Better Dungeons– Swamp Dungeons

 

Decided to do a little bit of mining in a swamp and was shocked to hear “screaming” underground. It was a bit terrifying and after investigation found a large swamp dungeon crawling with goblins.

These buggers are loud and they moan like little kids till they get excited when they scream. If that isn’t bad enough, some are riding large silverfish and some are riding bees!! The last ones are hard to spot and can do damage especially when you are fighting off a horde of these. I managed to rush towards the spawners to stop the stream of goblins overwhelming me.

The seems to have odd behaviour. In the middle of a fight sometimes they stop attacking and seem to walk around in circles chanting to themselves before attempting another attack. I was deciding whether to laugh or prepare for the next attack when they struck in mass. I could not get some screen shots to show you this action as I was busy fighting them off.

A little rick I learned was to seek higher ground and fight down. They are small after all. That will work with the ones on the ground. Not the riding ones. Also the large silverfish spawn smaller ones as well..

I retreated a few times to save my health. Booty is not really big just a few items. I better get back to the fight.

Epic Mob Grinder Build

 

I have built Mob Grinders before in some of my worlds but decided to try a design I saw on a web site. It took a few days (physical) but I got it done.. Take a look at the build process.

It works great and I removed my original grinder (the last two pictures). I modified the design to include a lip around the outside to prevent spiders from climbing.

Serendipity in Minecraft

 

One of the mods I quite enjoying playing in Minecraft is Millenaire. I cannot go into all the detail of this mod as I cannot do it justice. Basically, though, it adds villages of various cultures into the game which you an choose to interact with. Now, I hear a few people saying that wait, base Minecraft has villages. it does but the villages have limited use at the moment.

Millenaire adds a few village types with different cultures (mainly based around 11th century cultures like Normans, Hindi, Mayan and Japanese) spread liberally across your Minecraft world. You can interact with the villages by visiting the village town hall (or the equivalent in each village). You start off as a stranger but if you trade with the villages you get reputation which turns into cash which you can spend on various things. For example you can buy goods, a plot of land or even get the villagers to build you a nice house in the village. You can become one of the village.

Basically, you visit the town hall, find out what they need (e.g. stone, glass, wood etc) and trade with them. Sometimes they send you on quests, which can be simple or complex, for additional reputation. You can even visit multiple villages to start trading across villages. You even get to visit loner buildings for trade or even fight bandits. The idea is to get your village to its ultimate goal of upgrading their village to its full extent and also being self sufficient. It is a good mod.

Now, in X Mod Pack, Millenaire does not exist. This in understandable as it is a big mod and can be incompatible. Other mod packs have it but they tend to make way for it. Well, I wanted to play it again and decided to push into the X Mod Pack manually to see if it would work. After lots of crashes I seemed to get it to work.

I started playing and I would have random crashes. I traced it back to Millenaire to find it was because I had used tweaked settings that caused the game to build 4 villages too close. Everytime they interacted, and they do, it would crash. I did not want to abandon my world so I disabled Millenaire for now and continued to play. This is where the serendipity came into play.

Once you disable Millenaire, all the villages stayed as they were built using standard Minecraft blocks so now I had a few empty villages to explore. So I decided to use this as a positive.

I slowly removed the villages by hand collecting all the resources and returning the landscape back to its original shape (or as close as I could). This was a fun challenge. I would remove all the buildings and remove all traces of them there but placing soil and trees back in their places.

I was treating Minecraft as a greening rehabilitation project. I then decided any fortress I conquered in Better Dungeons would also be treated the same.

You end up with lots of resources and land returned to its former beauty. It was a challenge I enjoyed and continue to enjoy in Minecraft.

This is one of the reasons I like Minecraft, you can try and idea and take it to its fullest till you get bored and come up with something else.

You should try this. It takes patience but you get some satisfaction when you return a natural landscape back to its original shape.

Here are some pictures of the rehabilitation. In some cases I left traces of the village and in some no traces. In fact in one picture I have replaced a whole castle from Better Dungeons. See if you can work it out.

Huxley– Home

 

I was asked to publish my Huxley world build for a few people. Here are some screen shots of the house I built (sandstone) and a diving board I decided to build nearby.

Enjoy!!

Epic Battle!! - X Mod Pack–Better Dungeons

 

The Better Dungeons Mod is one of the best mods out there (Millénaire, BuildCraft and Equivalent Exchange are on the top of my list as well). The other night I had an epic battle in a volcano dungeon. Two hours of dodging and fighting I managed to come out alive and with lots of loot. The volcano dungeons are epic in size.

Let me explain. You see a large volcano FULL of ores (which draws you in). You can climb in and encounter level after level of spawners and loot. Now the volcano is not the dungeon. The dungeon is at the bottom of the volcano which is full of more baddies and lots more loot. The baddies are combinations of normal mobs and dwarves with armour and even dwarves riding giant silverfish
“things”. Finally you will encounter a boss which will take all your skill to kill. He looks like a giant robot (with no facial features). Once you kill him you have more loot and then the long trek out again. But be aware that now the volcano and dungeon have spawned normal bad mobs so you will have to fight your way out. But this is all so satisfying.

A couple of tips. In the X Mod use EE to build a Alchemy Bag to hold your loot. Do not be tempted to get ores just yet as that will mean death. You will die a lot. Be prepared with armour and weapons. Retreating is a good tactic. Place torches as you walk to minimize mobs spawning (they will behind you). Do not open a hole in the floor to drop mobs through it, they will just be waiting for you as you walk down (I made that mistake). The extra mobs such as dwarves are immune to fire and lava (so leading them into lava will not do much). Carry a bucket of water with you to help neutralize lava.

This dungeon was well worth it. It took me 2 hours of battles to conquer it. I now use the outside of the volcano as my ore resources. I minimized the lava using a trusty bucket of water. Lots of diamonds!!!!