My girlfriend and I have just recently gotten into Minecraft for the first time. Well, technically I did play it in the early days when it was first released. But I wasn’t really familiar with survival games at the time, and was not really into pure sandboxes. So I gave up on it pretty quickly.
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 wasn’t exactly sure how the mobs’ movement worked, and part of me thought the trench would catch most of them. I soon realized, though, that the mobs didn’t walk off of edges with more than a 2-block drop. Which makes sense — I just didn’t think about it.
So, my design for the trap was to put pressure plates on the outside of doors leading to a fully-enclosed “room” with a roof made of glass. As mobs walked toward us, they’d step on those pressure plates, opening the doors to said room. The doors would close behind them, and since they don’t physically open doors*, they’d be trapped. From there, I could either enter through the side entrance I built and take them out myself; or just wait until the morning when they’d burn up from the sun.
It was a moderately successful trap after a couple iterations. A few times I thought I had everything buttoned-up, but it turned out that I left a block in a spot that a mob could jump on and get over the trap. And I hadn’t realized it until the mobs did just that.
*At some point, I read that mobs can break down doors, but that never happened to us. Ever. Even when all we had separating us was doors from the mobs.
Maybe that’s just on Java or something because we never saw it.
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!