Home Improvements

Since 1.6, water elevators have been unusable, so with mine, I ended up boarding up the thing in my main corridor, until now. I was reading a thread on the Minecraft forums that has a video showing you how to make a working water elevator in 1,6, and I thought I'd give it a try! It meant making it wider in the corridor, but I thought I'd give it a try, plus with the flight mode in SinglePlayer Commands it makes it much easier. Another change this time was to make sure it was lit better, the last version was only one block width so between the ladders, the water and such there was no easy way to light it up. Anyway here are the pictures:

Also, yes, I've been putting Glowstone in ceilings in certain height areas - but I'll get to that shortly. As you can see it goes a loooooooong way down! I've encountered a few problems so far, one being - when I made it, I didn't think of where I'd get on, so the only place to get on is at the bottom by the lava pools. Two, at the moment my boat gets stuck underneath the water at the bottom, and I'm not sure why. The Glowstone every six spaces all the way down, really helps light things up too. The link to the water elevator thread can be found: Here

The other thing I've been doing is better lighting. I watched a video on how to light your home with less torches. All it is basically, is putting Glowstone in the walls and putting a painting over it. The Glowstone then shines through.. It's a nice idea, as I always have problems with torch spam in my front room due to the height of said room. So much so, that after raising the roof two blocks higher a long, long, time ago - I've now lowered it a block. It was 4 blocks high, it went to six, and recently went down to five blocks height. It helps with the Glowstone paintings trick, but there's still some dark areas - so I added a few Glowstone "lamps":

This has also led to putting glowstone blocks in the ceilings of certain low height areas like the corridor. I've also took the torches of the tables in the dining room and embedded glowstone in the table, much better.

My next project is a watch-tower. I've had this project in mind for a very long. long time, but have only recently just started thinking seriously about it again the other day. I've chosen a clump of land by the start of the Nether-bridge, just past the cactus farm. Already I have levelled it off and terraformed the former lump of land and it's trees:

Work did halt as I died a few times when working through the night. (Pffft, what's a few creepers and skeletons?! And the odd spider..) It's funny when you lose all your stuff and keep going back to get it then die a few times in a row. You always say - "That was never 5 minutes!". So that was last night which brings us up to date. I was a nit peeved, so I stopped. The new idea is a traditional watch tower instead of a building (Original plan), using fences as a stilt tower upwards, with a single block for a ladder. Up the top I might have a little wooden platform (With fencing around)  and a central watch/lookout area using glass. I'll probably do this over the weekend.

I will turn the rest of the surrounding grass/stone and dirt around the base to sand as well. I uninstalled SinglePlayer commands thinking it was taking to much memory, but it did it once without it anyway, so have re-installed it. Maybe my file save is getting too big now? I think i'll just restrict flying to when absolute necessary.

I also need to go travelling again to reload the chunk, the animals have stopped spawning - again.