I have spent a little time recently trying to get netherite armour in Minecraft. It used to be relatively easy – you “just” needed to get some ancient debris to make netherite ingots. Then they went and added a “smithing template” to the list of requirements and it took me a while to a) want to get a smithing template, b) be bothered to look for a bastion and cope with the general sense of death in the nether, c) feel netherite armour was worth it.
I have now done such a thing. I expected the bastion to kill me over and over but I actually managed to wander around relatively unscathed. It could be my gold armour saved me some injury – I don’t know. I not only found a netherite template but I also found an armour decoration template and that made me super happy. Although the templates are destroyed in the manufacturing process once you have one template you can craft more so I don’t have to go searching around other bastions, but I might just for the challenge.
So, armour has been upgraded and prettified.
Minecraft Armour Front View
Minecraft Armour Back View
For information and nothing else I’ve just checked my Minecraft world database file size and it’s coming in at 6GB at the moment. I have no idea in terms of average world size but it seems impressive.
I like playing Minecraft. It’s a better world than the one we live in. I know there are creepers and zombies obsessed with trying to kill me but the farming is fun and apart from the strange slavery the game is mostly peaceful. I only play in survival mode, I have entered a creative world, once, but I hated it. The offspring don’t really play in this world much anymore so it’s mostly me just wandering around and doing little projects. I do want to get elytra soon so I will need some help in The End.
There are many cheats that could be applied to the game but having played since Covid-times I have a good idea of which ones keep me playing and which ones make the game far less fun. In the past I have used teleportation and even edited the contents of chests and inventories. I don’t use these cheats anymore. As much as travelling around the map in real time seems frustrating, teleporting from one place to another really kills the fun and sense of acheivement.
I use one main cheat these days and that is software that produces a map along with coordinates on the screen. This does mean I can easily find resources underground such as coal, diamonds and gold. But I think it balances out the time I spend. I don’t have to strip mine, I just mine but in calculated directions.
A Mine Map – Minecraft Level 17
In the above picture you can see the routes I have mined and also some of the resources that remain, ready for me to plunder. Brown is copper ore, silver is iron ore and the grey is coal, I think. I can hover over the map in the application and it informs me the type of block I am over.
The mapping software I use is called Unmined, and it needs you to be able to access the world database. I normally FTP this from my server so I can explore using the map but without live updates.
A Minecraft Item Sorter
The above picture shows my item sorter which is placed underground. The red squares are all redstone. I will be making a video about this soon as the last one I uploaded covered my dugout mountain.
This is what the current base looks like from above:
Not long ago I wrote about my death in The End and how I lost all my lovely stuff. Clearly this is in my Minecraft world and I had spent ages trying to find the End Portal. Once I had opened the portal I decided to pop through to see what it looked like. This was a silly mistake as the only way back was to kill the Ender Dragon, which wasn’t going to happen or die. So, I died. I lost my kit.
Then, one day, while musing this loss, I figured I could sneak through to the end with an Ender Chest. If I could get all my kit and dump it in the Ender Chest it should appear in the Overworld chests that I have already used to transport stuff. There’s a time limit to objects that have been dropped and that is five minutes of render time. I hadn’t been back to the End so everything had existed for a very short time. If I could get through the portal and collect my stuff and dump it in a chest before the five minute time limit then I would be a happy person again and not have to grind to get all my stuff.
I built an Ender Chest and loaded just enough kit for me to survive in the End for a few minutes. All the good stuff was stored back at my spawn point. With bravery I headed through the portal and into the End. I managed to find my kit, place the ender chest, pick up some things and die. I dropped all the stuff again.
Once more I headed through the portal and found my kit. This time I managed to place the remaining bits into the Ender Chest and then I died, happy in the knowledge that my kit was safe and there for me once I respawned in the Overworld. I was happy once more.
One of the things I’ve been doing in Minecraft is searching for the End Portal. I don’t have any real ambition to kill the dragon but it is something within the game that can be done and so why not? I started the other day using Eyes Of Ender and throwing them into the sky. I found the stronghold and then got stuck. The entire area I had searched didn’t have the End Portal, none of the corridors went to the special room. I used a few more Eyes Of Ender when I was in the stronghold but I couldn’t find the room.
