Minecraft Forums

Quote from Courageous_Marinade»

For really long overworld connections building a nether rail is 8x shorter in time and distance, and for that, building above the nether is the most ideal. Above the bedrock ceiling of the nether it is completely flat. No netherrack, no lava, and best of all, no mobs! You use ender pearls to glitch through the roof and then use the dragon egg to break an opening for more convenient access. Yes, it can be done in vanilla. No cheats required.

Well, exploiting a glitch is sort of cheating... No dragon eggs (which is technically another sort-of-cheaty glitch-exploit), either.

Travelling through the Nether may be shorter, but it would involve spending way too much time in the Nether. Also seems like it would be less convenient for transporting loot... I dig my rail tunnels down at mining level: lots of shinies, and caves and mineshafts to explore (sometimes it seems like under the ocean is just one giant mineshaft - nearly all the regular rails used on this last segment (just under three maps long) came from mineshafts raided along the way), and sometimes you find something *really* fun: i recently tunneled right under an ocean monument, and way back at the start of this world I tunneled through a stronghold while connecting my house to a nearby village.

Of course the scenery is more enjoyable in the overworld (I once spent over 2 weeks moderating for JL2579 as he rode a minecart from 0,0 to the edge of the Minecraft world at 30,000,000 blocks).

Wow, now *that's* hardcore.

One of my long-term projects is to connect my woodland mansion base (at x=-18928, y=-12366) back to my main base (built within spitting distance of original spawn) by rail. It can be done. (almost a year in, the current end of the line is at x=-10634, y=-3450; from here there's actually a sea-route the rest of the way "home" (my world is very oceany), i may pop back for a visit before the railroad is finished... )

But you probably won't have to travel nearly that far just to hit all the biomes. Craft a map, zoom it all the way out, and explore until it's all filled in. By the time you've explored a 3x3 square of maps, you should have most if not all biomes covered.

I still have my favorite mending+infinity bow (and a couple of backups) so it hasn't been an issue yet, but I'd definitely pick infinity. Getting arrows isn't a problem - I don't do AFK farms or mob grinders, I end up tossing (or stashing in chests in dungeons/mineshafts/villages/etc that i'll probably never visit again, which amounts to the same thing) probably half the arrows i pick up in the wild, and I still have multiple chests filled with arrows. Flint is easy enough - toss fortune on a shovel, and you can turn all the gravel into flint. Or just buy all your arrows, they're reasonably cheap (you could also buy your flint, but that's kind of silly ). It's the carrying around all the arrows that's the problem - if I'm just hunting near home or one of my villages that's one thing, but if I'm out caving or exploring I'd rather not risk running out at the wrong time. And I'd rather have an extra inventory slot for loot than carry multiple stacks of arrows.

(i use my bow a lot; when i'm out hunting at night i wield my bow in my off-hand and run around picking off distant targets with my bow while i slash away at the mobs in melee range. When i'm out exploring I'll shoot cows or pigs with my flame-enchanted bow to top off my food supply without having to stop to cook. Creepers, witches, cave spiders, the skelly shooting at me from a long way away... If i'm out fishing at night, i'll just shoot any mobs who get too close and carry on fishing rather than climb down and chase them with my sword. It doesn't take much to go through a stack of arrows...)

Slimes aren't really a problem - in a 3x3 tunnel with a minecart track going down the middle, you're only going to get the occaisional small slime; you can shoot it as you approach, try to swing your sword at it as you pass, or just ignore it as you ride on past.

