a couch

Front view of the couch and decor

Here’s the whole room

Once that was done, I decided to work on the stairs up from that room, to the back exit. And there, too, I ran into a surprise: when I replaced blocks with stairs, I again ran into the cave passage ring. I ended up splitting the steps into two: one up to the back exit, and one back down into the cave passage ring.

The hole I hit in when building stairs

Splitting the stairs into up and down

The other side of the split

Here are the stairs continuing up

The current view of the central cave

I’m not sure what to do next. Maybe I’ll work on that flat area above the upper room? Maybe I’ll investigate that ring passage? Maybe I’ll start connecting this cave to Pinetown? Pretty sure I’ll continue in that area, at any rate.

Miranda was also there for some of the time, she was working on a desert castle.