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I had some free time before I had to leave the house this morning, so I stood afk inside my home and punched some zombies occasionally. Payment came soon! I really hope the game's not telling me to do what I think it might be telling me to do. Because I really don't wanna do that until I've got really good stuff!

Then, I decided it was time for some minor renovations. Those chests were really starting to annoy me, so some of them had to go. The rest will follow eventually, but I don't wanna mess up my carefully set up system immediately by having to stuff things wherever they fit. So they'll have to wait until I've got enough chests to move everything.

Now I've got a little space to breathe next to my bed. No space for my flowers yet, though...

Some of the more important items have been moved upstairs into my newly built storage room. It's still quite small and not very impressive yet, but things'll improve soon enough, I'm sure.

Charon will see a lot of me in the future. The stairs to my storage room are just next to his little "room" after all, so I can try to talk to him and improve our relationship a bit. We did start off on the wrong foot, maybe with some time I can fix that. He does tend to ignore me most of the time though... Cruel! Or maybe he just contemplates to use that torch to set himself free...? I should move it, just to make sure.

In the afternoon, I did some eventless exploring that needed to be done. Really nothing much to tell, except for those 5 diamonds that I found and the pickaxe that I crafted from them. After that was done, I went into the caves near the first skeleton spawner. I wanted to finally check out that ravine - and I realized just now that I was so taken in by exploring the upper levels of it, which I managed to more or less ignore last time, that I totally forgot to check out the ground level! I do need to fix that oversight later

So I walked along the cliffs when I spotted a surprisingly large amount of zombies jumping off the cliff on the other side, trying to get to me. Looking more closely, I actually saw a dungeon, and of course I had to check it out immediately.

My next discovery was a little cave with yet another dungeon and a couple of mushrooms, but other than that it turned out to be quite boring.

My third and last discovery was at the very top of the ravine, a little cave that lead to another ravine that lead to another cave system that lead to... wait, what?

I'm fairly certain that I checked out every single cave in that system at least three times, and now I go a way I've never seen before and end up right in front of the witch lake?! Now I had to investigate if it was just my mind playing a trick on me, but no, I actually found the little hole I was remembering from my last playthrough after searching for a little while. So yeah... There is a second way to get there, although it is a bit harder to reach, and I never realized even though I got lost in those caves all the time.

The surprise about this actually made me forget that I still hadn't explored a huge part of that ravine, so I went back to my normal everyday business. I opened up the last entrance to my home and explored the caves near the spider nest. I avoided going near said nest for the moment though, I was more interested in having some real fights with zombies for a change. So I found myself a spawner that actually managed to spawn 3 zombies before I could get my torches out.

Exploration didn't end there quite yet, though. I found myself an ender pearl, got more wood and coal, glanced at the more dangerous ravine without going in for now, took on another cave spider spawner and tried to figure out how to make life a little more exciting. I had hoped to get my excitement when I found this little guy...

However, it really wasn't much trouble at all, more like annoying to remove the webs. So when I realized that the only way I hadn't gone yet was blocked by a bunch of gravel and, behind that, lots and lots of spider webs, I returned home for a bit.

Not for long though. I just made sure that I'd leave any valuables that I didn't need in a chest, that I filled my buckets with water and that I had enough swords ready, then I headed back and cleared the gravel. Now, I'm sure you all now the three step program to success.

Step 1: Create a huge flood.

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit!

Well, it wasn't as easy as I make it sound, for sure, but it was still a slight disappointment considering how often I had died there last time. The only problem really was clearing enough space on the floor that I could safely move from there, after that, it was just clearing out the webs, placing more torches and killing the occasional stray spider that had managed to find a block without water to spawn on. Way too easy if you actually go in there with a halfway decent plan, even if most of that plan is made up on the spot after the original plan was more or less "bring water". And I even forgot to make use of that lava bucket in my bags! Life could have been even easier than it was!

But who am I to complain, I did get 81 coal, 47 iron, an emerald, tons of string and the chest as a reward. And I have exactly one torch left, I'd like to call that near perfect preparation! xD


No new achievements today, but one is actually halfway done - I had to get rid of some lava to use the buckets for water, so I started building a nether portal that is still missing its right half. Probably gonna finish that soon, but probably not yet tomorrow.

One of the first things I just had to do today was getting a lot of arrows. The easiest way I could think of was to build a skeleton farm. No XP farm this time, I just wanted their bones and arrows. That way, I could just let them fall to their death without having to bother with killing any skeletons other than those with feather falling.

Right next to this farm, I figured it might be a good idea to block the path into that cave system down there and make myself a fishing pond. So I took the two leftover buckets of water, cleared out a bit more space and after a minute had to go grab a fishing rod. I stood there for the next 30 minutes or so, and when I stopped fishing to check on the bones and arrows, I found several stacks of each. That should last me a while. Then, I noticed that at some point during fishing, I had actually come across a piece of leather!

When I walked to my storage room to gather some supplies for my next plan, I got fed up with the unfinished portal standing on the halfway point of my stairs up. It just really wasn't looking good at all, so my perfectionism took over and I had to finish building the frame. Activating it could wait until I actually wanted to go to the nether, though.

So, as I said, I had a plan and gathered the supplies I would need. I made some more torches, grabbed a couple of arrows, combined some of the enchanted armor that I got from the zombie farm and made sure that I had plenty of space in my bags. Then, I went to that (still not fully explored!) ravine to get to the witch hut.

When I dove up to the surface of the lake, I checked out the situation and was a little glad that I had brought a couple of arrows with me. In addition to the witches, I counted two skeletons and a creeper up there, so going for melee wouldn't have been nice at all. But with my halfway decent skills of shooting arrows at monsters, the Siege of the Witch Hut didn't last long at all.

Now that the hut was safe, I grabbed the water breathing potion and went right back into the water to clear the more dangerous part of the area. Luckily, I could place a torch before the spawner could activate, so I only had to deal with one witch there. Too easy!

I still haven't been able to decrypt that message on the walls, I have to say. Anyway, I didn't bother with that and just grabbed the items and the item frames and went back up. There, I took the sugar cane and sand, and then checked the chests again to see what else I could take home immediately (answer: not much).

Back at home, I started expanding my basement farm. I planted more potatoes and put the sugar cane up on the sides of the carrots. Now, short note to self: Girl, you do have leather, sugar cane and some diamonds lying around. Get off your lazy *** and gather some obsidian so that your diamond pick is actually used for a change! *cough* Sorry about that.

On with the story. Now that I had that useful little wand back, I felt comfortable enough activating that huge black ring of death teleportation. So into the nether I went! I secured the portal and then looked around for that fortress I remembered being relatively close. After a bit of searching around, I found it. Although I already knew that there wouldn't be any nether warts inside, I still checked it out and got a couple of blaze rods. No skulls, sadly.

Now, there was of course a reason why I looked for this nearby fortress despite knowing that it didn't contain what I was specifically looking for. That reason being a neat little pattern in fortress generation - knowing where one fortress is makes it relatively easy to find another. The next one this time was actually really close by; I looked around for a bit looking for a second fortress and when I found one in the distance, I realized that there was actually another one right below my feet. And that one did contain nether wart inside one of its chests, so I could go straight back home.

Within the safety of my four walls, I stood next to Charon and told him about all the neat little things I found: 5 nether warts, 6 blaze rods, 8 gold, 4 iron, 2 magma cream, 32 glowstone and 40 glowstone dust. And a whole stack of soul sand, which, I figured, should be enough for my nether wart farm. Charon was, strangely enough, not very impressed, but I could hear a jealous sigh from Bob's little corner.

Now that I had blaze rods, I made a brewing stand. However, in order to brew my first batch of potions, I will have to return to the witch hut, which I'll probably do tomorrow.

Now, I had enough exploring for the day but it was still quite early, so I opened up my zombie farm, figuring that I had gotten what I've been looking for and that I'll do an XP farm elsewhere later anyway, and adjusted it a little. Instead of dropping the babies into lava, I adjusted the water elevator to bring them up too, and while I was at it, increased the falling height a little so that most zombies would just die. The goal was, of course, starting my chicken farm! Actually, digging up some more seems to have brought me into the Lapis layer since I found 2 ores giving me 15 Lapis overall, which I did consider a really nice little bonus.

When the adjustments were done, I closed up the spawn room again, renamed two of my name tags and waited. A few minutes later, I actually had my first chicken sitting on top of the hopper, and another few minutes after that, I could actually start breeding. It didn't take that long until I could bring myself to call the little fenced in area a chicken farm. I had expected way worse luck in getting those first two, actually, because last time, it took me a long time to get them.

First of all, I did manage to finally gather those four blocks of obsidian to make my enchanting table. I expanded my brewing room a little in order to get my library into a decent position that doesn't interfere with my everyday life.

