Minecraft: Too Much Mining

I hadn’t played Minecraft for a few weeks, what with GDC and family members being sick and wanting to finish off the Pro Keys songs, but I found some time to play some yesterday. I’m still not quite sure what I want to do next: do I want to embark on another construction project, and, if so, what? So I fell back to my current default activity, namely mining. Which I find strangely soothing…

Two diamond blocks

Diamond and iron

Looking back and noticing gold

This loot was almost all from a single lode

I’ll spare you too many pictures of yet another ore block. Though I did find one lode that was pretty amazing: diamond, iron, gold, and redstone all right there in one place.

Another encounter with the waterfall from last time

Water, water everywhere

Trying (and failing) to dig around the water

I accidentally flooded an old corridor in the process

I’m trying to maintain my regular pattern of mine corridors; and I wasn’t quite far enough over to be safe from the water I encountered last time. I ended up mostly just going back into an old corridor to bypass it before continuing to dig.

Looking up into hole left by gravel

Periodically, you run into gravel that falls down as you dig it out, which means that you end up having a much higher ceiling in that part of the corridor than elsewhere. Which looks rather nice, actually.

My second mine corridor

At some point, I got bothered by the fact that I didn’t have a standard length to dig my branch corridors off of. So I decided to just pick a distance and dig them all that far, marking that distance by a corridor that was parallel to my original corridor. The funny thing was that, when I did that, I found that several of my recent branches were within two or three squares of hitting that new corridor exactly! So clearly my brain had developed a notion of how far a mining corridor should be…

View of branch corridor across the lava

This is a view of one of my branch corridors from across the lava pool that my main mine corridor ran into. For whatever reason, mining sets me up with a mindset of “we must make the landscape conform”: I don’t try to actually remove lava and water that I encounter, but I do try to maintain as regular a pattern of corridors as possible given the presence of those liquids.

Loot from that mining session

Here’s my loot from that mining session. A good amount of diamond, but not too exciting otherwise; and, as always, I wish I had more iron.

My bed

Once I felt like I’d mined enough, I went up and started things smelting while I harvested wood and reeds. And I built my first bed! I’ve only used it once, though: while it would come in handy when doing outside work, I still feel like following the rhythms of my world for now.

After that, I needed a break from mining (whether of ore or wood). I remembered that, when poking in the sand near my spawn point, I’d uncovered what seemed like it might be a cave. So I went over to give it more of a look.

Is there a cave under the sand?

Looking into the cave

Inside the cave

The outside view after removing all the gravel

There was a bunch of gravel under the sand; once I dug that away, there was indeed a cave. Which was reasonably tall, but didn’t go very far, so it wasn’t as exciting as I’d hoped for. Still, it was something, and I think I even got a bit of iron out of it.

After that, I returned to my house. I went to organize my goods in my chests, and realized that they were starting to overflow with junk. So I wanted to find a way to dispose of those extra blocks. And the easiest way to do that was in the lava pool in my mine: so I went down again!

My incinerator

Which sounds kind of silly, except I really like the journey from my house to my mine: it’s a nice familiar path, and it’s surprisingly fast. So I took a bunch of blocks down there and threw them away; while I was at it, I also built a third corridor parallel to my main mining corridor, this time on the right side of the main corridor. So now I have standard distances to travel on both sides when I’m mining.

How did that chicken get in here?

When I came up, I was surprised to find that I had a guest. I still have no idea how it got there: I checked, and all the doors were closed. Though the route from the ravine into my house isn’t guarded by a door: did it manage to make it through that? Did I leave a door open briefly earlier without realizing it? Did it glitch into the house? Did it spawn in there? Beats me; for now, though, I’m happy enough to have a chicken living with me, so I’ve left it there.

My current loot stash

Here’s my current loot stash. 257 iron ingots, which would be enough for 672 minecart tracks. And I now have enough diamond for a full set of armor, if I wanted to be ultra-fashionable, with one left over for a record player to boot! (I doubt I’ll do the armor, but I will do the record player.) I should make some bookshelves, too.

I’m not sure what I’ll do next. Maybe explore above ground, to see if I can find a place for a house that isn’t dug out of a hill?