Our April VGHVI Minecraft session was on April 28. Eric Swain decided to work on the towers that had been started last time: he finished the sky bridges, and also created a rectangle of glass that was floating unsupported in the air above the temple. Some pictures:

Finishing off the skybridge: because of a graphics glitch due to the height, I couldn't see Eric, so the glass was appearing out of nowhere!

The glass platform hanging above the temple

Looking down at the temple at night

The moon rising above one of the towers

The sun setting past another tower

A strange, perilous diagonal skybridge

I decided to experiment with power rails: they’re not as powerful as the boosters I’d been using, but they’re a good deal more straightforward and less prone to chaos created by cows. Miranda helped, and we ended up looping the rails around to the other side of the temple, so now they make an almost complete circle.

My first powered rail

Rails crossing a waterfall

The new end of the line

After that, we decided to build a train station near the other end of the line (right where the tracks had gone plunging into the lava, though we blocked that off).

Building a railroad station

On top of the railroad station

The cows really like that booster

More progress on the railroad station

Finally, Pat and Jonathan decided to build an underwater tunnel. They did that by building a wood core surrounded by glass, and then burning out the wood, which worked really well.

Burning out the underwater tunnel

A view of the burning tunnel from the surface of the water

The fire is dying down and the tunnel is appearing

Extending rails into the tunnel

The entrance to the tunnel

We do this every month, so feel free to come join us on May 26!

After I finished mining on Sunday, I did go exploring as planned. I’d already headed north, south, and west, so that left going east as the obvious next step! First, the requisite departure pictures, looking east from inside the house, the roof, and through the gateway arch.

Looking east from inside the house

Looking east from the roof

Setting out through the gateway arch

Of course, I knew the first landmark on my journey east: that’s where the ravine is. Here’s one of the views down, as well as a view up into a bridge I built in the trees when I first exited the ravine.

Peering down into the ravine

Trees with stone bridge above the ravine

But I was in unfamiliar territory soon after that. It was quite charming, with a lovely little pool, and my first wolf sighting! Too bad I’m in peaceful mode and hence don’t have easy access to bones; hopefully I’ll find some in a dungeon eventually…

Pond a little further east

My first wolf sighting!

The first real landmark was a mountain: here’s a view of it barely visible in the distance, and a closer view.

Is that a mountain in the haze?

Approaching the mountain

As I got closer, it turned out to be impressively large and to come with a waterfall. And with steep sides: I managed to climb up part way, but eventually I dug a spiral staircase into the walls.

The waterfall at the base of the mountain

A view of the spiral stairs from ground level

The stairs up close

You could see a long way from the top: here are the views west (towards home) and east.

Looking back towards home from the mountain top

The view east

After that, I continued east. First, some tree pictures: a strange tree with mixed branches, a view of my inventory after chopping down my first birch tree, and a view of some trees high up whose branches extended out impressively far from the trunk. Do trees that you plant not grow that well, or have I just not been patient enough with my tree farm?

A tree with a strange mixture of leaves

Birch saplings and blocks

Looking up at a tree with spreading branches

And some non-tree scenery: a bay with pigs swimming in it, a watery cave, and a pool of lava right in the middle of the desert!

A pig swimming in the bay

Looking into a watery cave

A lava pool out in the open in the desert

Note the water in all of those pictures: in general, I ran into rather more water in this direction than in some of my recent journeys. And eventually, I hit some water that I couldn’t see across at all. At least not with the normal graphics settings: when I bumped it up to high, trees slowly popped into view. In retrospect, I’m actually kind of sad that I bumped it up to high, I kind of preferred the mystery…

Is there land across the ocean?

A couple of trees pop into view

More trees appear, with the moon behind them

That seemed like a good place to stop, so I turned around. I took a slightly different, more coastal route back, and didn’t take as many pictures. Here’s another tree with huge branches and a strange partial skybridge.

A tree with huge branches

A strange partial skybridge

I also ran into the only large cave on this journey: not nearly as impressive as the cave I’d run into on my western trip, but not bad.

Looking down into the cave

It's a pretty deep cave

I approached the lava sands area from the water side: here’s a view of the bay next to it and one of the lava sands at night. Incidentally, I brought a bed with me on this trip so I didn’t have to wait out the nights.