This led to me looking for another mapping software. I had used Bedrock-viz because it allowed me to make a web searchable page and I could see the map without being on the gaming PC. For some reason though, the recent Minecraft updates have messed this up and bedrock-viz ends after ten seconds and doesn’t produce a new map. I did the googles thing and I found uNmINeD which produces a lovely looking map from the data files.
Minecraft World New Map
I found that the End Portal was hidden just a few blocks of digging through a wall. I had enough Eyes Of Ender or whatever they are called once I found the room so I thought, why not, let’s open the portal. I did and then thought, well I might as well go through and see what it’s like. So, I did that. I was NOT aware that I couldn’t get back without killing the Ender Dragon. This caused a bit of a problem because my load out wasn’t set up to kill the Ender Dragon, it was just my roaming around the countryside loadout.
I DIED.
I lost all my lovely kit as I respawned over 1000 blocks away because, like an idiot, I forgot to set my respawn point when I got to the village with the portal. What an absolute idiot. I had really nice stuff. I’m gutted. I just stared at the screen for a few minutes once it happened. Bollocks.
Nope, this communication isn’t about how I would like the government to make changes to improve peoples’ lives. I almost wish it was but then I don’t think I have the space for all the things I think government should be doing. If you know me then you also know I’m a raging lefty who is all for social progress, self determination and people paying taxes. This communication is about Minecraft and the current project.
Minecraft Mountain Shenanigans Part One
The above picture shows the very first steps of this project. I think you can see a staircase and that’s about it. This was in September and I’ve been messing around since then. Here is what the mountain looks like at the moment:
Minecraft – The Project
A lot of the work that has gone on is actually hidden from view and so I’m hoping I might get a short video together to show the stupid amount of mining I have actually completed. At the top of the picture is a mob-spawner that’s working quite well. Towards the bottom of the picture there is a slice of mountain that I have cut out and I am planning to cut out more slices. I’m not sure what it is going to look like but I’m having fun. I am also thinking of surrounding each slice with some precious blocks to make them stand out.
Yesterday I spent time trying to find an End Portal and although I’ve found a stronghold I haven’t yet managed to locate the portal inside that and I’ve found that quite frustrating. I guess I need to learn about stongholds and their generation. Anyway, the Minecraft world is far nicer that the actual real world, even with mobs that try and kill you.
I’m spending time in Minecraft these days because all of the events around the world keep doing their best to remind me what a shit species we are. We have ongoing events in Ukraine, Gaza. Also the Covid inquiry allowing anger to resurface from 2020 as we hear the evidence of just how utterly shit and awful the government were in the early days of covid. Johnson turns out to be an utter prick? Quelle surprise. Minecraft is a happier place and that’s even including the zombies and creepers that try to kill you.
This first video was one that I was aiming for. On the Playstation you can see what trophies you haven’t got and then aim to get them done. I was fed up of jump-running through the Nether to get to my faraway base so I build a railway. Yes, I know a boat would be quicker but the railway I can jump on and then go and get a drink, controller input is not needed.
The next trophy was one that I wasn’t sure how to get. Some you have to work at and some just kinda happen as part of the game play. I had to kill a skeleton from further than 50 metres. Now, I’d like to think that in real life I could do this no problem, I’m pretty good with a L98A2 so I expect I could handle a bow.
My next challenge is to get the Platinum trophy for Gran Turismo. It would be my first platinum and probably the game I am most likely to achieve it. I need to complete 50 online races – seems easy – but I also need to buy three cars that are “legends”. The problem with this is that they are really expensive. I did think I could buy some in-game currency with real money, I’d happily pay up to about £20 for that, but looking at the amount I’d have to spend it is more like £200 and I’d rather grind. So, that’s what I’ll be doing. Grinding on Gran Turismo. I’ve got races to win . . . .
After a little more work the mountain is starting to be adjusted. Still not sure how this will end up but I am working on the idea of a floating mountain over my cave. I did think that I might have made a mistake as my cave is around level -50 and that’s an awful lot of stuff to remove. I’ll cope.
