Welcome (Back) to the Jungle

Entry 7 ()

Whoa, is it time for the next post already? A wrench got thrown into the plan from last time: Instead of a second village, I stumbled onto a dungeon! The first I’ve found since Beta, actually. I mean, I’ve never exactly gone out of my way looking for them (I never considered myself a technical player and wasn’t interested in turning one into a farm or anything), but in Beta I found two on the same server, also without actually looking for them – so they’ve seemed more elusive since then. This one was even above sea level, visible from the surface!

Cobblestone, some of it mossy, in the face of a jungle cliff.
No spelunking necessary. (−2,928 W / −2,033 N), looking northeast.

But before that, I’d covered a lot of uncharted territory and… charted it. There was a lot of fruitless searching for that elusive second village. I started by heading through the now‐rarely‐used second portal and exploring the rest of the Core to the east, filling the remaining four maps there and looking over the entire border in hopes another village would be as near as Intersylva was, but… nothing. So I rode back to that first village and headed north, hoping the next one would at least be close to the existing Nether railway.

I wandered back and forth, filling a whole map… and a second… and then most of a third. I’d completed the second‐to‐last pass and was moving a bit west to finish up when I caught sight of that cobblestone in the cliffside. Another village will have to wait, but now I’ve got all the string and XP I want – and, as always, there was some other neat stuff along the way, too. For example…

Looking from a desert at the icebergs of a frozen ocean.
Minecraft moment. I half expect some gnomes to show up with a barge… (+1,481 E / −864 N), looking southwest.
Oceanside jungle with a single bamboo plant growing on the beach.
You’ve heard of the lone cypress, but what about the lone bamboo? (+1,639 E / −520 N), looking southeast.
Chest containing nine iron ingots, four TNT, seven salmon, five diamonds, a heart of the sea, and two gold ingots.
Quintuple‐diamond buried treasure chest! (+1,481 E / −791 N)
A polar bear on ice with two cubs nearby.
Oh, they’ve got babies! Sweeeeet! (+1,297 E / −768 N), looking southeast.
Looking down a ravine from the surface. Near this end, a second, deeper ravine cuts through it at an angle.
The rare intersection of two ravines. (+1,443 E / +23 S), looking southwest.
A mountain overhanging a large, dark area. There is a forest below, but one tree grows halfway up and another is on the overhang itself.
Tree line? What tree line? (+1,216 E / +1,976 S), looking southwest.
A swamp with a witch hut in the distance.
First witch hut sighting! (−2,773 W / +857 S), looking northwest.
A jungle temple on a riverbank, almost completely exposed.
Well, that’s something you don’t see every day. A jungle temple that’s neither buried nor overgrown. You can just… walk right on in. (−2,398 W / −1,990 N), looking southeast.

And then, the dungeon.

Interior of the dungeon. A torch is atop the spider spawner and there is a single chest next to the opening from the jungle.
Defeated with one torch.

As you’d expect, the loot was mediocre (though I did get my first music disc, “cat”!), but of course that’s not the real draw of dungeons – the steady stream of mobs is, and all of the drops and XP that come with them. Time for my first ever spawner‐powered mob farm! I didn’t 100% follow either design block‐for‐block and just sorta winged it, but Pixlriffs’s and wattles’s videos were very helpful.

Plenty of space has been cleared, presumably around the spawner, at the bottom of which is a tray of flowing water. The exterior is a mix of cobblestone and stone bricks, both partially mossy.
Fun with fluid dynamics!
An ocelot atop the partially completed wall.
This little one showed up and hung out for awhile…
Interior of the spawning area, now nearly complete with only a small opening to the outside. The ocelot is stuck at the end of the water stream.
…and eventually found their way inside.

I’d originally included some redstone lamps for an “off” switch, but abandoned that idea as more trouble than it’s worth. This was before I realized just how loud an ever‐respawning cluster of spiders can be. Also before I remembered that after it finally comes time to update from 1.17.1 just one lamp should be enough, since then even a block light level of 1 will do the trick.

