We even got some Redstone in there! I mean, I’m no Mumbo Jumbo or Pingu (by a long shot), but for a few hours of gameplay and a couple YouTube videos, I didn’t do too shabbily. These are just incredibly accessible, practical builds; that took my base area to new levels. Keep reading to check those out.

Everything around the treehouse (from the end of the last post) seemed, essentially, like more of the same — Just variations of wood. Not finding anything really new, we set off again. We tried to pay attention to landmark features and leave breadcrumbs for ourselves so we could make our way back at some point, but it didn’t really help.

Of course creepers and zombies were a problem, but now we’ve got ice archers? (“Stray’s” I guess) And they poison you?!? That’s annoying. We had to act fast, so we built a fence around this area to keep enemies out.

I had a vision pretty quickly for this base. I wanted the façade of the mountain to stay the same, with our living areas being within that space. And I wanted to add windows and lights so it looked like a home carved into the side of the mountain; which is exactly what it was.

On the ground level, when we first arrived, we built into the mountain to make our base. We simply carved out an area that looked big enough and dropped in beds, storage chests, and work benches. I wanted some “natural light” in this area, but we unfortunately didn’t have any glass or sand at the time, so I just made an opening in the wall. I figured we were protected by the fence we had already built.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think about spiders and the fact that some mobs have ranged attacks. We’d be minding our own business trying to get something done in the house, when all of a sudden we’re getting shot from behind. It got old fast, so we ended up filling in the gap pretty quickly. Actually, I still wanted the natural light, so I left the bottom row open. But then we were subject to spiders and baby zombies.

And the fence itself that we initially built failed quite a bit. Since we were in the snowy biome it, well, snowed. A lot. That snow would pile up (which is a cool game mechanic, I just didn’t know it existed), which would create a step for mobs to use to get over the fence. You just can’t win with this game.

After a couple nights I just high-tailed it over to the first beach I could find to gather some sand and head back, to create real windows that also protected us. It was necessary, too, because I had a few ideas for this base and they all involved windows. And I just tried to be cognizant about the snow, and clear it out whenever I noticed it piling up.

I wanted to expand the home and add a proper bedroom. Plus I wanted the outside to look more like there was a home built in there, so I started building up. There was a nice corner in the side of the mountain, so I carved out an opening to that. I put a wrap-around window in that corner, with a narrow hallway entrance, in order to make up the bedroom.

It was completed when gf added in the beds with the headboard and carpet; along with the seating area behind. Also on the second level (before the bedroom) was a bit of a library. I put windows looking out on the side of the mountain too — along with the aforementioned corner — to really make it look like a home from the outside. But otherwise, it was just the area you first got to when you went up the ladder to the second level.

Gf ran with it, though, and added some carpeting, bookshelves, and “seating” around the perimeter. We took a lot of it down when we moved (needed the bookshelves for enchanting, when we finally discovered that); but that’s what this looked like in it’s heyday — and I really liked it. Now, it mostly looks abandoned and ransacked.

Redstone

Also, around this time, I learned about Redstone. I had mined a ton of it, but I had no idea what it was or what it was used for. Thanks to YouTube, though, a whole new world was opened for me. I immediately started thinking about how I could apply these new principles.

My first thought was to have a machine that pushes mobs into a pool of lava at the push of a button. The main issue was actually getting the mobs in front of the pistons. My best thought was to have the tops of the pistons be on the same level that they walk on to get to me. Then, there’d be a small platform a block down in front of the pistons.

So, ideally, they’d walk across the piston, drop down onto that platform (where they’d stay because they A) wouldn’t willingly walk into lava and B) are still trying to get to me); at which point I’d press the button and have the pistons make the push.

I wanted to capture any items that the mobs dropped, too, so the plan was to put hoppers and chests under the lava. I needed a place to put the chests, with the hoppers above, with lava on top of those, not to mention the step for the mobs and the pistons that push them — so I built a huge structure off to the side that would accomplish just that.

And actually, for a first attempt, it worked pretty well. I had stairs going up to the top/platform, so I could lead the mobs up to the platform. I’d run around trying to got mobs to follow me; and when they did, I’d head up the stairs, jump across the gap, and head to the button hoping they’d follow.