My rail network is almost entirely at y=12; I'll probably never use even 1/10 of the resources I've collected, but I figure if I'm going to be digging long tunnels anyway, I may as well get some loot out of it. And tunneling under the ocean is definitely easier than tunneling through it; on my current (very oceany) world, at least, there seem to be lots of massive cave/ravine/mineshaft networks under the sea, to break up the digging grind (and top off your rail supply ). (My current rail project actually tunneled under an ocean monument - nothing like getting hit with mining fatigue just after breaking through into a big cave system with lots of shinies stuck in the walls... I brought some cows over from the nearest village for a convenient supply of milk while I built my little train station/workshop/ocean monument raiding staging area, and raided the thing from below. Probably took me longer to set the thing up than my more usual floating platform/small island just out of mining fatigue range, but it was fun. ) I don't decorate the entire tunnel (although i have been thinking of tossing up some paintings), but if I need to close up a hole or build a tube across a cave/ravine I try to make that look nice, or at least clean - long stretches of cobble-on-all-sides gets really claustrophobic really fast.

As for biome distribution, have you explored in all directions? 1500 blocks isn't really all that far; that's not even a whole zoomed-out map. Craft a map, activate it, zoom it out all the way, explore until the whole thing is filled in. Repeat any time you go off the edge of the map.

(I don't really spend a lot of time in the Nether, and I've never used it for travel; but the same principle applies: check coordinates at both end-points, dig/build a tunnel from one to the other.)

How do you even get around without diamonds? O.o I don't even come up for air my first day until i have at least a diamond pick...

Dig down to y=12 and start mining, you'll find diamonds in no time. And whether you travel home in the overworld or through the nether, they'll do a better job of keeping up if you keep them leashed...

They won't teleport if you stray too far too fast (as for example, if you get in a (full-speed) minecart, they'll generally end up staying behind at the station); putting them on a lead can help keep them close, but you do need to watch for breakage (can be an issue when going around corners, although the parrots handled that better than the llamas).

I found my parrots in a jungle not too far from one of my villages - half day ride to the sea, jungle visible from the shore. Once I had a bunch of parrots, I rowed out of the jungle down the river, across to where I parked my horse; rode back to the village, then attached leads to the birds and took a minecart the rest of the way home.

Quote from kekity»

I've had a few worlds myself where I just feel like everything is done; Or there isn't really much I can do. So I always just end up starting a new one. What I call, "Endgame" or a game as endless like minecraft is more of something where you have so much ores, You've built so much buildings, cities, and redstone machines that enough is just enough and you want to restart to feel something fresh.

I've never actually "finished" a world, I only abandoned them - early worlds created before map-changing updates, for example, or test worlds that I just haven't gone back to in a while; or my previous "real" world, which I started playing less of when I decided that my 1.9-snapshot test world was a keeper... However much I build, or explore, or mine, there's always more; I've never even been to the end, for example, although I've found strongholds in more than one previous world (found this one early on - stumbled on it while digging a minecart tunnel to connect one of my first villages on this world back to my base). This was the first world where I even found a nether fortress - and I just found a second (also the first world I think where i built more than one portal/nether base); if I ever get bored with any of my (many) on-going construction projects, and don't feel like exploring and filling in more map, I can always go spend some serious time in the Nether...

And seriously, if you feel like your current house/town/village/neighborhood/explored territory is "done" (or at least "done for now"), buy a treasure map and head off to find and conquer a woodland mansion. They can be pretty far away; prepare to set off on a long expedition, and possibly not get back "home" for a while. Once you've cleared the mansion, either set up a base there or build something completely new or whatever, and make that your new home for a while. In a lot of ways it can be like starting over - you'll need to plant crops, mine for resources, gather up animals, find new villages and establish new trading routes, all the other things you do when you start a new game, but you'll already have tools/weapons/armor (presumably diamond, reasonably well enchanted, with mending), so there's less of the early-game grinding just to get a pickaxe that won't fall apart. If your current villages are all "done", find a new one; pick one with a more challenging layout - one with a lot of water, or a ravine running through it, or with half the houses buried underground and the other half on mountain tops - secure it without losing too many villagers, and rebuild/expand it in a way that makes more sense, but without completely losing the character of the original. Find a nice spot somewhere and construct a village entirely from scratch, and then move some villagers in (either bringing them in by rail from another village, or curing zombie villagers). If you're *really* destructive, you can fill your base with TNT and just blow the whole thing up. You don't need to start over in a whole new world to start a "new" game.