Numerous spiders as seen from the killing area, blocked from the player by trapdoors.
Hope you can hear this one.
The same shot with hitboxes visible; there are at least 14 spiders.
They’re hard to count in the dark, so here’s a shot with hitboxes shown. After clearing these out for a fresh start, I set a stopwatch for ten minutes and killed 74 spiders, three of which had jockeys.

Of course such a remote location needs its own little base…

Exterior view of a big ugly mostly‐cobblestone box partially covered in vines.
Come on; it’s not that ugly. (−2,906 W / −2,032 N), looking northwest.
A door tucked away in another part of the cliff face.
The “back” entrance is actually the one closer to the everything inside. (−2,911 W / −2,073 N), looking southwest.
Interior view of a long hallway. In the foreground are the back door and a nether portal; midway down the hallway is a ladder leading up and another hallway branching to the right.
Quake Pro shot to get almost the entire lower level. The hallway with the ender chest leads to a bed and water elevator/drop shafts. (I’ve already replaced the pressure plates with buttons after having a zombie piglin spawn from the portal and open the back door at night…)
A lantern hanging from a jungle tree with a button and steel trapdoor below. A sign behind some tall grass and vines reads “Zoot Chute – Push Button – Receive Drop”.
The third and most hidden (well, maybe not with the lantern) entrance up top, useful for getting atop the jungle canopy from below. (−2,933 W / −2,059 N), looking southeast.

And the base needs to be connected to the Nether hub…

End of a new Nether rail line, located in a crimson forest. Next to the portal are a banner depicting mossy cobblestone and signs reading “Spiders, −2,925 W, −2,066N” and “−C1832”.
The floor at the station here is made of bottom slabs since Hoglins can spawn at any light level. Though they made for easy hunting during construction, before any rails were laid – they kept spawning in the tunnels but can’t actually fit through one‐meter gaps. (−364 W / −257 N), looking southwest.
View from the tunnel of large lavafalls pouring into a crimson forest.
The entire branch north from the main line runs through and over a crimson forest. (−366 W / −89 N), looking southeast.
A junction with signs pointing towards Spawn (ahead), Intersylva (right), and Spiders (behind). A lever controls the switch and there are detector rails visible farther along the track. Another sign on the wall reads “−W1928R”.
Usually I prefer my rail junctions more rider‐friendly, even automated, but this is the Nether and I’d rather keep the redstone compact and less breakable. The inner detector unpowers the rails next to it just long enough for the cart to stop completely, getting you quickly back to full speed when you push off (credit to teunu for the idea). Both detectors also trigger note blocks as a heads‐up. I need to get more glowstone and replace that torch – it’s just dark enough to allow zombie piglins to spawn without it, and I don’t like uneven floors or random objects for spawnproofing. (−276 W / −24 N), looking east.

Construction also called for lots of netherrack for bricks (the mining of which yielded enough debris for another netherite ingot… what to use it on?) and a few trips to Intersylva to trade for more glowstone. One of those trips also resulted in taming not one, but two more kitties!

Tuxedo and persian cats sitting in grass next to some tulips.
Meet Domino and Meowth! I still need to come back with leads and take them home though (−2,189 W / +1,509 S), looking north.

In my side quest to play with new‐to‐me HTML elements, I added some expandos to the Advancements section for tracking more detailed progress on those longer‐term challenges – and in the process, figured out the flower forest mystery that had me puzzled a few months ago. Turns out the one I found wasn’t counting towards Adventuring Time because… flower forest isn’t counted separately on the list of biomes required for Adventuring Time. Not until 1.18, anyway. Bit underwhelming, but hey.

And now I know exactly what I’m missing (for a few more weeks, that is – folks, we have a release date! I won’t be upgrading right away, in anticipation of the usual bug‐fix point release shortly after, but once things look clear, it’s time to get Mild.) – though it’s not a surprising list: The rarities, badlands and mushroom island fields, and the seriously‐why‐have‐I‐not‐found‐these‐yets, the snowy/frozen biomes (literally every single one except frozen ocean, which doesn’t count because ocean generation makes no sense (see also that desert island with icebergs just offshore)).

Next time: Maybe more village hunting, maybe working on some to‐dos, idk.