It was a 2-block-long jump, so I could clear it and head to the back of the machine, while not worrying about mobs following me that far. And I built the entire structure relatively long because at this point I was thinking about the bow-and-arrow enemies and how they like to stay a bit further back.

In the back of the trap I had the aforementioned, button and I would wait for the mob to inevitably walk toward me and off the one-block ledge onto the block right in front of the pistons. At the push of a button, those pistons extended and pushed the enemies into fire. Easy peasy.

There were a few downsides. For one, I took a lot of hits trying to lure enemies — I couldn’t just stand there and wait for mobs to come to me at the back of the trap, I had to physically go out and get each one to follow me. Also, Spiders were largely immune due to how I had the Redstone laid out. And, not that this affected the trap’s performance, but it was rather unsightly.

I thought I could solve a lot of those problems by making the platform of the trap at the same level as the rest of the ground — digging down for the drop-off, chests, hoppers etc. I could enclose the Redstone more easily (I thought), and hopefully enemies would see me just standing there and come after me, instead of having to lure them.

One small issue

There was one small issue with this plan, though, and it was that I was in an ice biome. So there was just water under the ground level. I had to essentially build a box underwater, fighting off Drowneds and trying to avoid drowning myself in the process (which I failed at constantly). I eventually got the box built and drained, though, and was ready to make the trap.

At this point, my vision expanded and I no longer wanted the one-block drop for the mobs. I wanted them to walk to the edge of the lava pit on the ground level, and instead of mobs dropping in front of the pistons, the pistons would pop up behind the mobs to push them into the lava. I tried several variation of this before realizing/discovering that pistons don’t like to move other moving pistons. So, I never got it working.

Before I was able to put it back to the original design, we decided to move on again from this area. Haley wanted to actually take advantage of villagers and make a real farm; and I was ready for a change. I was tired of being cold.

I closed off the trap so no mobs could get in — thinking I’d maybe come back one day and tinker — packed up and headed out again.

One of our main goals for the next area was actually using villagers for farming etc., so we high-tailed it to the first set of occupied houses we found. Having already ruined several villages by letting them get overrun with zombies, we were very cautious this time.

We lit up the whole area pretty quickly, then looked around, and found a nice open area for us to put our house. We chose a spot looking over a crevice that had water, and thought it would be cool to build out over that. There was also a big waterfall off to one side, so we really like what it looked like.

I wanted a slightly bigger build here, and I envisioned a very modern-style home with rectangles staggered on top of each-other for each designated space. So that’s what I got to work on. I did an entrance area, a bedroom, and a space for work tables initially. I also wanted to shoot my shot at making a piston door — so I did that as well — and I thing it turned out great.

At first there was a switch, but I eventually wired it up to pressure plates so we could just run in and out. I felt pretty safe doing so — we built a full barrier around the house, so mobs shouldn’t have been able to get in. I did have a couple moments of panic where I thought some were getting through (I’d hear the door while I was crafting or something) but it turned out to be the traveling merchant.

I’m not sure how he’s able to get in and zombies aren’t, but I’m grateful. We also left the entire back of the house open, just because. It was gf’s idea and I think it looked great. I’m guessing that helped keep mobs on the back-side of the home rather than inside the fence. Path of least resistance.

Once we figured out enchanting and what bookshelves were for, I stacked another rectangle on top to house those; and to upgrade the look of the house a bit (inside and out) I replaced the wall of our bedroom with windows, and that’s the house itself!

The Fun Stuff

Around the house there are a lot of things we built, too. Like I mentioned, gf wanted a farm and villagers, so she followed a YT tutorial and built one off to the side. We ended up getting tons of villagers with this setup. We (Haley mostly) also painstakingly fenced in the entire village so all of our work wouldn’t be in vain.

I couldn’t go too long without messing with Redstone, so I made a trip-wire trap that opened the ground as mobs walked across it, dropping them into lava (the one from the top of this post). I loved the idea behind this, and mostly the execution but it required a lot of finagling of blocks that I didn’t love.

