Thursday 2 May 2013

Burntcustard's Log - Entry 2 - High-tech XP farm and extended basement

The last log ended with a view down to my "extended basement". After walking down a long staircase, you come to a large room:
It's not that pretty, but it works.. as a room. Left-to-right: Skeleton xp farm, redstone/mechanical/sorting room, store room, staircase to the little building outside the front of the house, a few holes, the mine, enchanting room (behind the sword).

The skeleton-dungeon-farm-xp-grinder is the most interesting thing down here, so lets have a look at that:
On the left is the viewing hatch, then in the centre is the control panel and fully-unfunctional binary mob counter. I figured the counter could only count to 63, and to get to a decent level you needed more than 63 skeletons, so I never really started the workings behind it. Using the levers and button on the control panel allows you to open the hatch, and toggle the water and lights on and off, as shown in this gif:
That system is really useful for doing additional work or testing in and around the spawning room. You can just about see the elevation chamber at the back there, which scoops up the skeletons, sends them high up, over the top, then they fall down over....
Here! Left lever: Auto-burninate (kills any skeleton unlucky enough to be in the tiny tube - uses lava). Right lever: Item collection. Yep, that's what the dark line below the skeletons is; a hopper! You sit in the room and wait for skeletons (If I want to get to level 30 I'll AFK for an hour or so), lean in, punch the skeletons and get 1-hit-kills (or use healing potions to KILL THEM ALL at once), receive xp, and the items get automagically sorted into separate chests in the store room. Very Nice.

The sorting room:
The store room:


Some of the loot:

As you can see, I've got a metric shit ton of loot from the spawner. You might think I'll never use all that, but:
  • The bones are useful for growing plants.
  • The arrows are useful for shooting stuff.
  • The bows are good for making dispensers out of and crafting my Power V, Punch I, Flame I insta-kill bows.
  • The armour is good for free special enchantments like Respiration III (for clay hunting), and feather falling (for building tall structures).
  • Who doesn't like free stuff?
I will write a tutorial on how to make high tech xp farms like this one in my next blog post.

My mine:
It's on layer 11 and there's 3 blocks in between each branch. I've got loads of diamonds from it :)

Enchanting room:
Yep, this place is a mess. I'm not even sure why there's a cauldron in there. The lever is pretty cool though, letting me get just about any level enchantment I want.

This is where exploring my "starting" house comes to an end. Next time I'll show the castle. It will have been worth the wait!