Ah, OK

Should have known that as soon as I complained some would show up. It's in the wall, so I'm leaving it be for now, but there should be more iron around here somewhere.

The Latest Project Hole

What's amazing about this hole isn't the huge number of blocks coming out of it -- it's been the total lack of iron this hole has yielded so far. And by total, I mean total -- zip, zero, nada.

This Time It IS A Hole

This one is a hole, rather than a cavern -- it is only 13x7 blocks, but it goes down from the upper hillside down to bedrock.

...and at the bottom, I've encased the lava formation in glass.

Again, it didn't take nearly as long to dig as I'd thought it would. Maybe I should dig a more ambitious hole next time. Or a more ambitious cavern?

I Dug A Big Hole

I dug a 20x30 square hole that's about 30 blocks deep. The base of it is like 10 blocks off of the bedrock, so it is really more of a big empty cavern than a "hole" per se. Took quite a while, although not nearly as long as I thought it would. Digging like this doesn't yield enough iron to keep paying for the pick axes that you go through, you either need stone ones (which burn out really fast) or you need an iron stash previously prepared.

Lava Light Element

Ringing a 3x3 tunnel with a lava/glass element. Looks kinda cool, even if it was a pain to build.

Artificial Forest

The view of my wood farm that I made in support of the Site B warehouse. The farm is much bigger than it has to be now, it kind of got out of hand.

Two Bridges

First, the laboriously-constructed Skyway, a bridge at the roof of the world -- it literally isn't possible to build this bridge any higher than it is. This is pretty much the effect I wanted when I built it. Right now it heads east, but we'll have to see how far it actually goes.

Secondly, this bridge was built to connect the storage warehouse at Site B (which is coming soon -- the Site B project is still under construction -- I wanted to build something interesting to look at from the Skyway) with the first stores at the base of the Skyway. Seen from the Skyway Observation deck at the Western Root.

Skytowers

I figured that with the new version of Minecraft P/E, plus my brand-new iPhone SE, I could crank the render distance up on the game I play on my phone. This is two skytowers in the same shot. This is the same world that I carefully built the lava plunge down to the bedrock in. I was thinking the next thing I should do was to make a skybridge, but in digging the hole necessary to extract the raw materials for a skybridge I got lost. I only hope I can find my way out before I run out of wood.

Lava Power

So I tried to build a "broken" skytower, one that was leaking lava, but I'm not happy with the result. I'm also not especially fond of the lava powered one on the right, either. Not sure how to make the effect I want.

Skytower

Building skytowers -- towers that go up as high as possible -- is my new hobby in Minecraft. I'm experimenting with brick layouts, coloring, and designs.

Now Thassa Big Mushroom

...yes, yes it is. Found by wandering around my main world after the latest update. I later found an entire field of large mushrooms of varying types.

Lava Projects

Finally completed a long project on my phone's Minecraft/PE: a glass lava conduit that goes from the surface down a excavated, lined hole right down to the bedrock. It was one of those projects that you do for no good reason and when you are done, wonder exactly why you did it. That's what this is. And it looks OK, might have looked better if it was lined with polished diorite instead of the granite, or if there was some kind of texturing/pattern to the lining. This project took a couple of weeks to complete in the intermittent play-time I allocated to it, mostly because any time I found a granite/diorite/andesite vein I would mine it to exhaustion, and I did the same to any tunnel complexes I encountered on the way down.

Meanwhile on my iPad's Minecraft/PE, I have some lava sculptures that I put together because I thought they might look cool.

The big one on the left is an experiment designed to generate a lava-curtain -- the big block above it hides the block arrangement that lets this be "powered" by a single lava block. It kind of becomes a literal "firewall". It ate a lot of andesite blocks, mostly because I wasn't terribly efficient about how I put it together.  Still, it was kind of interesting to do as an exercise.

The other two are older stone-and-glass arrangements that don't really serve any purpose other than maybe looking cool. And to be fair, they do look kind of cool at night.

Tunnel Endpoint

I've gotten bored with the digging of this tunnel since there isn't anywhere to actually go, and there is a prohibitive amount of water in this particular spawn I can't just dig up to start a new overground location. So I played a bit with fancy tunnel shapes and lighting.

