Fifteen litres of blood for every shelf in my minecraft library. #blogjune
The ludicrous level of killing required to make a library in Minecraft.
I've been playing Minecraft since it came out back in 2009 more or less and one thing I love about the game is basically digging a huge hole, finding a ton of resources and then eventually building a library inside a stupidly huge castle. Although I've recently started to go more underground in my building techniques because it leaves less avenues for attack from enemies and also because it means I might find resources while building. However no matter what I like building a library in my worlds and I like having them be a little bit overboard in terms of size so I need a lot of resources to actually get them up and running.
My First ever Castle, sadly I'm on my laptop right now so I can't show pictures from my actual game in question so these are as close a representation as I could get. You can actually see a little bit of the library through the windows if you look carefully.
To build a library you need to have a bookshelf and to make a bookshelf you need six planks of wood and three books, to make a plank of wood you need raw lumber, to make a book you need three sheets of paper and one piece of leather, to make paper you need three bamboo shoots, to make leather you need a dead cow or four dead rabbits.
So, simple enough.
Now I'm planning on making a pretty big library so I figured I'd need at least sixty-one hundred bookshelves, which meant I needed to kill at least three hundred cows, grow over nine-hundred bamboo shoots and also fell nearly two hundred trees(because I needed wood to do other things as well as making shelves, like making weapons and tools to harvest stone).
So I started by destroying a mountain to make space for some farms to grow wheat, to do this I first chopped down some trees to make myself a pickaxe, then harvested some dirt and rocks which I used to make a stronger pickaxe, and then cut down the hills and mountains around my starting point to a flat surface so I could use it more efficiently, this took about six-eight hours. The top half of the field I planted some trees, when you harvest the leaves off of a tree sometimes a small sapling will fall down(computer game logic) and you can plant that to grow a new tree(you usually get about three saplings per tree so you can expand a tree plantation pretty swiftly if you want to. I had a ton of trees on the go so I'd never run out of wood but harvesting wood takes ages.
Trees. You need a lot of them to keep up your wood supply, without them you're in trouble. I tend to do a mass harvest of wood whenever I'm getting down to about 1/4 of what I think I need, then when I'm done I usually have enough left over for weeks of supplies and thus replant new trees to grow and replace the fallen.
My wheat fields can grow about eight hundred or so bushels of wheat at a time and also two hundred carrots on the side(useful for breeding rabbits and pigs). Once I had a lot of wheat I went out and found some stray cows wandering around the place, cows will follow you around if you have wheat and if you give them the wheat and give another cow nearby some wheat they'll get love hearts above their heads and make a baby cow. I used the wheat I had and herded them into a small paddock fenced in with the fences and gates I'd build from the wood I'd harvested earlier.
So now I could start breeding cows. Starting with two I soon had three and then had to wait about five-ten minutes to make four and then another ten minutes to make six, then nine, then thirteen etc. I basically went around breeding them whenever I was in that particular area and eventually a few days later I had several hundred cows resulting in my computer actually crashing from the strain of having to keep track of all of them.
A cow, my source of leather and beef. Oh, I didn't mention in my article that I had to keep eating in the game while doing all this work and also had to fight off enemies in the night-time who would try to kill me non-stop.
While I was sporadically breeding cows I was also making a special harvesting centre for making Bamboo, in Minecraft Bamboo can only be grown on dirt or sand next to a body of water, it won't grow anywhere else so I found a beach and build a long line of dirt going out into the sea and then another two spaces next to it and another again two spaces next to that, by the time I was done I had thirty rows of dirt of sixty-four blocks each which I could grow Bamboo on. I then put some stone blocks on the sides above the water so that I wouldn't accidentally lose any bamboo when I was harvesting it(the stuff goes flying in all directions, wheat does the same thing so I usually have an irrigation system which directs the cast-off wheat to a central location by flowing everything to a spot underground that I can access via ladder).
Bamboo harvesting, the early days before I got hardcore into resource maximising.
Everytime Bamboo grows to its maximum height(three blocks high) you can use the top two to start a new bamboo sprout and then grow that to another three high and start over(noticing a trend here in Minecraft? If you wait long enough all resources are replenishable, just need patience). So after about four hours I had several hundred pieces of bamboo on the grow at any time.
You take 3 pieces of Bamboo and put them together and you get a page. So I had to make a lot of Bamboo just to make a page.
Then came the most bloody violent event in the history of making a library. I killed about five hundred cows in an hour. I made a really nice sword, it was made of pure iron, and then I went around to my cows, all locked up and with no-where to run. It took an hour to kill them all, I still have almost one hundred left alive as of writing this and I'm likely to kill most or nearly all of them sometime in the next few days. But after that unpleasant bit of business I have my leather, which allowed me to make about three hundred or so books(I have enough leather to make more but I used some to make some armour and am keeping some in reserve just in case I need it for something else). Used to be in this game you just needed paper to make a book, I kind of miss those days because killing so many cows was just unpleasant, no sport or competition in it at all.
