Good Morning Folks! This is probably going to be the last day of Minecraft updates for a while, given that this afternoon the Cycle reset is happening in Last Epoch. I feel somewhat mixed about this because I have actually been enjoying myself quite a bit, and have a number of projects on the horizon that I am contemplating doing. Probably the biggest single project that I undertook last night was utilizing some of the real estate that I cleared outside of my base to set up proper fields. Right now I have pumpkin, potato, beet, and carrot farms outside of my walled area and have also taken the opportunity to move my sugarcane farm into this protected lot as well. At some point, I will probably uproot my wheat farm from inside the base and then expand out the fenced area to move it outdoors. Farms take up large amounts of room to do them properly so it just makes sense to move them outside of the closed-in area.
Other than that I started building out some more themed buildings in the main walled-in complex. I set up a proper smithy with an anvil, stonecutter, grinding wheel, smith bench, and a stack of blast furnaces. At some point, I might modify these to auto-feed fuel but before doing that I really need to set up a blaze farm in the nether. The lava buckets have been great for cooking meat, but this is not as easily repeatable for automating fuel intake into forges. Sadly the lava cauldron setup that I have does not work with either hoppers or dispensers so there is no way of feeding it into a furnace or blast furnace. I found a broken nether portal to the north of my base where I harvested a bunch of obsidian and magma blocks and then decided to use those as part of my design with some copper trap doors over them since I have so damned much copper.
The other new building that I added was a storehouse where I am consolidating all of my stuff. At some point, I plan on massively renovating the central tower and as such I am slowly migrating everything that I was storing up there down into sorted bins at ground level. I’ve incorporated a few barrels just because I like the look of them and on the left side you have spare tools, and on the right side, there are torches and arrows. Just to the far side of the building is a little troth that I set up for making obsidian, which I used to complete gathering what I needed for a nether portal. I also created a quickie infinite water source there so that I can grab it when I need it.
One of the big things that I did this morning was craft and enchant a full set of diamond armor. This means that I have officially retired my unenchanted and heavily battered set of iron armor. I figured I might as well use it as a decorative element so I set it up on an armor stand outside the smithy. I say I made a full set of diamond armor but that is a lie. I am wearing a golden armor helmet to give me immunity to piglins in the nether. While I enjoy killing them… I don’t want them to be aggro on sight. The nether is dangerous enough for me to not add additional difficulty levels. Several years ago when I started a hardcore Minecraft run, I did not know about this… and it summarily ended my run VERY quickly.
That experience has made me take the nether EXTREMELY seriously from that point forward. As a result, I have built my main portal underground and in an area closed off behind both a gate and a copper door. I’ve also been using these new copper grates in lieu of glass blocks because they are considerably more sturdy and I am not going to accidentally break them by swinging my sword to fight a stray piglin that makes it through my portal. At some point, I might fancify my portal room but for now, it works well enough. In general, I want to rethink the core of my base because it is getting extremely cumbersome to climb down the spiral staircase when I want to harvest materials from my strip mines down at bedrock. The spiral is super compact and was extremely efficient for getting down deep early on when I was still breaking the caves and such beneath my base, but the long staircase just works better for general purpose.
I’ve built the most rudimentary of shelters on the nether side, with cobblestone so that it won’t blow up easily and a copper door to wall off the portal chamber to keep it from being destroyed. Spawnwise I lucked out extremely well in that my portal is beside a Nether Fortress in the soul sand biome. This gives me access to a ton of resources and the ability to start farming Wither Skeletons as well as Blaze and the Lava Slimes. I think I might be on the boundary between biomes because a little way into the Nether Fortress it all changes over to Basalt and Black Stone. I wish I were in one of the tree biomes so that I could start farming those resources and I might need to make some expeditions out into the nether to try and find one of those.
For the moment I have limited most of my exploration to the immediate area surrounding the fortress. Last night I found a Blaze spawner really close to my portal, and as such I am probably going to set up a Blaze rod farm there. I will of course have to sort out how best to get from my portal to that area safely, which means a lot of tunneling and general construction. I will probably need to set up a more permanent base camp in the nether with chests full of non-nether materials for building tunnels. All of this is probably going to happen considerably later, and as such I am honestly glad that I have been blogging about my adventures. This will serve as a way of jogging my memory when I eventually return to this save.
Anyways! For now, I will be venturing forth into Last Epoch and starting a new cycle character. If you are so inclined for that nonsense I will hopefully see you there.
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