Minecraft Forums

Some pretty nice stuff for completely survival. Love the look of the entrance and the walls with the towers...very nice. Well done my friend!

I'd say get a good enchanted diamond sword and some fresh armor (enchanted or not) and a bow with infinity or plenty of arrows, go through your portal and immediately build a platform up a couple blocks then try to kill all the pigmen within the area. You'll find that sooner or later you can clear out all the "locals" and once there's no local ones mad at you, any that respawn won't be mad either. We've gone to the nether and built towers and gotten the pigmen angry on purpose just to get XP, gold drops and well, because we're bored. Like I said, clear out all the mad ones and you'll be fine. Don't try to just stand and fight on level ground...Even with the best armor, the sheer numbers and the damage they do will kill you quick. If your portal is low enough in the nether and you have room to do it, you might be able to build a tower straight up to get 40+ blocks away and stay up there for a minute or two.

Direct from the wiki "Zombie pigmen will remain hostile for 20 to 39.95 seconds, although they
will continue to pursue an already-targeted player after this time
until the player dies or escapes their 40 block pursuit radius.
Approaching an already hostile zombie pigman causes it to sound an alarm
call, angering other zombie pigman in a 40-block radius. The
forgiveness timer does not advance for zombie pigmen in unloaded chunks.
Thus, if the player enters a Nether portal
and returns, any provoked zombie pigmen in the area will still be
aggressive unless another player was nearby to keep the chunks loaded.
Dying will not cause zombie pigmen to become neutral towards the player,
regardless of whether they killed you"

I use nothing but diamond picks after I find diamonds. In a new world, a diamond pick is the first thing I'll make and the first thing I'll enchant when it becomes available. I always carry two picks once I get a Fortune pick. One (usually with Eff IV or V and Unbreaking III) to do the bulk of the mining removal and the other pick with Fortune to only mine Diamonds, Emeralds and Coal when find them. Although after I deem I have enough coal, I'll just mine with the regular pick for XP.

As far as branch mining, I always start out with feet on 11 and mine the sideshafts to be 100 blocks long. Clear out 3 blocks high on the first pass...go 75-100 blocks, turn (go over 4 blocks so you have 3 in between as others have stated) and mine back the full distance to your main shaft. I always place torches on the lowest block by my feet as I go...about every 8 blocks or so. This will give me enough light so I don't have to place any more unless I do a little side excavating on a big iron or coal pocket.

After the initial pass, I'll turn back the way I came and mine out the next two layers while standing on 9. Then another two block pass to 7 and the final pass finishes with feet at 5. Thus you've effectively covered every layer you're likely to find diamonds.

I find more than my share of diamonds in this fashion and really never run out. Diamonds really aren't that scarce so you don't need to be afraid to use them. They're much more efficient and last longer than anything else.

I've been in search of spruce wood and a couple saplings on a server I've been playing on. Get a few and I'll be set...I'll just grow more...right?. Well, I'm riding through the desert on a horse (about 5500blocks away) and finally give up and turn to go home...decide to head north a bit. See a temple (like the 5th of the night since I have 36 dynamite from pillaging) and decide to pillage one more even though my inventory is full (I'm at 3300 blocks east of my
house). It's starting to turn dark so I hurry in and start chopping my way down. I peer in because the last temple I was in there was actually a
witch waiting in the bottom and had to shoot her as she was walking toward the pressure plate. Didn't want that to happen again! I peer down...nothing. I get to the last block and chop the pressure plate out...ahhh safe. Just have time to throw a torch on the wall and am about to look at all the goodies. All of a sudden, I hear a *thud behind me and ssssssssssssssssssssss BOOOOOOOOOM! Dang creeper dropped down next to me, blows up, triggers the dynamite and blows me to kingdom come. I spawn back near my house.... I'm like SON OF A ********!!! I had a full inventory with saddles, horse armor, enchanted sword, two picks, a kickass bow, diamond armor, diamonds, coal iron, wood, etc. etc. So I grab another one of my horses and go racing back....3300 blocks goes forever when you're pissed.... let me tell you. I finally get there, hop off my second horse, and run in. I'm in such a hurry that I don't care and drop into the hole to see if any of my stuff is there. Splat...I hit the bottom and have half a heart left...whew! Nothing left down there except a huge hole...all my stuff is gone. I go to jump to another block and fall like 3 blocks. Remember the half a heart I had left? Gone. I die and spawn back at my house. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Took me a half an hour to go get both horses back. I was going to leave them but I get attached to the darn things. Man, that was quite a night.