I have a nice cave base in Minecraft and I’ve been thinking about doing some landscaping around it. Or more accurately above it. To find the cave I travelled far in the Nether and built a new portal. This took me into a nice cave and I’ve built a little house along with some prettification inside the cave to make it look more homely. The next issue, I think, is sunlight. So I’ve started to remove the mountain from above the cave.
Minecraft – Mountain Shenanigans Before
In the above picture you can see my staircase to the top of the mountain and to the right of that at the base you can see the entrance to my cave. I’ve started small as you can see in the next picture. I think my current plan is to remove a lot of the levels and leave the mountain there but dangling in the sky. I’m not sure, we’ll have to see how it progresses.
Minecraft Mountain Shenanigans Part One
The first part of this had me digging a 2×2 tunnel through the mountain at sea level +1 to see how far I had to go. If you look to the left of my mountain staircase you can just about see the entrance to the small tunnel. I’m hoping this will progress over time to be a complete layer leaving the mountain suspended in the air.
I’ve been thinking of having a dedicated Minecraft server for a long time. Prior to recently it has been running on my PC if and when the server is needed. I play on different platforms and while I can use the PC Server anywhere in the world moving my world to a provided external company as a server wasn’t an option as my PlayStations would not join those servers. Currently most platforms, except the PlayStation, allow connection to external servers but Sony haven’t because of reasons to do with safety? So, paying a company for a server isn’t really an option. I needed something that would work at home and independently from the PC.
I quite fancied a Raspberry Pi to do the job and there are plenty of websites out there with instructions. As long as the Pi is reasonably spec’d it should work ok and is relatively cheap to buy and cheap to run. I’ve got experience with the Pi owning two already – both for specific purposes. So I ordered a Pi to see how well it would serve me. A couple of things I noticed I guess. If you use Ubuntu you can’t use the Microsoft Ubuntu server edition because it is designed for a different chip architecture. The are various dedicated Raspbian Minecraft servers and I followed the instructions to create one. I couldn’t transfer over my current world to the Pi server as the file format was different and I’m not sure that I want to start completely again yet. So, the Pi will be used for a different project at some point.
The next option was to get a cheap PC and run Windows or Linux and operate a server compatible with my current world. I searched Amazon and Ebay for mini-PCs and ultimately landed on getting a refurbished Lenovo ThinkCenter. It’s a small box around 15cm square and about three centimetres deep. It has all the things I need. A good-enough processor, reasonable RAM and an SSD. The moving parts are minimal and the count of them is probably two – the fan and the power switch.
I ordered one from an EBay shop with plenty of good feedback. I don’t read the good feedback, I tend to read the one star reviews to see what problems I might encounter. A lot of people out there will leave low reviews for stupid reasons which are nothing to do with the product. i.e. took too long to arrive, didn’t work with my device etc. So the new device arrived promptly and I started the whole boot up, log in procedure. I always find it a little exciting when starting a new device for the first time. I logged into Windows and started to sort out the software and run updates when I got a blue screen of death. I was a little surprised but thought that maybe the update had messed something up. From that point on I would get bsod every few minutes and sometimes I couldn’t even log in to the machine. A number of the error codes suggested the memory was faulty so I got in touch with the company.
They sent me some new RAM immediately. I fitted it and the PC works very now. I have server software running and it’s accessible anywhere in the world. I have remote access to the device and have set it up so it is “locked” after start up. I’ve learnt quite a few things about Windows along the way. I have a better idea of what sort of things are possible. I can also access the files remotely so that I can back up my maps and keep all the work safe. Ultimately I gave the company a five star review on EBay. While the product was initially faulty they sorted it out quickly and it works well now.
It’s a touch annoying when setting up a new server happens to coincide with the day that Mojang release new updates for Minecraft Bedrock. I’d got the server up and running and I went to test it on the PS5 and I was told the server was out of date! Little did I know that the PS5 had updated Minecraft while I was logging in and I then had to update the server software along with updating all my devices that have Minecraft. I think one device still isn’t updated as the roll-out takes some time. I’m looking forward to playing Minecraft in those spare moments and seeing where else I can explore in my world.
