Lime Monster

I have finally started the proper structure for the pyramid, until now I have just been flattening things and getting supplies. It is made out of glass panes and has glass blocks for steps within it. You can see their lovely spiral structure from outside what is called The Glass Tower.

I also have panes running up the centre of the stair case to prevent plunging to doom. Because the panes grow little arms to connect themselves to adjacent blocks this gives the central column a cool corkscrew twisty affect. Though the tower is quiet hard to look into to see the structures whilst you are in it!

Glass is quiet hard to work with and I died once during the creation of this tower but the views are epic!

Even if most of my world is covered in ice :/

This may not look like a pyramid to you – that is because it is the central column or pillar only – the rest of the pyramid will be constructed around this – the outside of the pyramid is glass and it going to be stepped like Aztec ones and not like Egyptian ones.

I keep racking up experience points and I really really really want a silk touch pick axe so I can mine things like glass and the actual red stone. For this I need an enchanting table. For an enchanting table I need obsidian, books and diamonds (I think) I have enough obsidian thanks to a chest I found in a desert and I made a book ages ago but I still need diamonds.

The main issue I have is that once my experience is up to a certain level I then don’t want to die and lose it all as I could do good enchantments with it – you get experience points as you mine and make things and then these get used up when you enchant things.

I went and I mined and I found lava and I died and then I went and mined the other way and found red stone, iron awe and lapis lazuri and coal but no diamonds – My husband told me level 12 Y coordinate (the number of blocks up from the bedrock you are) was were you are most likely to find diamonds. I still have not found any 🙁

I do now have a chest in my mine though so that when I mine good stuff I can store it incase of any unfortunate lava incidences again.

I am happy with what I have found though as now I can dye some more sheep different colours and maybe get round to making some railway track.

I made myself a tone of wooden bowls as that is what you need to milk the mooshrooms in Minecraft with in order to get the mushroom stew. I then made my way back to the mushroom island via a piece of unexplored map – I found both my villages in the trip!

Once at the island I made a platform and enclosure for the mooshrooms and then lured them into it with some grain I had bought with me. The first cow was halfway up the mounting and was a bit of a pain to get. I could see another right at the top but it had fortunately come down into the sea by the time I had captured the first. I then bred them to get a baby cow and then milked them until I had an 64 bowls of soup! I filled an entire double chest with these back at my mooshroom island house and was using the others for full whilst I did other things around the place – I have something fun planned for the island 🙂

So finally I have found some Mooshrooms in Minecraft, they are on a pointed mountain island at the top edge of the map (I’m playing on xbox so it has a finite world). They are cows with mushrooms growing on them and if you milk them you get mushroom soup – I only had buckets with me so tried – but it turns out you need to milk them into wooden bowls to get the soup. I am now trying to work out how I can get them to my farm! It is a very small island and I only saw two mooshrooms!

I was on an explore and was almost out of food but I now have a bothy (little half way house/hut) on the island. I’m thinking of going back and building a fence and stuff and eventually I will build a rail system and Mooshroom Island will be a stop 🙂

I found clay in Minecraft which is very exciting as I didn’t know it existed! I am playing the game a bit ad hoc – as in I haven’t memorised large parts of the wiki like my hubby or hung out in creative like my daughter. Though it was my 7 yr old who informed me it was clay!

In mining it I now have a little ice roofed room which is interesting and I have started experimenting with how far away ice needs to be away from torches to stay ice etc…

The clay can be used to make bricks which I want to make a nice wall around my home 🙂

The clay is found on river beds and I hadn’t noticed it before as when you look at it through the water it doesn’t look that much different to sand. It appears as round little blobs which I initially mistook for gun powder from a creeper.

I love finding new things in mine craft 🙂

For the last few days I have been knitting a creeper (one of the agressive modes or monsters in Minecraft). It’s just my own pattern I have worked out and with wool my friend has bought me – it is to be a largish cuddly for my little girl for her birthday in August. She doesn’t know this and sees the knitting on the sofa when she sneaked down from bed to get some water.

Jean: ‘that green isn’t quiet right for a Creeper Mummy

Me: ‘Who says I’m knitting a creeper?’

Jean: ‘Mummy of course you are knitting a creeper…. can you make me one?’

Not entirely sure who she thinks a big cuddly toy creeper is going to be for but I thought the conversation was funny – she has also requested a knitted Steve which is the avatar guy you get to be in Minecraft.

Whilst investigating stuff to do with 3D printing I came across Printcarft on Thingyverse. The idea is that you can log in to their server and build something in a specific area that they can then turn into a file for 3D printers which can then print you your building!

I am so excited about this I can not even begin to describe it – people are already sharing their creations on there! I have my eyes on the little creeper keychains 🙂

heads off to pester friend with 3D printer

I made the sheep a huge underground pen but they kept disappearing which was odd – at first I thought it was the wolf I found trapped in the rock but it wasn’t. The answer lies in the fact that I had made it such a big space – apparently they can despawn!

I think it is something like 20 squares that is the limit before they start to despawn – I was very sad as I lost my baby black sheep to this!

I am now hurriedly building little pens for them – I was planning on doing this anyway as I want to keep the colours separat for shearing purposes!

So I discovered that Minecraft could annoy me – my husband decided he wanted to get the PC Minecraft – this infuriated me because a) I felt we still had much scope for the XBox version especially as they have added the End. And also I wanted a dancing game for the connect – but it was his money…

Then he would sit there and play it on his laptop whilst I was trying to play the XBox which kept putting me off as I couldn’t tell if the zombie sounds were in my world or his!

As a family we sit and watch who ever is currently gaming but with the laptop that is not easy – he seemed to have not realised this – I got hacked off about it one night – Minecraft had gone from being a family entertainment to him hunched over his laptop.

So he hooked it up to the TV so we could all see but his laptop is not brilliant at rendering graphics so he had to change modes so the world seems full of mist and it is still jerky! This jerkiness caused both of us to get motion sickness from watching play – it is tolerable on the small screen but not blown up huge.

We need a proper gaming PC but the only computer in the house that could just about be ok is the one my 7 yr old built with Daddy for her 5th birthday and she is so very proud of it that we wouldn’t steal it. I would quiet like to save up for a gaming PC anyway as there is a plethora of other games I like sitting and watching which we currently do not have a computer man enough for.

As I mentioned in an earlier post I went a wondering into the islands out the front of my house in Minecraft and promptly got completely and utterly lost. I panicked and tore about and realised it was getting dark so hurriedly chopped down some tree, sheared some sheep that happened to be around and constructed an emergency house as the sun was setting.

I constructed the outer walls first – using a natural recess to reduce the amount of building, I turned the wood into planks and then a crafting table so I could make a door, bunged that on and went inside to put the roof on. Once that was done I made myself a bed, chest and furnace.

The next morning there was a strange sound sort of whomp whomp and lo! An Enderman was there just outside my house – I didn’t know about endermen at the time so I attacked him and he hit me and then disappeared. I liked the purple sparkliness of him but his elongated figure and the suddeness of movements were very unsettling.

I then decided that I would explore until I found my own home but that I would do in a sensible and systematic way. So I made a load of torches which I used to make a trail. This way at least I wouldn’t loose the new house.

I managed to find my first house and dubbed the new one The Bothy – a bothy being a little hut with a few supplies left in remote regions incase you need it. I believe it is a Scottish word, last time I stayed in one there was a pinemartin, a stag and some snow. Anyway my plan is to explore the world using this torch and bothy system. I will take basic supplies to build myself a house and lay a trail of torches as I go.

Here are the torches leading back to my first house from The Bothy.