It's not exactly that I get diamond armor and enchant it completely out, It's more about the fact that there is really nothing else to build.

Yeah, for me fully-enchanted diamond armor/weapons/tools is the *beginning* of the game - everything before that is just setup.

What are your guys thoughts? And what would be the "Minecraft endgame" for you?

I'm not sure; while I'm sure I'll start new worlds, I'm not planning to retire this one any time soon. I've been away from "home" for almost a year now, living and exploring out of my (very renovated) woodland mansion; now that that project feels "nearly done", and the current end of the rail line leading from my woodland base back towards the old house is getting closer (a bit less than 1km to the edge of "known" territory; then two unexplored maps, and a three-map sail (through well-travelled and -marked territory) back to the boat-house down the hill from the main house), I'm suddenly starting to think about projects back at the old house: i was looking through some old screenshots, and after all this time in the woodland mansion everything looks so *small*. And my main minecart station back at the old house looks really sad compared to even some of the bigger village stations over on the Woodland line...

I may even go to the End...

If I'm coming at the ravine from the top I generally light it up top-down, cutting stairs down between levels; if the ravine is open to the surface in an area I'll be walking/riding a lot - near my house, or a village, or whatever - i'll usually close it up with cobble (later covered over with dirt/sand) and make a "safe" entrance somewhere. If I break through into a ravine down at the bottom, while mining or digging minecart tunnels (which i do at mining level), I'll usuallly run around spamming torches on the ground first, then go up. If there's a huge lake of lava, i'll often toss up a little barrier to keep me from accidentally running/being shot into it and use that as a "buffer" zone while lighting the other side (especially in those really huge ravines with lots of other ravines and caves branching off).

When I'm tunnelling, i try to remember to make a note of the coordinates where I broke through (or at least the x- or z- that the tunnel is travelling along); usually i end up just running around until i see the tunnel. Otherwise I just either build/cut stairs or pillar back up to the surface when I'm ready to leave.

I also basically use it for bulk crafting - it's great for turning an inventory full of lapis (after using a fortune pick on several stacks of ore) into blocks with just a couple of clicks, for example. But for most things I just craft them the old-fashioned way, and if I'm not sure about a recipe I totally still look it up on the wiki.

Who hates diorite? Like TheRealFanatic, I like the brightness of polished diorite. I use it a lot for the main streets in large (non-desert) villages (with spruce or dark oak stairs); i've also done polished diorite floors with scattered obsidian accents, and diorite/obsidian checkerboard. Polished diorite ceilings with sea lanterns have a sort of acoustic-tile-with-flourescent-panels look, which can work in the right sort of build - i like it for potions labs in modern houses, but it was completely wrong for my woodland mansion. And the ice village which is still in the early planning phase will almost certainly feature a large diorite/quartz/glass igloo.

Like any other building material, it can look really nice when used well, and really awful when used badly.

The *blocks* don't rotate, *you* need to rotate when you place them. That is, which side faces where depends on the direction you're facing when you place the block.

Quote from VolcanoBomber458»

I created what I hope to be my 1.12 survival world, as my command modpack will not be updated. I ended up traveling over 3,000 blocks in two directions to get to a woodland mansion, only to find a third of it burned to the ground by a single underground lava block. Not exactly my luckiest find.

Lucky you found one so close, anyway.

After (finally!) getting my first parrots home (and before my recent enderchest disaster), I made a lot of progress on my woodland mansion renovations.

I finally finished terraforming the land-side of the house (when I first arrived, the house was half in a lake and half growing out of a roofed-forest-covered hill - mobs could just walk across from the forest to the second floor roof, and the view from the windows on that side of the house was stone and dirt) and got to work on the landscaping. I added a stream (mostly because i wanted an excuse for a little bridge), replanted the trees, added a lava-fall and a couple of waterfalls to the now-visible mountains across the river, put in some paths, built a cocoa-bean-farm screen dividing the functional from the ornamental parts of the garden, built a fountain in the middle of the lake with a walkway around it with bridges from the front door and the barn; cut a new door and added a boat ramp/dock at the back of the house (where the lake runs into the river, which runs to the ocean).

