Minecraft: More Mining

I’d started a mine last time; it was fairly successful, but I certainly wanted more iron. And I actually rather enjoyed the process of mining; yay for repetitive clicking. So I went back and mined some more, this time branching off of the left side of my central passage.

Starting work on the left side of the central corridor

It was uneventful but reasonably successful at the start: here’s some coal, some iron, and some diamond, and I also found quite a bit of redstone.

Coal and iron

Diamond

But then it got more interesting from an environmental point of view. This picture looks innocuous enough,

Light around a bend

except that I didn’t create that bend to the right, and I didn’t put a light source there, either. And, if you go around the bend, here’s what you find:

A small pool of lava

That’s in the direction where I’d be digging my next branch, so I had to deal with that lava pool on a couple of subsequent branches; here’s a view of the same pool from a later branch.

Looking down at that lava pool from a later branch

Also, at some point around here I started to hear water. At first, it wasn’t too loud, but eventually it got loud enough that I felt that I should be sloshing around in it. So I stopped my normal digging and started digging towards the source of the water; it took me a surprisingly long time, but eventually I dug through a block that resulted in this:

Water streaming down through the ceiling

I’d been sensible and set up things so the water wouldn’t flood my mine corridor; still, I had a reasonable little river there.

The bottom of the waterfall, a fair bit further down

And even that wasn’t the end of my excitement: in my next branch, I ran into what I thought was a small bit of lava:

Another bit of lava

but when I started digging my way around it, it just got bigger and bigger. I guess this is the sort of thing that happens when you’re digging right above the lava level; it was a pleasant change of pace, I guess.

It's a lava lake

Finally dug a gallery all around the lake

But I wasn’t going to let a little thing like a lake of lava interrupt my plans, so I continued with my branch. Which meant that, of course, I ran into my waterfall again. But it was worth it, I found a good haul of iron soon after making my way around that.

Waterfall, we meet again

Finally a good amount of iron

If it hadn’t been for the last couple of iron lodes, I would have been annoyed at the iron in this session session; as is, I’m fairly sure that I ran into as many redstone blocks as iron blocks this time. Here’s my haul at the end of the mining session:

Loot from this mining session

On my way up, I took a detour to explore all the various chests that I had scattered around; I’m glad I did, because I found quite a bit of iron inside of them. So combining that will all of my previous loot, here’s what I have now:

My current stash

That’s enough for 592 minecart tracks, which should carry me a decent distance. Of course, I’ll have to use some for carts, and, as I discovered in this week’s VGHVI session, I’ll also have to save some for boosters.

I’ll leave you with one last sheep picture:

Sheep on the balcony