In order to hide the tripwire, I needed to build a little bit of a tunnel; and cats and pigs (and the occasional baby villager) kept getting stuck in there. And since that’s where the tripwire was, they’d be triggering it. This would leave the pit open, so they wouldn’t be able to get out. I’d have to break the trap to let them free, and then re-build it.

The villagers also weren’t smart enough to avoid the trap itself either, so I lost a few who fell in. Along with a couple iron golems. It was still worth it.

On the other side, in a corner, I built a much simpler version of my first trap. There was just a one-block hole just on the outside of the barrier of our property; connected to a button that removed the block for the drop in to lava. It was simple but it worked well — I even caught a few creepers with it.

Redstone wasn’t the only thing that YouTube taught me. I also learned how to quickly cultivate helpful items like kelp/bone meal, sugar cane, and wood. I built a basement to house the farms because I liked the idea of an underground “factory”. Also, the back-side of our base had water, and I liked the idea of having a glass lookout from the factory into the water. So I went deep enough to do that.

First, I built the kelp farm that automatically created the bone meal, and I used the bone meal to grow the oak trees (for wood) and sugar cane (for paper). I wired up a dispenser for each, so the bonemeal was automatic. When I wanted sugar cane, all I had to do was add bonemeal, turn on the farm and wait.

For wood, I simply had to place the sapling; a tree would eventually sprout for me to harvest. With this setup, I could grow 5 at a time. I even built some pistons at the top to get rid of the leaves so I could get more saplings and sticks — keeping the farm self-sustainable. I probably didn’t need that part though as I always ended up just climbing the machine to get all of the leaves anyway.

We started realizing our need for iron, so we built the classic iron farm that involved killing iron golems automatically. There were a few issues setting this up — there’s a lot of conflicting information out there, especially given the various versions ‘vailable. But eventually we got it working properly. And for shits and giggles, I built a rail line from the basement over to the iron farm.

To Do’s Going Forward…

I also attempted to make a couple mob farms in this area — one at bedrock and one like 300 blocks in the air, but I never got those to work for me. All the videos I watched made me think I did things right, but I couldn’t get mobs to spawn. Never did figure it out. Now that I think about it, I didn’t give them a ton of time, but I felt like I should have seen at least one or two if it was actually working. Now that the other farms are established, I might go back and try to work on one of these again and actually get them to work.

At this point, we felt established. And while we had some goals still, we also were itching for some new experiences. At various times while we had been playing, we glanced at the add-ons to see what was available. There were a couple that looked promising; and since we wanted to keep this world relatively vanilla, we decided to start a new world for that.

We ended up making a pretty cool homestead there, too, but that’s for another time. My pyramid that reveals a hidden enchanting room will have to wait for another post. Let me know in the comments if that’s something you want me to show.

Otherwise, thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought of this, and what your Minecraft builds look like, I love getting inspiration from other designs.

Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to check out one of my other ones! And be sure to check back soon to see what other games I talk about. Thanks again for reading, peace!

The post Minecraft Home Tours Part 2 | Farms & Redstone appeared first on I Talk Games.

I really loved Pokémon as a kid, so when I learned about PalWorld (bear with me, this is a Minecraft post), it was something I definitely wanted to try. My girlfriend and I gave it a shot, and we really got in to it. Going in, I didn’t know that I would have to chop down trees, craft my tools and weapons, and build shelters to survive nights. But given the overall idea behind the game (catching and battling Pokémon Pals), I was more than willing to do it.

Note: this is just a house tour post. I’m giving some background info and context for each build, but I’m not actually going to review or comment on the game itself much. I’m Just going to talk about the couple houses and bases and builds that we made, and why.

Also, as an Amazon Associate I may earn a small commission if you were to make a purchase using a link on this site. It’s at no cost to you, though, and can really help out the blog. I appreciate it!

As we played, I started enjoying the “survival” aspect of it more and more. And once I figured out the construction rules, I really loved bringing various build ideas to life (stay tuned for my PalWorld commentary and building tours). For a little while, I even got a bit of an itch for survival games and I branched out a bit giving Ark and Valheim a shot. I didn’t stick around long enough to give them a real chance, though (I may go back one day).