The red-circled area used to all be mountain; since taking this screenshot, i've cleaned up some of the lines and i've extended the beach - the whole bit below the dark green line (leaf-block hedge) at the bottom edge of the red circle between those two trees is now sand, and i've added some chairs. On the house, you can see the roof deck, the skylight over the pool, the chimneys from the fireplaces, the fishing deck, and the boat ramp. The river flows down through the desert (where i planted all those cactusses and a bunch of acacia trees) to the ocean.




Front of the house, with fountain. (I added the lava-fall to that mountain, to make the view more scenic) The darkoak/jungle building is the barn - cows, pigs, chickens and sheep; I don't keep horses or llamas here, travel to/from the mansion is generally either by boat or minecart. I still haven't brought any rabbits over from the desert behind the house, when I do they'll probably get their own building.




Still need to plant more flowers, and maybe put in some benches; the grassy bits on the left edge are now all sand - looking at the above map and sorting through garden screenshots was what reminded me to finish the beach, but i apparently forgot to take the "after" pics (and i'm a 25-minute minecart ride from home at the moment), sorry.



Really, a house this size needs more than one door (especially if that door opens up into the middle of a lake ). I added a garden door at the end of a previously dead-end hallway, and (after moving some interior walls and reconfiguring the layout of that corner of the house) added another door to the new dock/boat ramp.




When working on the garden, one of the most important views I check is the view from my (temporarily open) bedroom window. This time, I forgot that Pepper was riding around on my shoulder, and when I jumped up onto the window ledge she flew off and photo-bombed my screenshot.

Inside the house, I more or less finished the main work on the ground floor. Expanded the storage room - originally one large room (which originally contained a giant wool illager), I broke through the wall to the (empty, originally a large prison) room on the other side and re-arranged all the chests; still have to finish the last of the sorting. I finished the formal dining room, and the less-formal gardeny-breakfast room.

This was originally a narrow-room, with a large room on the other side; I moved the wall, turning this into a large room and extending the hallway into the new narrow room, adding a door out to the boat ramp. (the narrow room on the other side of the hall is a little storage/kitchen area for the fishing deck; i keep a change of clothes on an armor stand - leather gear, with some basic prots but no mending - and my favorite fishing rod in an item frame on the wall)



Once I started really working on the garden, I decided that the ground floor needed more windows. Rupert (on the tree) and Pepper (on the chair) have been hanging out in here, while Rosie continues to perch on her tree in the hall.

I've basically turned the second floor into one big library. I made a lot of structural changes to the second and third floors (the biggest of which was moving the third-floor stairs), opening up the space while still trying to preserve the "feel" of the house. Still have a few more rooms to sort out, but it's mostly there...

The whole thing actually started with the stairs: the original stairs took up half of a narrow room (with the other half being wasted space), and completely blocked a window with one of the better views of what was about to be turned into the garden. One second I was thinking "i should make a note to maybe fix this the next time i'm looking for a project", the next I was swinging my axe, poking holes in the walls and ceiling. At least half of the second floor rooms were some sort of library, so it seemed only logical to move the functional library up here. Enchanting area under the stairs, book storage in the "stacks" on the landing.



While working on the library landing, I poked a hole in the wall and realized that there was a boxing ring on the other side; a small lecture hall, with a doorway leading from the library landing, seemed like a better use of the space



Extra-large reading room: the front third of the room was originally part of the hallway - one of those little open spaces leading nowhere. Functionally, I wanted to "paint" the left-hand wall to hide the backs of the chests up on the landing; but i also wanted a big space to play with glazed terracotta quilt/tapestry-type wall hangings.



