I was going to wait a couple of days before preparing my next Hiveland post, but my Cave Spider XP Farm was so infuriating that I had no choice but to rant about it. 😆 And may as well write about some general gameplay while I'm at it.
When I finished up my last Hiveland post I had mostly completed my house, had some enchanted diamond stuff with the basics, nothing overpowered just yet, and was preparing to create an XP farm for better enchanting!
When I first started branch mining for diamonds, I stumbled across a mineshaft in my very first branch and took note of it for future exploration purposes, for future XP Farm purposes.
It was located across a ravine, so I decided to backtrack through my mine a bit and make another tunnel to get there easier. That is, without crossing a ravine and being shot down by skeletons. 🤣 Thanks to my navigation skills, I found the mineshafts again and began exploring.
After about ten minutes I found what I was after.
Cave spiders soon came flooding out of it, so it was the correct one; not just a normal spider one. Unfortunately, it was located in the middle of a bunch of shafts, overhanging another ravine, and I was going to need to do some fancy footwork to navigate creating this farm.
Now, I could have just found a different spawner to use. There are usually a couple of these things in the mineshafts. But this one was at ideal coordinates that I could attach to my house easily and I didn't want to have to find another one.
I'm pretty sure there's a zombie spawner dungeon thing nearby too judging by the waves of zombies that kept assaulting me as I tried to square this off. I'll have to search for that later. Don't want too many entities taking up the spawn limit for my spiders. 😝
So, why was this so infuriating?
I have made quite a few cave spider farms. In HARDCORE mode no less. With ease. This one was a pain in the arse. It was open on all ends so there was a constant stream of enemies interrupting me. Mob griefing is turned on so unexpected creepers kept exploding my construction efforts. It was just annoyance after annoyance.
I finally got the room sealed off, but now I had to dig out three floors below it and face all those mobs again.
Mobs! Mobs everywhere! And those were just the ones below.
But finally I had the room built. Everything was in place, I just had to turn off the lights.
With that sorted, I closed up the room and made my way to the other end of the farm -- the usable end. The end that's at some point going to be all decorated and fancy-looking because it's part of my construction efforts and needs to be beautified. xD
And voila! The currently-ugly farm has been completed! 😁 With much stress, blood and tears. If any creepers blow up this shit, I'm going to be so sad. It's hard to believe I've done this on Hardcore mode so many times with ease yet this time, on a server set to Easy, I experienced such difficulty.
Madness.
If anyone on the server wants to use my XP Farm, feel free! It's just down the hole in my floor in my house. 😅
Now that the horrors of the caves were over with, for now, I decided some nice and peaceful farming was in order. Plus, I wanted to breed sheep, a lot of sheep, so I could have a lot of coloured wool.
Usually the first animal I grab is pigs for food, or cows for food and leather. This time, I was gathering sheep!
Unfortunately there were no sheep in sight. And I still don't have any leads to just drag these creatures home. So I had to do it the old fashioned way. Luring the beasts 700 steps with wheat.
I'm an idiot and forgot to bring a bed with me. 😆 So halfway through luring the sheep, night fell and I had to quickly /home and go to bed and race back to my previous coordinates and hope that my two sheep were still there. They were, thankfully.
With the sheep home, and secured in their new fencing, I thought that I'd go Minecraft Skin Hunting and see if a new skin would fix the skin issues I've been having. I don't see why it would, but you never know. Maybe a new one would just... magically work.
I opened up a single player game in 1.16.5... and my person was fiery. She was not Alex.
I logged in to the Hiveland server... and I'm Alex. ARGH!~
Resigned to my fate to just be an ugly default character, I continued my Sheep Quest. I bred them until I got two white ones, killed the browns ones, dyed the white ones black, and bred them some more until I had lots of black sheep!
Now it was time to shear them for days.
While doing other things to break up the monotony of constant shearing.
Each pair of shears gives me about 8 stacks of wool, which is all going towards this:
The tunnel that leads to the Cave Spider Farm and my mines. It's going to be allllll black, and then I'm going to go visit the Nether and get alllllll the glowstone.
Whenever I take the long trip to the mines or my XP farm, it'll look pretty trippy. xD The tunnel will be pure black with a grand glowstone spiral. It'll be glorious. For a mere tunnel. 🤣
Once the tunnels had been blackified, I coloured the sheep so I could have some pretty wool...
... and decorated my house a little more. 😊 I still have a big empty spot on one side of the house, but I'll find something to put there. And then I'm going to do a basement which will basically house a workshop type of area with furnaces, stonecutters, various equipment, etc.
I also need to create a secret treasury! 😆 So I can store all my gold, diamonds, and emeralds whenever I find some. I think, for the treasury, even more quartz will be required! For a grand treasury/vault, it must look magnificent. And, in my opinion, quartz is one of the most magnificent looking blocks in the game.
Until next time!! 😊
All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, 