So, after taking a bit of a hiatus to play different games (like Split Fiction), we started itching to do some mining, resource gathering, crafting, and building again. Having just watched the Minecraft movie at a friends house with his kids, it seemed like the natural option.

The Beginnings

We wanted a relatively fresh playthrough, so we didn’t go in to the game with much information or any goals. We mostly planned to just explore and see what we could find, and I knew there were diamonds out there to be had. But otherwise, we decided to figure it out as we went.

I forgot how little information the game really gives you when you start. I did know that we had to sleep through the nights because there were enemies, but I didn’t remember just how dangerous they were. It was a pretty quick lesson.

I wanted to build a house, but between creepers, spiders, and helmet-wearing zombies, I didn’t feel safe just building out in the open, even during the day. I figured it would be a good idea to create ourselves a platform that we could build on top of that monsters couldn’t reach.

We found a good spot, kind of on a cliffside facing a village (something else that was new to us) and thought that would be great because we really only had to dig down 3 sides. Also, we found an area that already led pretty deep underground right below that spot, so it was a good place to start mining too. So I started digging three blocks down around the area that we decided would be our base’s plateau.

Digging out the space

Truth-be-told, I didn’t fully think the plan through. I thought the landscape would be largely unaffected, but there’d be one area just a little higher than the rest where our home stood. It was early in the game, so I didn’t have the blocks to build up, and in my mind, I’d easily achieve that vision by just clearing the blocks around where we chose our home to be.

I realized pretty quickly, though, that I wasn’t building a plateau, I was building a moat. I was just trenching out the area around my base, creating a pit. Oh well, it’ll still get the job done. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t think a one-block-wide pit was enough. It seemed like the enemies could make it across that gap with little issue. So, I decided to double-up my work and make the trench at least 3 wide.

It wasn’t my initial vision, and a bigger project than I anticipated. But after a couple in-game days and a few frustrating deaths, I got it dug out.

While finishing the bulk of the trench was relatively quick, it took several days of tinkering to finally get it to a place where I thought it actually looked decent. We had to fill in all of the creeper holes and block off any overhangs where skeletons could hide out during the day. It was a whole to-do, but I liked how it turned out.

I left an area off to the side as our “main entrance” to the plateau. It was an easy-enough jump for us, but one that mobs couldn’t make. I ended up making another easy way in — by climbing up and over the trap — but this space remained the main way we got on to the home area. There were various ladders within the trench, too, in case we missed the jump (which we did often. Frequently finding creepers waiting for us at the bottom).

Catching Mobs

Speaking of traps, I was thinking about ways to capture mobs to harvest their drops — especially the arrows from the skeletons. This was long before we watched any videos about what to do or how the game mechanics worked, so I was just trying different things.

I eventually got everything filled in properly, and actually buttoned-up, so there were no unknown/missing spots where mobs could sneak in. And on the outside — next to the doors that made up the “entrance” to the trap — I put ladders so I could climb over into the property while hopefully luring the mobs into the trap.

I say it was only moderately successful because I really only trapped zombies. I didn’t think about the skeletons’ mechanics and how they tended to stay a bit further away so that they could shoot. After the couple times zombies got in when I wrongly assumed I was safe, I ended up building walls around the trap to prevent that.

With those walls, though, I was out of the sight-lines for the skeletons, so they didn’t come into the trap that often. I tried luring them every once-in-a-while, but they usually lost interest after I got into the base. Or they’d kill me before I had a chance to make it back.

Spiders could obviously just climb over the trap, so I wasn’t really trapping them in the first place.

Instead of glass, I ended up trying a couple iterations of putting transparent blocks in different patterns in the opening between the trap and the home. I hoped that would lure more skeletons, while at the same time stopping them from shooting us. I kind of got close (and close to a traditional mob farm, accidentally) by putting blocks only on the top-half of the opening. But by the time I got to that plan, we decided to move on and explore another area.

Overall, I never got the base into a perfect place, or the trap as efficient as possible. But I did learn a lot and had fresh ideas for the next home-base we built.

What about the inside?

As for the house itself: When we first got to this plateau, I built a small hut to sleep for that initial night. But once we built the “main house”, it just became storage and extra crafting tables.