I connected up a bunch of small library-type rooms, and turned them into one long, open, casual reading/sitting room. Windows look down onto the garden.




The map room. I changed up the outer edge of the table/chairs (seriously, after all these renovations i'll never need to craft another oak stair again ), and replaced the decorative bookshelves with functional map storage (each chest holds one quadrant of the map wall; maps are stored in the chest slot corresponding with their placement on the grid. when i'm out exploring, every time i add a new map i update the key with the map number, so i can reasonably easily find whichever map i need (and i have (multiple) backups in case i ever die and lose inventory, or accidentally drop a map into lava or the bottom of the ocean or something)), added the carpet and lighting, and replaced the original (small arch) doorway (where i was standing) with two larger archways (keeping the central column between them).

The third floor is very much a work in progress. I've blocked out the general layout - a central open space (basically a ring of hallway carpet around the top of the stairs) with rooms around it. The first thing I did up here was turn the last of the boxing rings into a swimming pool; then, while I was still moving walls around, I finally put in a proper bedroom (i'd been camping out in a small bedroom-with-tree-and-faux-fireplace on the second floor), and a bathroom. I already had a door out from what's now the pool to the second-floor roof (and a ladder from there up to the third-floor roof) for post-thunderstorm repairs; especially with all those windows looking out onto a flat expanse of dark oak planks, I wanted to do something more interesting with the space. I put in a rooftop garden, with a firepit, dining table, and lots of trees and flowerpots.

My first working fireplace! In a massive house built almost entirely out of wood! The purple glazed terracotta panel is covering a window - the other windows look down on the garden, but that one's visible from the second floor roof. The space on the other side of the cyan terracotta wall used to be the top of the stairs; there's a wool illager face covering the window on the opposite wall.



And a wide-angle shot of the view from the window:



When I first blocked out the rooms, a narrow room seemed like it'd make a really roomy bathroom - bath at the end with the window, archway down the center, toilet at the far end. But of course I forgot to account for the "paint"... Adding a fireplace (open to the bath side) turned a long, narrow, awkward space into two small cozy ones.

Bath side - the faux-window paintings help open up the room, and there's an actual window behind me.



There's a sink on the opposite wall (next to the door). The green on the back wall is dark green concrete, the other three walls are lime terracotta.




The pool. There's a (black glass block) skylight over the center of the ring; the windows now look out onto the roofdeck/garden.




And the roof deck. The vines have grown it a bit more, making this a really nice cozy seating area.

There's still a lot of work to do, especially on the third floor; there's a room-filling wool cat that makes no sense but I can't bring myself to rip out, there are some rooms that have defined functions but still need furnishing and/or decorating, and there are still some rooms that I haven't touched - a couple of dorm rooms, a dining room, some faux-fireplace small bedrooms. And I need to decide how logical i want the place to be - on the one hand, on a single player world i'm litereally the only person who exists; on the other hand, I've got this giant house with a massive library; i should probably have some guest bedrooms and at least one other bathroom.

If you're worried about finding your way back to a house that isn't at your spawn point, there are two things you can do: hit F3 to bring up the debug info; you'll see a line starting with "XYZ:" followed by a set of numbers. the X coord is east/west; Y is up/down/; Z is north/south. Write down the X/Z coordinates of your house (or any other place you want to find again, like a village or a particularly scenic spot or whatever), and any time you're lost you can hit F3 again and navigate by numbers. The other, in-character, solution is to craft some maps (check the wiki for info on how to craft and use them). If you put a copy of your "home" map in an item frame somewhere in your house, you'll see a little green marker in that spot; when travelling, compare your location (white marker) on the map with that one, and navigate accordingly. Having some visual cues that can be seen from a little way off (once the chunk is loaded) can help once you're close - I like to plant a bunch of every type of tree near all my houses and villages, including mega-spruce and jungle giants; I light up a pretty huge area around my houses/villages, making it really easy to spot at night; and I usually have large herds of rainbow-dyed sheep free-roaming around my house, sometimes the first sign that i'm getting close to home (especially if i'm coming through a dense forest) is the sight of a random purple sheep.