A spit of land in the bay next to the lava sands

The lava sands at night

And two final pictures: a rather impressive waterfall snaking down a sand mountain, and the beginnings of my birch tree farm!

Long waterfall flowing down from sand mountain

Starting a birch tree farm

That’s enough exploring for now, I think. Minecraft being what it is, there’s doubtless quite a lot more exploring to be done near my home base (in particular I’m planning to get to know the waterfall area a little better), but I don’t see any urgency in doing that. (Probably the eventual release of maps will give me a nudge in that direction.) Instead, I think I need to do some more domestic tasks: I want to set up an above ground house somewhere (trying to so so in a way that teaches me a bit more about Christopher Alexander), and I want to begin a rail system. The natural direction for rails would be south of my home base, so I’ll see if I can find a nice place to build across that desert.

I had planned to continue my exploring from last week when I played Minecraft this weekend, but it was dark out, so I decided to work on my mine for a bit first. Which started off as normal: a decent ore haul, but not enough iron, despite the following:

Several blocks of iron ore

But then, as I was digging one of my branches, I found an opening beneath me, and saw water beneath. Heading down, there was a quite lovely little pool down there, with a surprising amount of ore in its ceilings!

Water beneath me

The inside of the pool cavern

So I went down and mined out the ore that I could find, and then went back up the entrance that I came in. The thing was, though, it felt like I should be pretty much at the end of that branch, about to rejoin the central corridor; and that part of the corridor was interrupted by a lava pit! (This underwater cavern was actually beneath the lava layer, only four or five blocks above bedrock.) So I was afraid that, if I kept going, I’d accidentally set off a lava flow: in fact, I wasn’t completely convinced that I wasn’t already under lava. So I dug over into an adjacent branch, and carefully counted off the squares: it turns out that no, I wasn’t underneath the lava, but I was right underneath a corridor wall. I carefully dug down there, creating a second entrance into the pool.

Looking out the second entrance to the pool: those low walls are protecting me from lava

After that, I extended my main mine corridor, and ran into some ore and a couple of diamond blocks. And, when I dug the bottom of those out, I ran into another suprise: more water!

Water coming from behind diamond blocks

I’m not used to that much water right at or beneath the lava layer. I swam up in there, and there was another quite nice pool; here’s a view from inside the pool, looking back at the main mine corridor, along with a view of some of the redstone that was in the pool walls.

Looking at the mine corridor from the second pool

Redstone in the walls of the second pool

I did a bit more mining after that, but nothing else as spectacular; here’s another ore picture, and a picture of my final loot for the day. (Tons of redstone, but mediocre iron.)

Blocks of iron and gold

Today's mining haul

After that, I went back up to my house to smelt the ore. Here’s a picture of my current stash, along with a view of a cow in the distance through the window and the achievements that I took the time to earn. Surprising how many achievements I haven’t earned, given their small number (and it’s not that I haven’t earned them since 1.5 was released, I’ve never done them): I’d been consciously avoiding combat, but I really should give farming a try at some point.

My current loot stash

Achievements are here

A cow far off in the distance

Hard to believe that I haven’t worked on my Minecraft world for almost a month; I guess I’ve been too busy in my weekends, and Rock Band 3 takes priority. But I did find time today to play for an hour or two.

I’d been doing a lot of mining recently; that’s strangely soothing, but I’ve built up a fair supply of materials now, so I figured it was time to stretch my legs a bit. I’d headed north and south before, but I had very little idea of what was to the east and west; so I packed my bags and headed west. (Actually, I didn’t pack my bags very well: next time, I should bring a bed, to avoid the tedium of waiting out the nights.)

Looking west from my front door

Sand and hills past the tree farm

There’s a tree farm immediately to the west of my front door; I knew there was a bit of sand beyond that, but I wasn’t sure what was past the sand. And water north of that area; it wouldn’t have surprised me if the water curved south and turned the western voyage into a very short trip indeed! That turned out not to be the case: the scenery to the west was, honestly, a little boring, and I ended up going north a bit to hug the coastline.

Water to the north

Hills, sand, and a bit of water to the west

Still more water to the north after I've headed west

Eventually, the terrain got a bit more varied, and I saw some mountains. There was a cave inside the mountains, but it didn’t end up being particularly large.