There are some other things that need organising. I need to figure out where to put the Server. It’s currently in a temporary place where I can get to it and use it with ease. I’m thinking I might attach it to the underside of my PC desk so that all the nice things are close together. This causes some issues as there will be cables stretching across a currently cable-free area. So, I’ve decided to get another ethernet switch and use that to minimise the cabling required. I think it will all fit nicely and be partially hidden. Also, I can have the server displaying on one of the PC monitors if I need it without moving things around.
I’ve been busy over the last while playing Minecraft now and then. This video is long overdue as it’s a walk through of the latest base area, which I think was finished a few months ago but I just hadn’t got around to recording the walk-around. Things have been quite busy. This last weekend gave me the opportunity to spend some time setting up the recording software again [it hadn’t been used really since the new screen was purchased]. It took a while to figure out how to create new scenes and get widescreen recording to work nicely. However, this Minecraft video is in standard 16:9. Why? Because I don’t think Minecraft looks good in ultra-widescreen. I’d rather put a decent product onto YouTube than one where I think I’ve compromised in video quality. I’ll be uploading some flight sim stuff soon and that will be in lovely widescreen.
I spent a few hours yesterday gathering resources to start the landscaping project on my base area in the Caves and Cliffs part one section of my world. I expect to move to a new base area once the next part of the update is released.
Map Of The Land
In the above image you can see railways over the sea connecting the main components of the base. Sitting in a minecart allows me to eat and get my inventory sorted while also travelling from one place to another. I am going to keep the railways but I wanted to make it look a little prettier. So, I decided to claim back some land and build an artificial island.
Obviously Man-Made
The above picture shows the start of the landscaping works. My first thought was to try and make it look natural but I’m actually now keen to make it obviously man-made. Let’s see what I can be bothered to do. It turns out I’ve also made a secret harbour area and so I need to add in railways to that somehow. The pond in the middle is going to be for the axolotls I gather. I also need to light up quite a bit of the work so to avoid mobs spawning. I don’t want all of it to look the same so I have some other ideas for joining to New Holland. Look out for a walk around video on my YouTube channel at some point.
This is communication number 1929 and so here are some things that happened in that year:
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu moves to India. This woman is horrible.
I play a lot of Minecraft. I’ve been into it since the start of the first pandemic lockdown when my kids talked a lot about it and I decided it’d be nice to know what they are talking about. So I gave it a go. I have loved it every since. I mean, I made a YouTube series on my megabuild in one of our worlds.
It was an interesting experience doing the recordings once the build was complete. I had to learn how to play the game, or at least wander around, while also talking about what I have done and I found that quite tricky at first and so there were plenty of recordings that I deleted for quality purposes. I am also not going to edit the videos once recorded because that’s a level of caring I don’t have.
For a long time I have used some software t create maps of my world. I know this is cheating to a certain extent but I have decided that it’s ok to do somethings but not others. I think it’s ok to have a map and I think it’s ok to have coordinates turned on. Other than that I don’t employ any other “cheats”. I have played in some worlds with teleporting and keep inventory turned on but to be quite frank that makes it too easy. There should be an element of death and destruction within the game. The random things are what make it interesting for me. So, I don’t really play in creating mode, in fact I’ve only ever been in creative mode once, and I don’t have many “cheats” turned on. Everything I have done is in survival mode, because it’s more interesting to me.
Map Of The Land
The above map shows the area of my current base. Once the Caves And Cliffs Part One update was released I went a long way in the nether and popped out wherever it was in the overworld. The aim was to generated new areas of the world using the latest version of Minecraft. I suspect that I’ll do this again once the Part 2 update comes out and start a new-new base there.
Things to note in the map of my world are the mob-spawner just SE of the centre of the map along with an island, called New Holland, just SW of the spawner. The island is around 70% man-made in terms of area and houses my slave villagers and farm animals. There are two iron-golems there to protect the villagers which is nice I guess. It is my trading area. From the villagers I have easy access to mending and silk touch enchantments for tools. Over the next while I think I need to look more into potions and learn how they work.
Just left of centre in the map is my portal to the nether where I popped out originally when finding a new area for the latest update. There are three railways that connect this hub with the island, the spawner and my crop farm and storage area. Just NE of centre is my crop farm – currently wheat and potatoes – along with a subterranean storage area and my bed on top of a hill nearby. I’ll see if I can get some screenshots or do a video walk around of this new base area. I should probably do a video of the old base area in this world although I think I wrote about it here.