So many books, so many bookshelves. I have truly created the foundations of a library here. This was worth the dozens of hours I spent in trial and error, building farms, farming wheat, killing cows and growing bloody bamboo. The three little blocks with 64 as the number in the right hand corner of the image are bookshelves.
Now that I have my books I can build a book shelf and then place them in the game.
This is my first attempt at a library. Totally worth killing all those cows for.
So there you have it, how to make a library in Minecraft. Just spend about twenty hours at it and you'll be fine.
My castle from above, the library occupies the top two floors. Currently, I have a plan to build a castle with trees as the foundation, a massive storeroom of tools, food, material and supplies as the bottom few floors(with wooden walls) and then make the entire upper floors a library and the rooftop an observation platform
This Weeks topics.
My Day.
Today was Monday and I went to work a bit late because I had to help out with some work around the house, the roof has a small leak in it and I helped my dad to find it and kind of started to fix it, it is a multi-stage job and we'll likely need to do a few more bits of work on it, going up on the roof and applying sealant etc.
After that I went to school for the afternoon and found that the replacement staff member covering for the regular librarian is being moved to the prep grade and a teacher who's coming off maternity leave is taking her place. Since she hasn't worked in a library before we can't work out what jobs to give her considering that I can do most of it and the other librarian on duty can handle everything else. I'm not there all the time so having her on board will be better than relying on me.
Our current plan is to just get her to shelve books. I spent the afternoon shelving and sorting all the teacher reference books out the back of the library and then sorting out all the returned books so that shelving them will be easier.
After that was done I had to go straight to my brothers house to wait for him to get in and then we spent the afternoon just watching some TV before going out for steak dinner at the Corinda pub and then doing the weeks shopping across the road at Coles.
Once that was done we went home and I eventually put him to bed before I wrote this post and am now going to work on a short story I have to finish for my writing club tomorrow afternoon. I've done 300 words so far and I need another 900 minimum, should be fine.
YouTube Clip of the day.
On the topic of digging!
I've been playing Minecraft since it came out back in 2009 more or less and one thing I love about the game is basically digging a huge hole, finding a ton of resources and then eventually building a library inside a stupidly huge castle. Although I've recently started to go more underground in my building techniques because it leaves less avenues for attack from enemies and also because it means I might find resources while building. However no matter what I like building a library in my worlds and I like having them be a little bit overboard in terms of size so I need a lot of resources to actually get them up and running.
My First ever Castle, sadly I'm on my laptop right now so I can't show pictures from my actual game in question so these are as close a representation as I could get. You can actually see a little bit of the library through the windows if you look carefully.
To build a library you need to have a bookshelf and to make a bookshelf you need six planks of wood and three books, to make a plank of wood you need raw lumber, to make a book you need three sheets of paper and one piece of leather, to make paper you need three bamboo shoots, to make leather you need a dead cow or four dead rabbits.
So, simple enough.
Now I'm planning on making a pretty big library so I figured I'd need at least sixty-one hundred bookshelves, which meant I needed to kill at least three hundred cows, grow over nine-hundred bamboo shoots and also fell nearly two hundred trees(because I needed wood to do other things as well as making shelves, like making weapons and tools to harvest stone).
So I started by destroying a mountain to make space for some farms to grow wheat, to do this I first chopped down some trees to make myself a pickaxe, then harvested some dirt and rocks which I used to make a stronger pickaxe, and then cut down the hills and mountains around my starting point to a flat surface so I could use it more efficiently, this took about six-eight hours. The top half of the field I planted some trees, when you harvest the leaves off of a tree sometimes a small sapling will fall down(computer game logic) and you can plant that to grow a new tree(you usually get about three saplings per tree so you can expand a tree plantation pretty swiftly if you want to. I had a ton of trees on the go so I'd never run out of wood but harvesting wood takes ages.
Trees. You need a lot of them to keep up your wood supply, without them you're in trouble. I tend to do a mass harvest of wood whenever I'm getting down to about 1/4 of what I think I need, then when I'm done I usually have enough left over for weeks of supplies and thus replant new trees to grow and replace the fallen.
My wheat fields can grow about eight hundred or so bushels of wheat at a time and also two hundred carrots on the side(useful for breeding rabbits and pigs). Once I had a lot of wheat I went out and found some stray cows wandering around the place, cows will follow you around if you have wheat and if you give them the wheat and give another cow nearby some wheat they'll get love hearts above their heads and make a baby cow. I used the wheat I had and herded them into a small paddock fenced in with the fences and gates I'd build from the wood I'd harvested earlier.
