If you don't travel with an ender chest full of shulkers, you're doing it wrong. And you don't have to use all the new blocks anyway. Now you'll (hopefully) be able to stack bundles into shulkers into an ender chest. That's a big backpack.

SNOWIER SNOW

 

I have played Minecraft on-and-off since the early days (first Java, now Bedrock), but this weekend I defeated the Ender dragon for the first time in a survival world. Despite being heavily overprepared, I still just about managed to die more than once. Also, after watching so many Lets Plays on Youtube of people defeating the Ender dragon, I thought hitting those bloody end crystals would be far easier. I ended up giving up on the bow plan and had to tower up to each of them individually because apparently I suck major balls with the bow.

This also marks the first time I've ever owned shulker boxes or an elytra. What a time to be alive.

 

Shulker boxes are game changers. Elytra is nice but rockets are a pain in the arse and you must have mending and I breaking on it.

 

When I fight the first Ender Dragon in a world, I bring enchanted diamond gear, an enchanted bow (from fishing), potions, 2 water buckets, golden apples, a bed, an ender chest and some stacks of blocks.

1) bed in the portal room in stronghold, click the bed
2) establish safe home base on End island
3) infinite water source
4) cover area between obsidian pillars with water, two reasons: repel Slendermen, provide safe fall when you inevitably get knocked off one of the towers (because I can't do MLG water)

I don't always fight 19 dragons in a row to spawn all the portals, but when I do, I wear Netherite gear, bring an unreasonable amount of potions and enchanted apples and rockets.

 

Yeah, I went in with full Netherite, fairly heavily enchanted. I only brought one bucket which proved completely useless as despite some attempts to practice using it I was hopeless. Fortunately the feather falling on my boots was enough, and I didn't get kicked up too far. A few health potions and a bunch of golden apples proved very useful when I managed to aggro half a dozen endermen (I elected not to go for the pumpkin head thing).

Fortunately, Mending is like the one useful enchanted book my harem of villagers is able to produce. Still trying to get an Unbreaking III though. I'm thinking my next plan will be to try and make a creeper farm. That's definitely going to be a big project for me though. I decided to try and build a kind of castle-town around a really nice natural bay on my mushroom island, but in a moment of insanity decided to make it out of blackstone.

As a result, it currently has about 2/3rds of a tower and 1/3rd of a wall segment. Now that I have shulker boxes, though, I can make a much better job of mining blackstone.

 

I'd just go for a general Mob grinder, they are much easier to make and can give a good amount of gun powder as well as the rest of the mob drops.

 

Badger is on Bedrock and classic dark room farms don't work on this version because spawn mechanics are meant to be easier for lower end devices to handle. For example, ocean monument have 25 permanent spawn points for guadians, which actually makes it much, much easier to build a guardian farm than on Java, but if you want a dark room spawner, you'd pretty much have to clear a huge area of all possible spawnable spaces and force the spawn into one location...

I'm currently trying to do that on my Realm. It's easily the biggest project I've ever taken on.

 

After being thoroughly shamed by @ScottPress's impressive builds, I decided to make some real-inroads on my blackstone keep plans. It's still early days, but I tore down what I had, and built up a new, larger design:



While it's nothing terribly impressive, I'm really pleased with how the bridge worked out between the two gateway towers. It's at a 2:1 angle, and getting a decent looking curve on that angle was very annoying, considering I didn't have any kind of real plan.

My plan (such as it is) is to encircle a fairly large section of the island around the cove. I'll then build a big keep on the top of the hill overlooking the bay, and hopefully fill the area inside the walls with town-stuff.

This may take some time.

 

I dig that. I really need to try a castle build myself.

 

On a Mooshroom island I see, a man of culture.

 

I'm a busy man, I don't have time to deal with mobs. Except Mooshrooms. They're precious darlings who need to be protected.

In other news, gone through some more shulker boxes full of blackstone to get the main keep area 60% done (externally, at least. Detailing is still to be done):



Probably another 5 shulkers of blackstone needed to complete the keep + walls I reckon. Then I want to fill in some of the bay, and create a town of some description on the reclaimed land. I'll need to make sure I light it up properly, however, as Drowned are already a regular annoyance.

 

I've built a second map room (has all my maps on the floor instead of the walls) and a second emerald beacon. Reclaimed two and half stacks of iron for my trouble. Villager trading is going well.

Next on the agenda are probably netherwart and sea pickle farms. Netherwart is straightforward, sea pickle will take some redstone trickery, ugh. I am however almost done with the farms I want to include on my island.

 

My nether network has been on hiatus for a while and I hit a bit of burnout working in the overworld, so this has been a nice change, just working on fast travel tunnels and building a portal room at each destination.

 

First update on 2021 is a look at some recent additions to the base. Most of these are in the underground complex.

Cow & sheep farm, finally

All of my best gear



A view of the underground halls



Twin structure to the above 2 images, same column design, color scheme sort of reversed


New map room. Maps all easily viewable on the floor



Newest addition: netherwart farm



Pumpkin & melon automatic farm



The Great Big Desert Pit

I've been digging in a desert, I've been digging in the Nether, I've been building underground. I think it's time to build something above ground, so the base actually looks like it's changing. Next update will probably be about terraforming, or I might have a new build on the base to show you.

 

I dig the colour scheme in the underground halls, looks cool.

 

I'm watching this survival series on YT and on one hand I like the builds enough to keep watching, on the other, the entire city this guy is building is brown and gray. Wood and stone bricks and andesite.

I could never do this. Brown and gray. Gray and brown. And some more gray. Bleh.

 

Yeah, the world's gloomy enough already. I feel that way too. It's why I've got so much lurid art up. Inject some colour directly into my eyeballs!

On that note, I look forward to seeing your next technicolour pizza

 

New house for villagers on my island. After years of watching better builders on YT build houses in this style, I decided to give it a shot. As I was building I thought I had the proportions totally off. The base seemed too puny supporting this ridiculously steep roof, but apparently ridiculously steep roofs look fantastis in Minecraft because this honestly came out better than I expected. Replacing some plank blocks with warped netherwart blocks and sticking soul lanterns on the roof was an unplanned inspired idea after I had already called the exterior complete (no interior yet).

@Steelbadger you still building your blackstone fortress?

@Alindrome whatcha think? not a giant pizza, but I tried to stay away from the drab stone brick+spruce style. Though I did use spruce and stone.



bonus leftover floating warped tree in the background because this build needed so much warped wood

 

Looks fantastic, you just little a touch of landscapping to really tie the build into the world. A path, some bushes. Looks really good.

 

Landscaping will have to wait a while yet. I need to do the interior, capture some villagers, then install a minecart system to be able to transport them down to the trading hall.

There's also some more open space left on the island. I want to fill that up with builds, then landscaping will finally fill the spaces in between. Been working on the island for 2 years now, so I'm not in a rush lol.