For information, the mapping software I use is called bedrock-viz for Minecraft Bedrock Visualiser. It works on the server map files and turns them into a webpage that works similar to google maps. So, if you are running your Minecraft world on a PC and you know where the database files are and you are comfortable taking copies of those then you can probably use the software. I also FTP the files to a webspace so I can see the map on a laptop screen while I’m playing, it’s a little small on my phone. I like it and I find it really helpful just for getting around the place. It’s just enough of a help that it’s worth it and not a silly amount of cheating that I think it’s ok to use. To give you an idea of what it does here is what it looks like at level 13 under my base:
Level 13 Overworld
In the real version of the map you are able to zoom in and hover over blocks to see the coordinates so that’s really helpful. In the picture above you can see water and bubble columns – blue and light blue – along with geodes. The yellow bits are gold and the dull yellow is iron. Bright blue is diamond and red is redstone, green squares are emeralds but once you’ve got a trading farm going with villagers who cares about mining for emeralds?
Communication number 1924 and here’s a selection of stuff that happened then:
A radio time signal is broadcast for the first time.
An explosion in a mine in West Virginia kills 119.
This is my current base in this latest world. I’ve written about things recently but this is a whole new era of my Minecraft skills. I have a simple base at the moment, I have a villager breeding area as I try to get the mending enchantment and I have a kelp XP farm. Things are going OK at the moment. The island in the bottom is mostly reclaimed and so I’ll be calling it New Holland.
I’ve got railways joining these places over the sea. This land is in a new chunk since the caves and cliffs update part one and therefore there are geodes and glowing squid all over the place. I’m not sure how to make a proper base yet, but part of me wants to build up a massive volcano and go completely Bond-villain.
I spent a little while adjusting some of the decoration on the villa. The idea what to make it still look textured but less “busy”. I’m not sure it’s complete yet but it’s better that it was in the previous communication.
I really liked my beach house that I built in the Minecraft series that is on my YouTube Channel. It was placed nicely although a little small. So, in the latest world I wanted a nice big beach house. And I’ve made it.
RTX Sunrise
Now, I’m not sure I’m happy with some of the texturing and so I am going to remove and change of it. There’s too much detail in the fascia of the villa. The villa faces east and so this is a shot of the house with the sun rising.
Glorious Sunrise
This is a more front on view and you can see the levels. There’s an animal farm to the right rear of the villa. All the storage systems and other farms are hidden in a basement to the rear of the building.
View From North
Here you can see the side of the villa and the animal farm. In this series of screen shots I’ve got RTX turned on and it’s lovely. Absolutely lovely.
Second Balcony
This is the view from the top balcony. There’s a bridge in the mid-distance and that has the old entrance to the mine that we started. I now have a minecart that goes from the basement to the mine and I can get there straight from the villa rather than heading into the dangerous outside.
I recently had a long session on Minecraft, I was stuck in the house and couldn’t get out as I was waiting for someone to come and fix my boiler. I didn’t really feel like getting into a TV show so I spent some time [too long really] putting an idea I had a while back into place. Here’s an overview of part of the latest world:
Latest World Overview
The mess top right next to the bay is the MAIN Base. I’m going to see if I can get some screen shots of it, or maybe give a walk around viewing video, I’ll see what I can manage. The big grey blob in the middle of the map is a gravel topped mountain and I’ve not been there to get the gravel yet but it will be useful at some point I hope. In the bottom left of the map you can see the nearest village to the base. I wanted to create a way of getting to and from the village without having to walk over land. I could have created a minecart track but in this world I chose to dig a canal.
Sea Level Details
This cross-sectional map shows everything at level 62 – sea level [currently]. If you look closely at the top you can see a thin blue line going horizontally. That is the canal I dug and added water to. You enter the canal from top right and move directly westwards and exit in the Great Lake. From there you follow the passages and mini-canal southwards to get to the village. There could be an issue that I can’t remember whether it was this village or not that had actual live villagers in it. I didn’t bother to check before I started this infrastructure project so it could have been for nothing!