Mountains in the distance

A mountain cave

Inside the mountain cave

Continuing on from that, my next surprise was when I looked down at the grass below me and saw a hole! I dropped down, and it turned out to be another not particularly large cave, with a more normal exit on the other side.

A cave hidden under the grass

Inside the hidden cave

I kept on going until nightfall; not too much in the way of further excitement.

Another mountain

The sun is going down

Sunset over water

Moon past island with tree

Eventually, the sun rose, and I trudged on.

Morning at the beach

Meadow with pigs

A bit of snow

After a bit of hiking, I ran into a truly amazing cliff with a waterfall pouring down from it.

Tall cliffs with waterfall

The base of the waterfall

I swam up the waterfall; that cliff was really tall, bringing me up to cloud level! I’d never seen the clouds moving right past me before.

The view after swimming up the waterfall

Hullo clouds, hullo sky

Looking across the clouds over the valley

That really is a long way down

Somehow, I made it down without breaking my neck and kept going. The next bit that caught my eye was a canyon with water in the middle; for some reason, I felt like I should be flying a ship in a Star Wars game through it.

Water surrounded by steep walls

The canyon continues

At this point, the sun was setting; I was in a winter region, with very tall trees.

Sunset past snow and tall trees

I was almost ready to go home, but one last cave caught my eye, so I decided to take a closer look. And, when I went down there, it seemed quite deep, and there was iron visible, so I had to hop down and explore/mine.

Cave under the snow and sand

Iron and darkness below

And, unlike the previous caves I’d seen on this expedition, it kept going and going! Here’s an underground river, and another view down a steep drop, with what looks like water below. (And a light source, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see the water…)

An underground river

I think I see water below; but where's the light coming from?

As always when you have unexpected light in a cave, there was lava. (Like I said, this cave was very deep: I went all the way down from the surface to the lava layer.) And there were good mining opportunities to be found: I ended up with 25 iron and some redstone and gold as well.

I see lava way down there

Hello, lava layer!

Lava and water

At which point I was at the bottom of an enormous cave, with no clear idea of how to get up. (The vast majority of my descent had had a generous assist from gravity.) I didn’t even have a mental picture of which way I wanted to go; fortunately, at various points I could look up and see torches that I’d placed. So I took out my pickaxe and started climbing, finding a few more caves along the way.

I guess I'm supposed to head up there somehow?

Wow, I've got a big climb ahead of me

At some point in the ascent, I ran out of torches; I wasn’t worried about coal, but I’ve never been so relieved to open my inventory and see that yes, I do have wood on me. (My pickaxe was running low, too, but I had a spare of that as well, and wood is all I need to construct more of them.) After quite a while, I eventually made it up to the top; and, as I reached the top, I broke through the ice and accidentally flooded the cave! I’m curious what effect the water had on the cave, but not curious enough to have actually gone down and checked…

Looking down into the newly flooded cave

A truly glorious cave; a pity that it’s so far away from home, and that I have very little idea how to get back there! At any rate, I turned around and started trudging home after that. Which didn’t take so long, I made it home the same day, because I knew which direction to go and didn’t stop to take pictures and explore caves.

My house is visible in the mist

I'd never noticed this pool near home before

As I got close (quite close, you can see a sapling from my tree farm), I noticed a cute little pool under the sand; funny how such pleasant surprises can be lurking under your feet!

Once I got home, I smelted the ore that I’d gotten in the cave, and, to prevent subsequent animal incursions into my house, followed Steven’s suggestion and replaced the dirt floors with cobblestone. Though I was sad to see that my chicken had disappeared; I guess the game doesn’t track mobs when you’re far away? A pity, I kind of liked having a pet…

My loot from the cave

Cobblestone patch on the floor

Looking west from my balcony

We’re planning to do VGHVI Minecraft sessions on the last Thursday of every month, which means that we had one on March 31st.

I spent most of my time experimenting with minecart boosts: I removed the circular boosts we’d had earlier (since they can apparently cause lag in multiplayer), and put in some boosts that looked like this:

One of the new boosters I added

They worked great: two of them provided enough power for a cart to traverse all of the existing track, including going up some hills. So I decided to keep going; rather than extend in the same direction, though, I thought I’d start looping back, maybe ending up at the temple from a different direction? I made a left turn, which led me into a mountain: it was a lot longer than I expected, but I tunneled through all of that, and fortunately no boosts were necessary in the middle.

