Moved to Tumblr

As you can see (not see), the log of my Minecraft stuff didn't really work. I've decided to post smaller snippets of my Minecraft shenanigans onto Tumblr. This should be more manageable (i.e. more likely to happen), and I'm hoping I can get a larger audience.

So, come and visit me on Tumblr, where I post cool Minecraft stuff, and pictures of my horses, like this one:

Burntcustard's Log - Entry 2 - High-tech XP farm and extended basement

The last log ended with a view down to my "extended basement". After walking down a long staircase, you come to a large room:

It's not that pretty, but it works.. as a room. Left-to-right: Skeleton xp farm, redstone/mechanical/sorting room, store room, staircase to the little building outside the front of the house, a few holes, the mine, enchanting room (behind the sword).

The skeleton-dungeon-farm-xp-grinder is the most interesting thing down here, so lets have a look at that:

On the left is the viewing hatch, then in the centre is the control panel and fully-unfunctional binary mob counter. I figured the counter could only count to 63, and to get to a decent level you needed more than 63 skeletons, so I never really started the workings behind it. Using the levers and button on the control panel allows you to open the hatch, and toggle the water and lights on and off, as shown in this gif:

That system is really useful for doing additional work or testing in and around the spawning room. You can just about see the elevation chamber at the back there, which scoops up the skeletons, sends them high up, over the top, then they fall down over....

Here! Left lever: Auto-burninate (kills any skeleton unlucky enough to be in the tiny tube - uses lava). Right lever: Item collection. Yep, that's what the dark line below the skeletons is; a hopper! You sit in the room and wait for skeletons (If I want to get to level 30 I'll AFK for an hour or so), lean in, punch the skeletons and get 1-hit-kills (or use healing potions to KILL THEM ALL at once), receive xp, and the items get automagically sorted into separate chests in the store room. Very Nice.

The sorting room:

The store room:


Some of the loot:

As you can see, I've got a metric shit ton of loot from the spawner. You might think I'll never use all that, but:

• The bones are useful for growing plants.
• The arrows are useful for shooting stuff.
• The bows are good for making dispensers out of and crafting my Power V, Punch I, Flame I insta-kill bows.
• The armour is good for free special enchantments like Respiration III (for clay hunting), and feather falling (for building tall structures).
• Who doesn't like free stuff?

I will write a tutorial on how to make high tech xp farms like this one in my next blog post.

My mine:

It's on layer 11 and there's 3 blocks in between each branch. I've got loads of diamonds from it :)

Enchanting room:

Yep, this place is a mess. I'm not even sure why there's a cauldron in there. The lever is pretty cool though, letting me get just about any level enchantment I want.

This is where exploring my "starting" house comes to an end. Next time I'll show the castle. It will have been worth the wait!

Burntcustard's Log - Entry 1

Get it? Log! I use lots of logs in Minecraft!...

This is the first entry in this series, and I have no idea how long it will last. Hopefully I manage to finish this article! I'm going to try to keep these "in character" and not mention real world stuff. The first few will be in the past, describing the older stuff in the world, and then they should catch up with my castle building. I'm keeping the GUI up in screenshots to give it a more "survival-ey" feel.

EDIT: This got quite a few views from new people, so I feel like I should introduce myself. I'm Burntcustard, and I like overcomplicated redstone contraptions, fancy houses, and gold hats. I've been playing Minecraft since Alpha, and would like to think I'm pretty good at it. Look at my older blog posts to see some cool stuff I've made in the past.

Now, about what I'm standing in front of...

In a brand new world, with Tattysaurus, we started on a hill next to a small lake. For once exactly in the right place to build a house. After deforesting a huge section of land, fishing, and a bit of mining, we built a house. We also found something extremely convenient underground that I'll go into next episode. I then built a very fancy new structure to supply us with enough food to stop us having to spend so much bloody time fishing. Oh and there's a small entrance to the mine. It all ended up something like this:

The cows and sheep were collected and bred for the massive project that is going to be the main focus of this series ;)

The balcony out the back of the house is for fishing from. It has a redstone lamp in, that with the other redstone lamps in the house, turns on automatically at night.

Inside the house is all the standard fittings, chests, beds, etcetera. The chest you might be able to see in that picture currently has a stack of diamonds in. Fortune 3 woo!

The automatic redstone lamps in this picture were deactivated (redstone torches swapped with normal torches), because they interfered with industrial size furnace setup we had to fit for cooking all the clay for the.. secret... okay the castle. Wearing our swimming hat (Respiration 3, Aqua Affinity) really helped when collecting the clay. There's also a retractable table that had to be broken :(

So why is the top of the house so wonky? Well, firstly someone put some gravel up there *grumpy face*, and secondly, there's a semi-auto wheat farm up there!

Getting all that to fit was a struggle, but it works pretty well. Press button -> water pushes the crops forward -> press button -> water stops -> pick up and replant. Speaking of food...

This is the drop-off point for the output of the medium size building to the right of the house. At first it delivered fresh goods every morning. I later changed it to keep the minecart in the house, and collect 32 more of each item when the button pressed and the cart is sent off. An industrial-sized setup like this is currently in development for the castle. The food systems linked to the castle will need to supply food for at least 4 people, so is at least 2 times as big. Lets have a closer look at the building creating the goodies.

This is the pumpkin pie factory! Ignore the hole on the right.. missing sign, missing door, damn monsters. On the left is the daylight sensor, which causes the crops to be harvested once a day.

There's no close up of the redstone or chest-feeding point. It's quite simple, but I could give some sort of explanation if requested. I know that nothing in there is very efficient, but it was half done for looks.

Now back to the house, specifically the basement:

As sign-ed this is the Nether room. The Nether portal is turned off when the doors are closed, to stop the annoying noises and Pigmen coming through (it has happened!). Behind the portal are two dispensers, one with flint and steel, one with a bucket of water. Fiddly redstone timings are used to get them to "fire" at the right times.

And down to the extend basement... You'll have to wait until log 2 to hear about the inhumane contraption that's located in the deep down there.

Here ends part one of the series. Was there too much text, not enough pictures of redstone, not enough dragons? Any feedback is appreciated. I'll leave you with a picture of the sunset from the fishing balcony: