It has been a long time since I wrote in this blog and thought that today would be a good time to update it. While the guys are busying playing Mass Effect 3, I keep plugging away at Minecraft, oh and I did put in 100 hours into Skyrim, which is a great game in itself. But as always I keep coming back to Minecraft, I guess it's because no matter how immersive a game like Skyrim is, I actually can shape the world of Minecraft like no other. Now add in some questing and some of the depth of Skyrim and I'd never stop.
Anyway I have been spending a lot of time and effort in my quest to defeat the Enderdragon and "beat Minecraft". It has been a long journey, numerous adventures underground, the creation of a vast castle to house my farms and goods, adventures into the Nether taking on hordes of Blazes so that I could create potions (which I never use), and then my hunt for the stronghold housing the portal to The End. At this point I'm working on collecting Ender Pearls so that I can open the portal up and face The End for the first time. I'm not really sure what to expect in the end boss fight, I know that there will be a ton of Endermen there, so I have crafted myself a set of diamond armor, enchanted with extra protection. All in all a lot has had to happen to get to this place in the adventure.
In order to obtain the needed XP for the high level enchantments I got lucky early on and found a skeleton spawner near my home castle. Originally I was excited to get unlimited arrows but shortly after setting it up I realized that I was going to need to start farming XP for the future. So I went to work on expanding the XP trap, I opened up a room 24 blocks away that would funnel mobs to me in addition to the skeletons so that I could earn even more XP. But the flow was more like a trickle, I needed something bigger. At first I went to work on a separate machine, but it was an utter failure. I'm not totally sure why, but I know that it didn't work as I intended so I gave up on it and went to work on expanding the trap that I already had. Plotting out the corners to the room below I started adding floors to the trap one after the other, funneling mobs down the levels until they ended up in the kill location. Now complete with 4 1/2 floors and the added monster AI from the latest patch, I'm raking in XP levels at a time. I'm really happy with the final results.
At night now my goal is to hunt down Endermen, their rarity as made it so that I have actually seen more spiderjockeys in the last couple of days than Endermen. I think I need another 3 pearls to open the portal, so next time I get on it will be grind XP during the day and hunt for Endermen at night once again, but I'm getting close.
I have also been playing a bit with my son on our server. Built myself a nice little X-wing, and we're working on the Ewok village in one of the new jungle biomes. He is really excited to play with me on the weekends, I only wish that he wouldn't get all weird after playing for extended periods of time. It looks like we're going to need to go back to limiting his time online a little better. It's amazing to me what he has been able to create himself and how he uses the wiki to look up other formulas. Essentially he takes a look at what I build and then he copies the design and expands upon it. I'm really proud of him when he gets creative and is willing to play by himself (both in RL too). But as much as his creative skills have gotten good, I've decided that it's time to take his skills up a notch, I've built a zombie arena in our world so that he can take them on as practice for the future. He needs to get used to the idea of fighting them where he could get killed. But with a full set of iron armor, a diamond sword, and damage set to peaceful, I don't think there is much danger. To him it will be a great confidence boost, first we take on Zombies then Skeletons and Spiders, in time he'll be ready to play with monsters, then we can have some real fun.
Anyway I needed to update the blog, just because. Not sure how much gaming there will be in the future with the move coming up so here it is.