After that was done, I made a little trip to the witch hut to get some of the stuff back home, including the bottles in order to make my first potions: three splash potions of weakness. With that done, I got one of my golden apples and prepared for an incoming onslaught of curses when I fed both of these items to Charon. As expected, he wasn't very happy for a while, but then suddenly, he was uncomfortably quiet. I went to check on him, and he suddenly looked very different from before! Seems like my plan to cure his unhealthy looking disease worked, and he's now incredibly grateful. When I asked him what that piece of paper he was holding was, he told me to get a fresh piece of paper and a pen, since the message had become illegible. He then wrote: "You are not alone..." (Note: He did so by forcing me to sacrifice a level in order to write what he dictated me on my anvil myself, of course )

Then he looked longingly at the stack of paper I was holding and I offered to give him some of it. He didn't want to take them as presents, so he offered to give me emeralds in exchange for some paper. And that eventually, we'd be able to do more trades. So yeah, that's the story of how Charon became my librarian.

Enough with the over the top roleplay now, I won't be able to keep that up for long anyway! Now that Charon had become a very nice, book loving person, I had some other things I intended to do. For my first plan, I needed more soul sand, as I had figured out while doing a bit of research. So I went back into the nether, got a little over three stacks of the stuff and returned back home.

I got my buckets out of my chest and headed toward the silverfish area, filling the empty buckets with lava along the way. Then I started putting down lots of my soul sand which made dealing with the silverfish incredibly easy – just walk back a few blocks and let nature take its course. (For those who don't know: Silverfish suffocate on soul sand!)

I just had to be a little more careful when I was mining the spawners, but still, when I left the area, I think the silverfish have only been able to hit me like three times total. So my plan had obviously worked way better than I had hoped it would. My research on silverfish had definitely paid off!

My adventuring wasn't quite yet done, however. I still had another nest to take on! So I grabbed arrows, a couple of lava buckets and lots of cobblestone and torches and went into the ravine. It was my first time in it in this playthrough, but even so I decided to ignore that huge amount of coal in order to get things done faster.

As battle tactics go, I went around the room taking down the skeleton spawners first. Mormo didn't want to let me do that, so I had to kill him early and hope that his head wouldn't despawn until I could get to it (I could get it, fortunately).

Basically, this whole area was me doing what I like to do best: shooting stuff from far away. I actually didn't even have a proper sword on my hotbar - only Sliverfish in order to get rid of some stray webs that were in the way. If I wasn't shooting the monsters, I was having fun watching them burn, especially when I found huge mobs like this.

At some point, I actually ran out of cobblestone, so I mined some more in a corner. I was quite surprised when a hole opened up and behind it I saw a ravine. I was even more surprised when I tried to take a screen of it at the same moment a skeleton decided to ninja me to death. It almost managed to kill me, although not in the conventional way... When I had killed it, I had to check my screens to see if it had actually fallen down early enough to appear on the picture, and when I saw that it did, I ran nearly out of breath because I was laughing so hard at how unreal it looked

So yeah, I shot down skeletons, I poured lava over zombies and skeletons that happened to be on ground level, and I built pathways through the air in order to place torches everywhere without allowing the zombies to get to me. I had a little trouble to disable all of the spawners, but after a little fixing things up, nothing else spawned, so I consider this area cleared.

Now I could peacefully concentrate on the next part I had intended to do today - rebuild my zombie farm. I have my chicken farm, the only thing I really need from zombies now is more villagers. So I tried to devise a farm that would allow me to get rid of normal zombies but keep the villagers. As long as I can pull the lever to close the trap door into a lava pit fast enough when a villager appears, I should be fine. And of course, when I was just trying to test the design, the next zombie that spawned was a villager... Just my luck!

In order to get him to a reasonable spot, I just opened the gate and he ran towards Charon's little fenced in area immediately. That allowed me to put a fence around him, too, without too much trouble. When I had cured him successfully, he told me that his name was Vincent and that he was a butcher before he was turned into a zombie.

And, as the game wouldn't let me have some peace for a change, outside one of my gates stood yet another zombie villager. Fencing him in was a little more complicated since I had so little space left in my main room, so I eventually just trapped him upstairs. Not the most effective thing, but it worked.

He, too, was cured and presented himself as Leonard the armorer. Fortunately, that was it for the time being with the zombie villagers waiting for a cure, so I had some time to clean up a little. I took my chickens and lured them through a trap door that lead to the upper chicken area of my brand new chicken farm. I won't burn them to death however, since Vincent buys uncooked chicken and it would be a waste to pass up on the emeralds when I have a decent food source already. So my chickens die the more cruel death by drowning.