The tunnel through the mountain

After that, I added another boost and then turned left, hoping I was close to the temple. That took me through some treetops:

Tracks across snowy treetops

Eventually, after adding another boost, I stopped; I’ll probably continue eventually, but as is the tracks are more than long enough for an entertaining ride. Here’s me giving Roger a push to make it to the first booster:

Giving Roger a push

Looking around, there are some familiar bits near the end of the tracks: here’s a view of the super tree at night, and of one of the new towers that I’ll talk about more in a sec.

The super tree at night

One of the new towers

A postscript on the train tracks: later in the evening, Jonathan helpfully popped out of nowhere, offering to give me a push. And, as one might expect from previous months, this offer turned out to not come without strings: the other end of the tracks had received a slight alteration.

A bend in the tracks, leading down to lava

Pretty awesome.

Leo built a nether portal, placing it right next to the statue that Nelson had created a few months ago.

A nether portal

Unfortunately, it didn’t do anything! (A pity, I’ve never been to the nether in person.) Talking it over, I remembered that I hadn’t turned on the nether in the server options; fortunately, somebody said that he’d heard that it didn’t work well and suggested I should make a backup, because when I turned it on and restarted, it was a complete failure: there was no world at all (not even the non-nether world from before), just us standing on bedrock. Oops. So I reverted to the snapshot I’d made, and we continued.

Back to those columns: several people decided to build some columns going all the way up to the top of the sky, with glass bridges between them. There was one tower picture earlier, here are a few more.

Looking up at a tower and skybridges

The entrance at the base of one of the towers

Up on one of the skybridges

Looking down at the temple complex from a skybridge

The plan was to have four pillars, surrounding the temple from a distance. I’m not sure whether we completed all of it this week, but you can see much of the scope of what was planned in that last picture. Here’s a picture of Pat working on one of them, and a view from the ground next to the temple.

Tower construction in progress

A view of some of the towers from the temple

Miranda built a house next to the temple: here’s an outside view and a view of the crops that she planted on its roof.

House next to the temple

Crops on top of the temple house

And Garenas built a bathhouse over closer to the spawn point: here are some pictures of that.

One of the bathhouse rooms

Columns (lockers?) inside the bathouse

One of the baths

The builder of the bathhouse

The entrance to the bathhouse

Lots of fun, and I continue to be amazed at the different projects we come up with (and carry out!) each month. If we follow our schedule, the next VGHVI Minecraft session will be on April 28th; subscribe to the VGHVI blog if you want to know for sure.

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?

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

We had another one of our more-or-less monthly VGHVI Minecraft sessions last week; here are the pictures.

Roger and Miranda continued their work on the temple from last time. Miranda had some ideas for how to finish off the roof, and it looked great. Here are some views from inside:

Finishing off the roof of the temple

And now the roof of the temple is done

The sheep approve

And here’s the outside of the temple roof:

The outside of the temple at night

A top view of the temple roof

Miranda also built a fire pit near the temple:

Fire pit outside the temple

Don't fall in!

I’d been curious about how mine carts work, so I did some track building, with Jonathan and David Sahlin doing much of the work. Definitely an educational experience, it pointed at some ways in which my naive ideas for track building on my main world won’t work, and I clearly need to look into boosters. (Incidentally, for people who were complaining about lag: apparently circular boosters can cause lag in multiplayer servers, so that might have been what was going on. I’ll replace them with something else the next time we play.)

Near the start of the minecart tracks

Looking back along the minecart tracks

Looking back along the second segment of minecart tracks

The sheep approve of the boosters, too

The tracks end near the temple

Minecarts litter the ground

At some point, Jonathan commented that it had been a few sessions since he’d done something evil; the next thing I knew, he was giving himself lots of fire, and we had a lot fewer trees growing nearby than had been the case.

Trees on fire

A closeup view of one of the many conflagrations

The arsonist in action

He then gave himself a bunch of arrows, and started work on a huge tower, looming over (threatening?) the temple. I’m still not sure what he intended do do there, and eventually he demolished it, but I got some pictures in the mean time.

Jonathan starting work on the tower

The top of the tower, in process of deconstruction

Towards the end of the session, Miranda and Roger built a dirt house near the temple. I also took a picture of a pool at some point around here; I’m not sure of the context, but I like it, so I’ll throw it in.