As far as Extreme Hills living goes, it can certainly be a challenge to start. You'll want to find some water sooner or later; once you get some iron, craft a couple of buckets, fetch some water, and make an infinite water source (if i don't have a lake/river right outside my front door, i'll put a 2x2 "well" somewhere so i can keep my buckets refilled while I work on things like the vegetable garden and the sugar cane farm). Are there trees nearby? Grassy bits, or is it all stone and gravel? Are there animals?

Build a house, dig down into the mountain to mine for resources. I do my mining at y=12; the first thing i do when i start a new world is to build a quick-and-dirty box of a shelter and start digging a staircase down. Along the way i'll generally start to find some coal and iron ore; once i get enough iron i'll upgrade my pickaxe (and then once i get some diamonds, i'll upgrade again and never look back ).

Once you get going, you may want to think about terraforming the landscape immediately around your house - maybe levelling parts, covering some of the bare stone with dirt/grass, etc. And you'll probably want to mark your routes up and down the mountains and put in some actual stairs to make getting around easier... Once you find some horses, they'll also make running up and down mountains a lot easier. And minecarts - I'm not saying I'm lazy, but at my not-even-very-high-up-at-the-edge-of-the-ex-hills house I have a minecart track going from my just-below-the-surface basement storage room down to the mine...

Quote from VolcanoBomber458»

I'm curious- why would you need several ender chests? I always make do with silk touching my single one. Not that I can't make more, I'm just too lazy to.

I'm the other kind of lazy - I'd rather craft a bunch of enderchests and scatter them around in useful locations than have to drop it and pick it back up every time I needed something from it. Back on the east side of this world, I have at least one enderchest in each of several villages; one in every mining hub/minecart station; and several around my house (storage room, kitchen, workshop/potions lab, library, map room, portal room, barn, and probably at least one or two more i'm forgetting). When clerics stopped selling eyes of ender I tried to get into the habit of carrying around a small stack when going out exploring, but in all the planning before setting off in search of the woodland mansion I sort of forgot. (I also hadn't planned on staying here so long; but then once I got here it seemed silly to just turn around and go right back, leaving all the loot I'd picked up on my journey behind...) Having only the one enderchest all these months has taken a lot of getting used to - I can't tell you how many times I've hopped out of a minecart after a fifteen minute ride only to realize that the enderchest full of trade goods was back at the house. And now I have *no* enderchests, which is taking a different kind of getting used to. So far, I don't like it...

After months of being *really* *careful*, I finally did the thing I've feared ever since the point halfway on the journey to my woodland mansion when I realized that I'd only brought along one single enderchest (instead of a small stack of four or five): I went to pick it up without triple-checking that the pickaxe in my hand was the silk touch one, and I accidentally destroyed it. >.<

Nothing too terribly critical in it - I was on a map-filling run, and while there are two maps between my current location and the nearest village minecart station currently locked away and inaccessible, I should be able to find my way back without them (and i've got multiple backups stored back in the library, of course); but not having access to an enderchest will get really old really fast. (seriously - with all the whining still going on about a barely-noticeable change to combat mechanics, where's the outcry about the change made to village clerics at around the same time? i need eyes of ender, not ender pearls....)

It looks like I may be heading home - back to my original house, that is, where I have a large stash of eyes, spare ender chests, and blaze rods, and still know some clerics with old inventory - sooner than planned. Still have to work out the details of the journey - the south-eastern-most station on the (extremely north-west) woodland mansion line is still a good eight maps away from my house; but there is a pretty clear sea-route that'll take me most of the way with only a few quick land-crossings, I may just row home and either go back with supplies and worry about connecting the rail lines later or just play from home for a while and eventually dig my way back...

(the good news is there are a bunch of jungles back near my old house that haven't been loaded since like october; here's hoping some parrots decide to spawn when I make it back there. )