Lava Light

An experiment in my tunnel on using lava and glass features for lighting purposes. Downside of using them is that you can't run rails over glass, which totally changes how I was going to run the rails down this tunnel.

Minecraft Project

We literally slept until noon on Friday, and wasted the rest of the day in front of the TV. I started digging a gap in a ridge in Minecraft P/E for no good reason other than I wanted to see  how hard it was. It is a lot of work, and it eats up axes -- fortunately there are lots of trees nearby and the hole generates its own cobblestone by the ton. So the project is more or less self-supporting. This is easily my biggest excavation so far in the game.

Bigger Building

So just to be different, I've been building something a little bigger.  I wanted to use diorite, and ended up using redstone because frankly I had a ton of it and no practical use for it.

This is the result:

First Project Building

It is a bit more intricate inside, with a two-story lobby in the front.

Lobby

There's not really anything else in it.  There are some pictures showing the construction deeper in the Minecraft album I have on Google Photos.

Next time I'll probably try to use granite, diorite and stone throughout rather than cobblestone.  I'm already preparing the next site for the next building.

One thing that is (slightly) interesting is that digging for physical resources shows you how scattered they can be.  I dug a fairly deep 9x9 shaft to get cobblestone for this building, and the shaft didn't yield especially much in the way of extra resources (iron, granite, diorite, or even coal).  Meanwhile another shaft dug about 300 blocks over yielded a lot more -- even after accounting for the fact that it was a 11x11 with +4 feathering so it covered a lot more blocks.

Coal really becomes a scarce resource when you are using it to turn cobblestone into stone.  I managed to reduce my torch usage by just using the torch to light the active trail I was on, and then blocking up "finished" tunnel areas with cobblestone.  It does mean I won't have any indication that I've explored a tunnel run if I encounter it with another shaft later until I hit the cobblestone wall.  But one coal unit only gets you 8 units of stone, which means that building with it requires a lot of coal.

Or a willingness to use diorite/granite for stone.  However I like the starker colors that those materials provide so I am reluctant to turn them into stone.

I've also changed to using stone pick axes to conserve iron.  Using iron pick axes was sustainable, in that I would usually find more iron than the cost of the pick axe, but the net collection of iron didn't really get further ahead.

Of course dying with a load of materials either in the bottom of some shaft that I'd wandered to start digging and/or the bottom of a lava pool probably has more to do with my lack of materials.

Well that turned out a lot longer than I intended when I started writing it.

Minecraft P/E: Northern Outpost

So this is the second round of Minecraft builds in the same world as the last time. I built a highway from the original mine, then thanks to a decision to build a "skyway" over a pretty flowered glen ended up hovering over the water. Rather than keep going I ended up building a hovering platform, and from there kept adding to it. At this point I think it is pretty much done.

The Northern Outpost
(Probably more intricate than Home Base is right now)

So thanks to the marvel that is gravel, I've added some "legs" to give the illusion of support. I've built a second level where the "workshop" stuff is.  And the third level is a Solar Cathedral.

Dawn in the Solar Cathedral

Glass is a pain to collect in my current world because sand isn't anywhere near where I've been wandering.  Gravel is more common, which is good because it is incredibly useful, but you can't make glass out of it.

The other thing I've been playing with is the idea for a dam made of glass. I have managed to build a prototype using sand and gravel. To be honest, the idea for this arose when I started mining a very shallow beach for sand using a gravel wall that I started progressively pushing outwards.  I figured if I put up a gravel wall, then put glass up against that, I could pull the gravel out from the bottom and end up with water against the glass.

How's that for a view

This particular one is limited because immediately underneith this "floor" is a cavern that would have to be dealt with if we wanted to drop things lower, and we are pretty much at the edge of the sand bar that I was mining.  But the technique is probably sound.

It might be neat to try to use this technique to build a house entirely out of glass under water.  If the top layer of the gravel stays under the water except where the door is, I probably wouldn't get the same edge dropping that I am getting here.

Small dam made of glass

So maybe I'll try to find a place to build a prototype under-water house next.