Outside of dirt house

Inside of dirt house

Pool

Another first-time participant was Pat Holleman. He helped with a lot of this, but then he went off and built some sort of super tree structure. (I forget the term he used: basically, you use wood blocks to build a huge trunk, and then plant trees high up along it.) Here are some pictures:

Super tree from a distance

Inside the trunk of the super tree

One of the platforms on the outside of the super tree

A great time; we do this about once a month (though with the GDC interruption, the next session might not be until the first half of April), anybody is welcome to join us!

I think I want to build some minecart tracks at some point, which means that I need a lot more iron. So far, I’d been haphazardly gathering resources while exploring caverns; I had access to vast amounts of coal, of course, and I also had more redstone and gold than I knew what to do with (I really should come up with a plan to use that redstone), but not nearly as much iron as I wanted. (Is coal really only twice as common as iron on lower levels? It sure seems a lot more common to me…)

Miranda had been talking about branch mining, so I decided to investigate that. This stackexchange thread led to this explanation of mining strategies; after reading them through, I decided to go with tunnels with the following cross-section. starting right above the lava layer:

The cross-section of the mine that I'm using

Basically, first you dig a long tunnel that’s the central core of your mine. (That’s not shown in the picture.) Then, you dig another long tunnel going off of it at right angles. (Two high, that’s the hole in the picture on the bottom slightly to the right. Go back to your original tunnel, move three to the left and dig up two squares, and dig another tunnel. (That’s the hole in the upper left.) Go back to the original tunnel, move three more to the left and back down to the original level, dig another tunnel. Repeat until you’re bored. You’ll dig out the holes in the picture directly, and you’ll see most of the yellow squares in that picture (all of them if you tile the region completely, continuing to go up); also, if there is ore in the blue squares, then hopefully it’s part of a cluster that will stick out into one of the yellow squares. That might not be the case, so you might miss a bit of ore, but you’ll get quite a lot of ore for your effort, more so than if you compulsively made sure you could see every single ore block.

So, with that in mind, I needed to start digging! But where? I wanted to be close to home, but also far down; fortunately, my ravine nicely satisfied both of those criteria. I could get there quickly, I already had steep steps down in place, so all I had to do was go down there and find a low point that I could quickly access from the entrance, and that’s where I’d start digging down to my new mine.

Going down to the ravine entrance and making a couple of turns gave me an obvious location to start digging my new stairs down. But, as soon as I did that, I found another cave system: this whole area is riddled with caves! Fortunately, the sides of the cave were fairly steep, so they actually worked very well as stairs down, saving me the time it would take to carve them out myself. Before going too far down, I explored the new set of caves, where I found my second monster spawner, this time complete with a music disc in one of the chests.

There was a record in one of those chests

After exploring half of the new caves, I wanted to head back to the main stairs out of the ravine, so I could find a good location for continuing to dig down. And I got completely lost while doing so: I got to familiar areas of the ravine, but I kept on going in circles, missing the key turn back up. After a few minutes, I finally found the main stairs, but clearly I needed to add some signs; so I decided to go back up to my house and build some.

Armed with the signs, I descended down into the ravine, and put the signs at various turns, giving directions both to home and to where I wanted to put my new mine. I also put in stairs in a few locations, to give another clue as to the main route.

Sign pointing to the main stairs out of the ravine

More signs marking the route between home and mine

I didn’t actually have to do much digging during this point: the cavern system did a good job of going down at an appropriate slope for quick traversal of vertical distances. Eventually, I hit a lava pool; based on my reading, this probably meant that I was at level 10, and at a good level for mining.

Lava pool near bottom of mine

I dug a bit into one of the walls there (either to get at minerals or because I thought I might start a mine there, I can’t remember: to my surprise, after digging just one or two blocks in I ran into the following:

That's one of my old lava galleries!

It was one of the galleries around the lava that I’d dug out the last time I was down here! I had no idea that I was so close to that region; that also served to confirm that I was on the lava level (it was at the same height as the other pool), and it also suggested that I should build my mine in a different direction, because I knew there was more lava where that came from.

So I went over to a wall away from that lava, and started digging. First, I dug down to bedrock, just to confirm that I was at about the height I thought I was, then went back up until I was just above the lava level and started digging the central corridor of my mine.