So now I could start breeding cows. Starting with two I soon had three and then had to wait about five-ten minutes to make four and then another ten minutes to make six, then nine, then thirteen etc. I basically went around breeding them whenever I was in that particular area and eventually a few days later I had several hundred cows resulting in my computer actually crashing from the strain of having to keep track of all of them.
A cow, my source of leather and beef. Oh, I didn't mention in my article that I had to keep eating in the game while doing all this work and also had to fight off enemies in the night-time who would try to kill me non-stop.
While I was sporadically breeding cows I was also making a special harvesting centre for making Bamboo, in Minecraft Bamboo can only be grown on dirt or sand next to a body of water, it won't grow anywhere else so I found a beach and build a long line of dirt going out into the sea and then another two spaces next to it and another again two spaces next to that, by the time I was done I had thirty rows of dirt of sixty-four blocks each which I could grow Bamboo on. I then put some stone blocks on the sides above the water so that I wouldn't accidentally lose any bamboo when I was harvesting it(the stuff goes flying in all directions, wheat does the same thing so I usually have an irrigation system which directs the cast-off wheat to a central location by flowing everything to a spot underground that I can access via ladder).
Bamboo harvesting, the early days before I got hardcore into resource maximising.
Everytime Bamboo grows to its maximum height(three blocks high) you can use the top two to start a new bamboo sprout and then grow that to another three high and start over(noticing a trend here in Minecraft? If you wait long enough all resources are replenishable, just need patience). So after about four hours I had several hundred pieces of bamboo on the grow at any time.
You take 3 pieces of Bamboo and put them together and you get a page. So I had to make a lot of Bamboo just to make a page.
Then came the most bloody violent event in the history of making a library. I killed about five hundred cows in an hour. I made a really nice sword, it was made of pure iron, and then I went around to my cows, all locked up and with no-where to run. It took an hour to kill them all, I still have almost one hundred left alive as of writing this and I'm likely to kill most or nearly all of them sometime in the next few days. But after that unpleasant bit of business I have my leather, which allowed me to make about three hundred or so books(I have enough leather to make more but I used some to make some armour and am keeping some in reserve just in case I need it for something else). Used to be in this game you just needed paper to make a book, I kind of miss those days because killing so many cows was just unpleasant, no sport or competition in it at all.
So many books, so many bookshelves. I have truly created the foundations of a library here. This was worth the dozens of hours I spent in trial and error, building farms, farming wheat, killing cows and growing bloody bamboo. The three little blocks with 64 as the number in the right hand corner of the image are bookshelves.
Now that I have my books I can build a book shelf and then place them in the game.
This is my first attempt at a library. Totally worth killing all those cows for.
So there you have it, how to make a library in Minecraft. Just spend about twenty hours at it and you'll be fine.
My castle from above, the library occupies the top two floors. Currently, I have a plan to build a castle with trees as the foundation, a massive storeroom of tools, food, material and supplies as the bottom few floors(with wooden walls) and then make the entire upper floors a library and the rooftop an observation platform
This Weeks topics.
- Monday: The ludicrous level of killing required to make a library in Minecraft.
- Tuesday: G20 security and volunteering or how I was not allowed near a president despite being awesome.
- Wednesday: Cycling to and from work, the logistics of ironed shirts.
- Thursday: Packing for a trip, clothes, books or e-books?
- Friday: Exhibitions in libraries.
- Saturday: The Very Quiet Young Girls Guide to Multiple Personalities.
- Sunday: Short Story Sunday.
My Day.
Today was Monday and I went to work a bit late because I had to help out with some work around the house, the roof has a small leak in it and I helped my dad to find it and kind of started to fix it, it is a multi-stage job and we'll likely need to do a few more bits of work on it, going up on the roof and applying sealant etc.
After that I went to school for the afternoon and found that the replacement staff member covering for the regular librarian is being moved to the prep grade and a teacher who's coming off maternity leave is taking her place. Since she hasn't worked in a library before we can't work out what jobs to give her considering that I can do most of it and the other librarian on duty can handle everything else. I'm not there all the time so having her on board will be better than relying on me.
Our current plan is to just get her to shelve books. I spent the afternoon shelving and sorting all the teacher reference books out the back of the library and then sorting out all the returned books so that shelving them will be easier.
After that was done I had to go straight to my brothers house to wait for him to get in and then we spent the afternoon just watching some TV before going out for steak dinner at the Corinda pub and then doing the weeks shopping across the road at Coles.
Once that was done we went home and I eventually put him to bed before I wrote this post and am now going to work on a short story I have to finish for my writing club tomorrow afternoon. I've done 300 words so far and I need another 900 minimum, should be fine.
YouTube Clip of the day.
On the topic of digging!
Click to view