While I was digging the trench, my gf built the main house — complete with expanded storage and work tables. She even included a roof-top deck decorated with a bell from the nearby village (we didn’t know what the bell did yet).

I liked what she had done with it, and wanted to add something of my own. I decided on a basement, complete with a nice little fireplace; and I included a walk-out, so you could enjoy the water from that level. There was also a cleared out area under our house that we’d created by mining for stone and coal and getting blown up by creepers. I thought that area looked pretty cool, so I added a window looking in from the basement. I kind of made it up as I went, and I really liked how it turned out.

Haley also realized that she could potentially keep pets and wanted to see what that was about. Given the trench I made, it was difficult to actually get animals up to our homestead, but that persistent merchant was usually around.

Haley built 3/4 of a fence and waited until one of the merchant’s llamas were within it, and closed it off. Our first official pet. We were still learning at this point, and didn’t actually know about taming or breeding. So we just held on to the one llama until we moved on from that base.

Which leads me to house number 2

We were starting to get a little bored with our original home, and as I was out gathering resources one day, I came across a new biome and type of tree. It seemed like a good opportunity to explore and move on, so we packed up and did just that.

It turned out that the tree wasn’t much more than just a new variation of wood, so we moved past it. We had committed to moving on, so we didn’t want to simply go back. Eventually, we came across a huge chasm in the side of a mountain, and decided to explore that. It was pretty mob-infested, so we built a base pretty quickly right outside of it.

We, once again, gave ourselves a bit of elevation between the home and where the mobs spawn. But it was nowhere near as in-depth as the first spot. We basically just built a small platform in the side of the mountain to make a simple sleeping spot.

I wanted to give it some character, though, so I added a wall of windows to look out through. It turned out great, and it was very little work. Good thing, too, because we realized that this chasm didn’t have anything for us at the time, and we moved on pretty quickly.

Treehouses

When we left the base by the crevice, we immediately came across a swamp biome. And for the first time, we saw a Huge Brown Mushroom (I had to look that up, I thought they were just yet another variety of tree. I never chopped one down). We built a bit of a “treehouse” on top of that, but it was another quick one to just get through the night.

At one point, my gf and I got separated, so I built a base on the treetops so she could hopefully find it/me. In order to get into it, you had to navigate up and over using it’s leaves and the leaves of nearby trees.

Both of those interim houses gave us ideas for what would become our next main base. We wanted to create something up in a tree, with a more low-key hidden entrance up through the leaves.

We found a prime candidate for the treehouse and carved ourselves and entrance channel through the leaf-blocks. This still honestly might be my favorite entrance to a house we built.

We got to the top and cleared out a spot for the house. We had tons of stone at the time, so we built this grayscale monstrosity on top. While aesthetically the jury’s still out, I thought It was really cool disappearing through the leaves to secretly get inside this base.

We planned on staying here for a little while, so Haley built this wrap-around balcony and added a garden with some decorative plants. It wasn’t too substantial (and we didn’t really know the farming mechanics yet, so we weren’t trying to gain anything from it) but it was fun and we liked it.

I’ve also always like the idea of living furniture & decoration — like having a tree growing through the treehouse, so I tried to bring that to life here. We left the body of the tree, and just build around the trunk. At the time, we thought that leaves would continue to grow on trees, so I built a couple blocks off  the side of the top of the trunk, so there’d be more leaves above, too, which would have been incredible.

Turns out, leaves don’t grow like that, so it didn’t seem like my vision would be realized. But while creating the videos for this post, I added them in manually. I was in creative mode anyway, so I figured “why not?” It actually turned out pretty well, and I kind of wish I thought about it from the start.

Thanks for reading! This was actually just part one — It was getting pretty lengthy as is, so I felt like I should break it up. Be sure to check out Part 2 where I start to dabble in some Redstone and farming (and I don’t simply mean planting crops).

Let me know in the comments what you thought about my first builds after being away from the game for over 10 years. I think they’re pretty clever for having gone in with very little information. Hope to see you in part two, or if you enjoyed this, be sure to check out one of my other posts!

The post Minecraft Home Tour Part 1 | Plateaus & Treehouses appeared first on I Talk Games.