Length Of Navigation Route
My map making software also has a measuring tool. You can see that the total canal length is about 0.85km. So that’s 850 blocks long. I’ll probably create a video soon of the base and where the canal goes but until then, I leave you in peace.
Early on in this pandemic that is fucking the world I started playing Minecraft pretty much so I could engage in conversations with my kids and understand a little about the world they were obsessed with. I still don’t know everything but I know what I like and enjoy and so I’ve been building. It gave me purpose. I hated it at times, having to head off to the farm to get wool or go and get supplies so I can make concrete. I considered making a squid farm at one point, but just changed my design to have less black concrete. I quite liked the process of building a thing and then changing my mind about what I wanted to to look like or how to complete a particular section. I would often think about what to do while I was running or working.
I haven’t done everything I want. There are things I kept thinking about that I could make to increase the complexity of the build and make it look even better. I wanted exhaust tubes to be built heading from the base of the launchpad up to the ground level around 100 blocks away and these would have smoke constantly pouring out of them to look as though the rocket was taking off. I wanted to build a launch control centre like the one at Kennedy for the Apollo launches but I only have so much time and there are other things I like doing. I’m not a complete obsessive!
Once I had done enough – I don’t think I should say finished – I tried to figure out the best way to save this build for posterity. I have the world save files backed up and stored on a NAS and in the cloud. But I wanted to be able to show this off I guess so I looked into making a YouTube walkthrough. Now, I have some rules about this website and I decided I should have rules about the videos. I wasn’t going to feature my ugly face, but I decided I would in the end. I have an opening title card – ha ha, created in MS Paint – yes it looks cheap but these are my first videos. Not sure what I’ll do next. I’ve been really impressed with the video recording software and I found it very intuitive. So, here is the first in the series, Episode 1 of Megaship 3000.
It turns out I can talk much better if I have wine and it amuses me how stilted and staccato my opening words are. I think I relax a little once I get going and know what to talk about. Many, many thanks to Penguin for giving me feedback on the first few attempts at a video and I would also like to thank the penguin chicks for their advice which, as seasoned YouTube watchers, was really good. I guess it’s now time to publicise my efforts and think about a release schedule! There are eight episodes in all and I guess, one day, I might do this again.
So, Bedrock edition just got updated to include Ray Tracing in the standard edition. This meant I had to update the server as well and the results are bloody gorgeous. I’m using the most basic texture pack but it still looks absolutely amazing.
Minecraft With Ray Tracing
It’s a shame this won’t be on the PS4 but it works on the PC and that is where I am going to record the tour videos of this build. One thing is that glowstones don’t shine as bright and all the lighting I had sorted out to look lovely has been adjusted. But it looks bloody lovely.
So, as time goes I progress on my Minecraft Megabuild. Even as I continue to build I keep coming up with ideas for new things and extensions but I have decided that once I’ve completed the inside and possibly adjusted the route of the underground railway approaching the build I will stop. I’d love to make a launch control like the one at Kennedy Space Centre but maybe another time. I need to start playing on a new world. This server is now known as Season Two and Season Three has already started. I expect another couple of weeks of tidying up this thing and then I will start recording the tours. I’m keep planning how this is going to work. I’ve practised recording a video with audio and it went ok. I just need to sit down and plan the sections. I think I’m going to make each video around five minutes long covering a single aspect of the build each time.
River and Rocket
I’m currently fitting all the control systems to the rocket. Really this is just a bunch of switches and toggles in places that look right. I’m also moving all the material I excavated from the hole into rocket storage. I guess my plan is to have this thing be able to blast off and then build a new world somewhere. I’ve got my cabin sorted and I’m pleased with the view from there.
Top Half Of The Rocket
I’m not sure how much time I’ve spent on this. It’s been around an hour a day for quite a while. I’ve been spending time collecting the resources as all this has been made in survival game mode.
Minecraft Statistics
I’m waiting on a new camera and then some more time just to sweeten off this model and then it’ll be record time. I’m looking forward, it’ll be a new skill and one that I’ve kinda tried before but the result was terrible!
Gantry and Beach Base
Here you can see my beach house, tree farm, beach bar and monolith. There’s also a nether-portal and if you know what you are looking for you can see Beach Station. Anyway, just wait for the videos!