Now that I'm mostly done catching up to where I was before I thoughtlessly deleted my save, I'll probably concentrate a little more on building for a bit. I will check out the mineshafts near the witch hut, because I do need some of the stuff I can find there. But other than that, it's probably more or less just checking out the ravines a little since I haven't kept up with that exactly, and making my home a little more homey. Things will slow down, I really won't be able to keep up with my current pace. Updates will probably only come every two days or so from now on, so I won't have to let you sit there with a couple of pictures and 5 sentences

If you're interested in the trades of my villagers that I've unlocked so far:

Achievements that I could cross from my list today: enchanting table, redstone machine, curing a villager (x3).

As I expected, I didn't really have much to tell yesterday. I started working on my basement farm which I had already more or less planned out. The real challenge was going to be setting everything up in the game. I started in small steps. The stairs were extended and covered with actual stairs, and on both sides I started with the first indications of what was to come.

After digging out a bit more of the area I wanted to be my farm, I got fed up and needed a little change of scenery. Behind my chicken farm, I dug up in a spiral staircase in hopes of finding some Lapis on my way up and Redstone or maybe even sand near the bedrock. I didn't come very far because I dug straight into a little cave that needed exploring. It really wasn't big, but it did have a bit of Lapis for me. After that, I somehow forgot that my real goal had been to get close to the bedrock, so I haven't returned to dig further up yet. Should do that sometime soon...

Occasionally, I relaxed a little at my fishing pond. And I actually found a second piece of leather! And when I wanted to return there after getting rid of some stuff, I was a little surprised to see two zombie villagers trying to get through the walls in order to eat my healed villagers. Of course, I took them home to cure them immediately, would be a shame to just let them despawn! One of them became a leatherworker, the other a Cleric. When I started to get a little anxious about the lack of farmers, I saw another zombie villager standing at my gates - and he actually turned into a farmer!

On a side note, I've unlocked Charons last two book trades - Lure I and Silktouch I. With Lure and Luck of the Sea, he seems to be quite fond of fishing. Maybe when I get around to building my village, I'll give him a little pool

Anyway, at some point this weekend I wanted to go to the mineshafts near the witch hut, so that's what I did next. Turns out that I haven't quite yet driven cave spiders into extinction, they were still around in these parts of the caves. But I intended to change that very quickly, because I really hate those things.

I was really happy about all the resources I could find, and I had to get every single one of them. My bag wasn't as happy about that as I was, so I had to return home a couple of times to store it properly. The dungeons that were around didn't really help in that regard, it seemed like every chest contained something I didn't already carry around with me that needed to be taken home. Eventually, I ran out of caves to explore, so the only way left to go was up into the Monsters Menagerie which I had dutifully saved for last.

Unfortunately, the Graendal didn't want to be nice, so no head. But he did give me his sword, and including the chest's contents, I got 18 slimeballs which I was very happy about. Another thing that got me excited was the fact that my enchanting table is now level 30, so in a matter of days, I got back everything I had lost, all the things I had after weeks of work originally Knowing the map really makes things so much easier to achieve!

The only thing I hadn't got back quite yet was a decent home. So for a little while, I concentrated on continuing building. I got the farm complete in it's basics, but it still needed a lot of work in order to make it look good. On the opposite end from my stairs, I built a little room that I forced all of my villagers to go into in order to get them out of my home. They will get a decent place to live eventually, but for now they have to be happy with the fact that they have at least some space to move around. They had been fenced in this whole time after all!

Next, I thought that with my full enchanting table, I should make a new XP farm. When I went to check on the zombie nest, I got a little distracted by the ravine behind it that I had found last time. The area there is huge, and it contains another mineshaft. I didn't really gather much here, I didn't have enough space in my bags and my tools wouldn't have lasted very long anyway. So I just did some basic exploring that still took most of the afternoon.

One thing I really couldn't resist was the huge amount of diamonds I could find. Good thing that I had my Fortune I pickaxe with me, it really came in quite handy. I mean, look at this one room (which I had to split into two pictures due to safety concerns)!

That's 4 diamond ores in just that one room, and the rest of the place had even more. Thanks to Fortune and a couple of minecarts, I came out of the ravine with 20 diamonds in my pockets. And a diamond horse armor, but who really cares about horse armor when there are no horses around?

When I got back home, I managed to cure two more villagers. This time, I ran out of luck though, since I got another useless leatherworker and a butcher with the exact same trades as my other butcher.

For the rest of the day, I smelted cobblestone and started working on making things look a little better. But first I realized that for my plans, I needed Quartz, so I went into the nether in order to get some. When I had enough, I set up my pillars and then used the stone in my furnace to redo my floors and walls. The place still needs a lot of work, but so far I'm quite satisfied with how it turned out. The only thing that really bothers me is the zombie farm with its lava pit that is right above the farm. I'll have to think of something to remove any traces of it from my farm because it definitely doesn't look good.