In my last Minecraft post I had traversed the Nether and tried my best to portal to a new region of my world. Unfortunately, I kept landing in giant caverns deeeeeep beneath the ocean.
Finally, I found land above ground -- AND it was near a dark oak forest, too!
It's time to explore and see if this new region is worthy of inhabiting.
Laying down a careful trail of torches so I wouldn't get lost, I made my way through the dark oak forest in hopes of finding a nice area to settle down.
At first the area in the screenshot above seemed quite appealing!
A nice mountain, waterfall, I could clear out the trees at the bottom and set up a home by the river...
But then I ventured to the top of the mountain.
AND FOUND A MANSION!
No lie, this is the first time I've ever organically found a mansion. I've found quite a few whilst flying around on creative mode, but this is the first time I've ever just stumbled across one.
I decided that I would investigate it later, and set up home somewhere else.
Returning from atop the mountain, I noticed that the island in between the mountain and birch forest where my portal landed was rather nicely shaped with a river running through the centre and a nice round water area in the middle.
I decided that this would make a nice place to call home.
Which, of course, meant I needed to set up a quick little area and begin some deforestation. 😅
And some terraforming -- land flattening -- for building purposes. I'm awful and I'll never understand how people build atop rugged terrain without flattening it first. Insanity.
First I made a nice pier for fishing on and began work on some pathways. This path will eventually connect to my new Nether Portal and allow for quick travel to and from the farmlands!
If I ever find some blue ice, I might consider changing this aesthetic a bit to better much the zoomy block.
I placed down some flooring for three of my future buildings.
The birch-floored one will be the Enchanting Library! Which I've plotted out the appropriate space with dirt blocks. Beside it will be a potion hut, and I've started work on the blacksmith.
Of course I'll need to make a nice manor to call my own, too. But we'll work on that later.
With my new area partially sorted out, I thought it would be a good time to jump back into the mines.
Mostly for levelling purposes - I restored the integrity of my two pickaxes and I need a lot more XP to do more enchanting. Ideally I'd have a cave spider farm by now...
Which reminds me. I found a mineshaft earlier! Now I just need to remember whereabouts in my super ginormous cave that is. 😅
This cave is seriously huge. And I've gone in so many different directions within it... the first time I went down into the cave to search for the mineshaft's whereabouts, I ended up having to dig my way out with an inventory full of gold, iron, lapis lazuli and MOAR DIAMONDS.
So... after clearing out my inventory and cooking all the ore....... I tried again. xD
Only to discover even more unexplored areas of my ginormous cave system.
After trying three times to find this elusive mineshaft, I decided it was time to finalise my mine's travel system.
It was tiring running back and forth, back and forth, and yet again, each time my inventory was full and I had run out of torches. 😅 I honestly have no idea where this dang mineshaft is and at this point I might as well just dig elsewhere and inevitably stumble across another one.
Or, knowing my luck, it'll be the same one and I'll smack my forehead in annoyance when I explore it and suddenly find my giant cavern full of torches again. 👀
I guess we'll see if I finally find this mineshaft and make an XP farm out of it or not... in my next post!!! XD
In the meantime, I used up my existing XP and created this lovely sword which would've been great if it had Smite on it instead of Spider damage. I don't really need to loot a million webs and spider eyes.
Alas. 😅
All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, 
The texture pack in use is PureBDCraft's Vanilla pack.
