In my last Minecraft post my main objective was to find diamonds, mine up a bunch of obdsidian, and make a portal to the Nether. Which I did! Of course. xD
With that out of the way, my current objective is to beautify The Great Farmlands of Melancholy, build up a little farmhouse complete with enchanting room and then begin work on my Nether Travel System.
Starting with beautification. While I don't plan for these farmlands to be my main base of operations, I would still like them to look nice.
So, naturally that means ponds! Sugarcane! Flowers!
I made a start with some ponds and finishing some decorativeness around the Portal, and then I started planning a spot for the farmhouse.
Progress screenshot!
Then! Whilst I was building my farmhouse! A group of pillagers spawned.
I literally saw them spawn in. xD I was minding my own business, taking a screenshot, when WHAM! The group of enemies appeared.
Now I need a second group to appear so I can make my house symmetrical with another Ominous Pillager banner.
The house was now complete. 😄
Now it's time to focus on killing many, many cows for their leather and harvesting many, many sugarcane reeds to turn into paper. It's time to make a BUTTLOAD OF BOOKS.
Because I'll be making another enchanting area in what will be my future 'proper' base area, I'm going to need twice as much as well.
So I made enough books for the bare minimum amount of shelves required for a max-level enchanting setup. I normally like adding extra bookshelves for aesthetic purposes, but I'll save that for my proper base. xD
And with that enchanting table done, my main goals for this post were completed. 🙂
Now my new main objective was to sort out my future Nether Transportation Network.
Because I'm pedantic, I wanted to enchant my gear slightly first before daring to return to the Nether.
I enchanted my armour with whatever protection I could for the time being, and also enchanted my pickaxes. Need all that unbreaking and efficiency and FORTUNE! I don't plan on quartz farming just yet, but when I inevitably come across some I'd like a lot more than I'd normally get.
It'll also come in handy for when I find more diamonds and coal and such. xD
For now though... I braced myself and headed into the Nether.
First things first, I needed to protect my portal. I couldn't have any random ghasts blowing up my entryway.
By some miracle, the tunnel I dug was remarkably flat with no giant lava ravines in my way! I travelled a good 500 steps or so, which, in the Nether, is a good amount of steps to start my next portal. I believe 1 step in the Nether equates to 8 steps in the Overworld, so when I build this new portal, I should spawn a good 3500 steps away from my current Melancholic Farmlands.
Really - it's probably better if I just go off on an adventure, find a decent spot, build a portal, then slowly web and weave around until I connect it to this one...
That'd be the logical way of doing things.
Where's the fun in that though?
Besides... if it lands somewhere shitty, I can just hop back in, dismantle it, and pop it down somewhere else.
I stepped through my new portal into the great mysterious beyond.
And landed in a massive cave system! After checking the information such as coordinates and biome location, I discovered that I was in a massive cave beneath the ocean.
Yay.
There were heaps of diamonds though! All thanks to my Fortune III pickaxe. 😈 So it was a worthy journey. Not the journey I wanted, but good enough.
After farming up all I could see, I hopped back into the portal and dismantled it. I would have to try again.
Honestly, I 'tried again' FOUR TIMES before I finally found proper land. Four times I landed inside caves beneath the ocean, despite how far I travelled.
I ended up going back the way I came and going in the opposite direction.
When I hopped through the portal for the fifth time, LO! There was a dark oak forest in the distance!!!! 😁 In the next post of my adventure, we shall approach this forest and see if it is worthy of calling home. And start shaping it, if all goes well.
Until next time! 🐷🌱🐣
All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, 
The texture pack in use is PureBDCraft's Vanilla pack.