That topped my previous best creeper experience....My son and I had started a new world, had a house built and a couple animal pens. I go to expand the animal pens and notice right next to the cow pen there's a huuuge hole...one of those that goes straight down like 30 blocks. I start putting a fence around it so that no one falls in (I plan on plugging the hole later). Just get to the last couple fence pieces and sssssssssssBOOOOM....creeper blows up behind me, launches me in the air and straight down the hole I go.....splat! Dead. That was close enough that I was able to go get my stuff back but dang creepers really make me mad at times!

Sword

Pick

Bow

Shovel

Torches

Cobble

Food

Axe

And final slot, almost always a Fortune pick (but depends on if I'm building - I'll carry logs or glass, or if I'm mining with a lot of lava around - a water bucket)

Agreed...love the builds Derman! Love the egg shape in the ice spikes. Although using a mini-map isn't entirely vanilla...

I'm 47 and play quite a bit of MC. My son got me into it a couple
years ago and while he's gotten bored with it, I keep playing...

Long time gamer here...been playing since the old Castle Wolfenstein and
text based adventure games and arcade games back in the 80's. Got into
PC/online gaming when a golfing buddy introduced me to "Fighter Ace"
flying WWII planes. Many many hours on that game... Some of the guys in
one of the squads I was in, introduced me to Rogue Spear and Rogue
Spear:Urban Ops. Played that for a few years on the old Microsoft Gaming
zone. One of the guys in my Rogue Spear group, introduced me to
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. I've belonged to a clan in ET for many
years and actually still play when I get the time as I'm one of the
admins on the server.

When my son first got
Minecraft, he wanted someone to play with. I resisted for awhile, both
because I have other games that I play and the fact that the graphics
were...well....rough looking. After a couple of months I helped him find
some servers to play on only to find that time after time, there were
people being jerks to him. Griefing, killing, stealing and just being
rude little a$$hats. Found him in tears one day when he logged on to the
server that he played on and found the small town that he and a couple
other people had built...in ruins. I said enough of that and bought the
game so him and I could play together and he could have someone to play
with that he could have fun with and know his stuff was safe. After some
time of just him and I playing, I talked one of my ET buds into buying
the game. We've all played together for a couple years and now my son is
moving on to other games so it's mainly just me and my friend on our
server. We tried letting some of my son's friends on, but they get bored
quickly since they can't go into creative mode and give themselves
whatever they need. We've really found that kids don't want to work for
or earn anything...they want it handed to them or have it magically
appear.

Get's a bit too quiet at times with just two of us on my
server....It'd be nice to find a strictly survival server that's a bit
more populated and both friendly and more mature without fears of having
stuff we create or build being destroyed or having our stuff stolen. If
anyone is looking for some mature players in a survival setting (either
vanilla or lightly modded), we might be interested.

Cheers,

Digger

Quote from Neo_Dicronus

Not to worry anyone but, According to Norton web-safe antivirus thingy, Bdcraft.net has two Trojan viruses... http://safeweb.norto...&source=toolbar)

Quote from Elite_Digger

Running into an issue with another mod...
While using with the Gems Plus mod, we are able to put full enchantments on any of the vanilla swords but when we put in any of the Gems Plus swords like Ruby, Sapphire, etc. we are unable to put any enchantments on except unbreaking. We can circumvent that by enchanting a book with all the enchantments necessary and then enchanting the Gems Plus sword with a book on the anvil so I don't think it's a problem with Gems Plus items not being able to be enchanted, it's just that we can't do them directly from the table. We are able to put unbreaking on them so I don't think it's a problem on the Gems Plus end of it...
Thanks for your help and keep up the good work. We love the mod on our server....
PS- Let me add that Enchanting Plus and Gems Plus worked hand in hand perfectly in 1.5.2 so it might be something simple lost in the transition/translation to 1.6.2