Digging down to bedrock

Central corridor of the mine

After which, I started branch corridors off to the side at various appropriate distances and heights. Which was very successful: here’s a picture of the only diamond lode I found, but I found several iron supplies (not as much as I’d like, but better than I’d been doing before), a couple of bits of gold, and more redstone than I know what to do with.

Diamond and iron blocks in the mine

I also found something that I didn’t want, namely water: one of my corridors flooded as I dug into it.

Flooded mine corridor

I ran back, but the water followed me; eventually, it petered out, so while I did place a block to stop it, the block really wasn’t necessary at that point. That was quite startling, but at least it was only water: if it had been lava, I probably would have died and lost all of my stuff. (Which I had a lot of by then!)

I need a better plan for dealing with that (anybody have good suggestions?), but in the meantime I decided that I should build a workroom at my mine entrance. That way, I could leave my valuables in a chest there, so if I got incinerated by lava, I would’t loose too much stuff.

This is how much I was carrying when I ran into that water

The storage room off the entrance of the mine

That was enough excitement for one time: rather than use the storage room, I decided to head back up to my house and deposit goods there. So I went up there, started the iron smelting, and went out and harvested trees so that I could make more charcoal, torches, and signs. (At this point, actually, it’s not so clear that I should be making charcoal out of wood: I have access to enough coal that maybe I should do all my smelting using coal instead. Though I’ve got a pretty good tree farm nearby, too.)

My main storage chest

Here’s all the loot I have collected so far. (Or at least most of it: I should look through other chests to make sure I don’t have anything valuable in them.) 184 pieces of redstone that are crying out for me to come up with a plan to use them; 105 iron ingots, which should be enough to make 272 segments of minecart tracks. (Is that a lot? I should count off that distance above ground: my hope is that it will make it comfortably over the desert to the south, but I’m not convinced that it will go much beyond that. Though, looking at those pictures, I think I won’t quite need 100 tracks to cross that desert, so maybe it actually is a good start.) I should build a jukebox, too, to use that record!

But I’ll probably stick with mining for a little while: it’s strangely soothing, and I actually really like traveling through the ravine to get there.

Now that I’m done exploring the ravine, I decided to explore slightly further afield. I’d already gone north; when I bumped up the draw distance after getting the new computer, I saw some interesting scenery south from my spawn point, so I decided to go in that direction this time.

The view south from my home mountain

The view south from ground level, near the spawn point

Actually, I had another reason why I was curious: if I’m going to turn my home mountain into a train station, then the natural direction for the first line would be south, so I’d like to see what I’ll reach if I do that. When I stand on top of my home mountain, it looks like there’s ocean not very far in the distance, but I was hoping that’s an artifact of how the drawing algorithm handles distance rather than a sign of what’s actually happening with the terrain. And indeed, once I made it down from the mountain, I could already see terrain features that were in that blue area, so that guess seems to have been correct.

So, I walked south. Through desert initially, but I reached grass soon enough. (With a cute little cave tucked away.)

A cave hiding under the grass

And then mountains, built of both dirt and sand; I climbed up on the grassy side.

The mountains at the edge of the desert

Mountains with grass, trees, flowers

That wasn’t the last of the sand, though; here’s another big bowl of sand, and a view of the tree-covered valley (complete with odd overhang) next to it.

Bowl of sand, with water and trees on edge

Tree-covered valley next to sand

Closer view of that odd overhang

I can’t remember how densely I took photographs; the next one after that is what I assume is a lake. (I don’t know if that’s an island in the distance or the shore jutting out.) I also ran into a lovely little meadow dotted with red flowers.

Lake ringed by beaches and trees

Meadow with red flowers

Eventually, I ran into my first region of snow. And not too far beyond that, a large body of water; I don’t know if it’s the ocean or not, but if it’s a lake, it’s a big one.

My first snow

Is this ocean?

At that point, I turned back: I wasn’t planning to go on a huge expedition, I just wanted to get a sense for what the terrain was like to the south. And the answer was: interesting and pleasantly varied, I’d certainly be happy to expand further in that direction.

But first some mining, I think: I need more iron. And I should explore east and west as well: I’ve gone some amount east underground, but I should go farther aboveground. It looks like I’ll hit ocean fairly soon if I go west, but I could be wrong about that.