Yes! My hardcore Minecraft adventure is still going strong. In my last post we visited the Nether and safely, carefully and painstakingly dug a rather large tunnel so I could build another nether portal and teleport myself to a yet undiscovered region.
That region was, thankfully, somewhat picturesque so now I'm going to use it to start my building.
There's also a village nearby. Not the best trades, but they'll do for now.
Since I have a nice area to build up, I'm going to use my first base as Resource Ground and just mutilate the hell out of it for all manner of goods. It's not like it's going to mar my proper building area!
Note: if this was a non-hardcore game, I likely wouldn't do this. I'm an OCD perfectionist and I hate holes in the ground and stuff. But since, when I die, it's all going to vanish... who cares?
I start by clearing up the land I'm going to build on first, chucking all the trees and dirt and whatever in my path into treasure chests for later. Before I move my stuff from First Base to Here I would like a grand vault to place everything into.
A vault!
Which of course means I need me some quartz for some beautiful building blocks.
But, of course, being the pedantic so-and-so I am, I need to lay everything out first so my vault's position makes sense. Which means I need to work on the boardwalk, starting on the outer edge of the future city and working my way inwards. Logic!
So I begin terraforming the land... only to discover there's another village in my path, and tonnes of ravines. And the area isn't really good for building on. Sigh.
So I go visit the other side where the cherry blossom trees are instead.
This time I investigate the area thoroughly before deciding to do anything.
There are no unexpected surprises, the area looks nice to build on, it's like a giant mountain island in the centre of a river with other mountain islands around it so I can make a bridge system around the place.
While cherry blossoms are nice and all, I don't really like the "forest of cherry blossoms" look in the game, I would rather have a bunch of oak trees with the occasional birch and the occasional cherry blossom... so all these trees have to go. I'll leave the flower petals on the ground though. XD
So I started my deforestation effort once again upon this pink mountaintop. It looks like the area below this mountain could be nice to build on as well. And I like the small mountain with a cave in the centre in the background!
This could be an interesting place to build, indeed.
While I was chopping trees, some uninvited guests appeared and decided to hover around the area.
I would normally just kill the pillagers and get it over with, but I don't want the raider's debuff on me at the moment when I have to go to a village to jump through my portal, and my first base is near two villages too.
Don't really want to deal with a raid right now. I just want to chop trees and prepare my vault so I can stash all my stuff.
While terraforming, I got distracted by a cave system that lurks beneath my mountain home. It was large, and full of coal and iron, and I still haven't explored it fully yet.
I had to force myself away to cook the iron, make some more tools, and continue my terraforming endeavour. At least I didn't have to go back through my portal system to get new tools! So that was a convenient diversion. xD
This is what I've cleared so far. Near the lone cherry blossom is going to be a path that leads down to the land below.. I'm going to expand the ground up here a little and build my quartz extravaganza.
Due to a food shortage, however, I'm waiting a bit before building this and am heading down to the lands below to make some farms instead. There's always something that distracts me from what I want to do! xD
Farms first. Then storage facility.
So I flattened some land at the base of my mountain and built two paddocks. One's for sheep, which are conveniently located just across the river. The other's for vegetables. I'll make another for cows, too, because I need all that leather for books!
Plus, cooked beef is better than cooked mutton.
For the time being though, this is enough and I can get work on quartz acquirement and main base building.
Then. Rudeness happened.
The pillagers that are hovering around my mountain appeared again. This time with a few extra bandit members.
I still don't want to kill them, not yet. They want to kill me though! And they broke my shield while I was trying to protect myself!
I ended up running around, getting shot in the butt several times upon my swift retreat. I'm surrounded by rivers so I took a giant leap and plunged into the safety of the watery depths.
Which is fantastic, because while I'm down here I can get some fish to eat. xD
I gathered a bunch of salmon, made a little cave just above the river to put in a furnace, cooked up the fish, healed up, and headed back to my mountain.
The pillagers had disappeared again. For now.
So I continued my work on the farms. Paranoid that the group of pillagers would sneak up behind me again at some point just to annoy me and shoot me in the butt, again.
Hopefully that's not the case as I continue onwards! xD
All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, 
