Minecraft Survival: Part Two - New 1.17 World

If you saw my first article on this topic, you know that I am planning to start a survival world in the caves and cliffs update. Since the 1.18 update might take another 5 months, I decided to quit waiting around and at least get started on a new survival world. I could have done some more planning; made a few redstone designs and whatnot. I was getting that itch, though. I had to play some minecraft.

First Minutes

No, I didn't punch a tree, actually. I explored the world in spectator mode until I found a suitable spot far away from spawn chunks. Then I set the world spawn in the center of the region and set the world border so that it is 3 regions across. Essentially, I have a 96x96 chunk area to play in the overworld. This may change depending on my needs, but the idea is that when the new world generation comes along, I will reset the world border and explore the new terrain.

What I have explored of my domain so far

First Survival Minutes

What I did first was secured some food in the form of a berry farm, then I went on a long mining session. It took one hour to find diamonds @ y=5. I almost cried when I finally found them. Unfortunately, I didn't take a screenshot.

Villagers Farming For Me

After I had acquired some materials, I went exploring for a village, which I found pretty quickly by luck. I made a carrot farm at this point for a better food source than berries.

A villager-powered carrot farm

I decided my goal was going to be to build an iron farm. "A simple process," I surmised, having no idea what was in store for me. Motivated by this, I created a villager breeder and a wheat/bread farm.

Villager breeder (left) and wheat farm (right)

Iron Farm

Now that I had a source of villagers for the iron farm, I needed a nametag for the zombie. I decided to go the fishing route, but I figured it would be useless to fish without a properly enchanted fishing rod.

I had an enchanting table for the fishing rod, but it was useless without any bookshelves; I needed a source of leather.

There were some cows ten chunks away, but it was useless to try to rangle them for a farm without a lead; I needed a source of slime.

So I dug a hole in the ground to farm some slimes.

A slime in a clearing with some buggy shader support from the Iris mod

Then I used some string I had from killing mobs along with the slime drops to make some leads. I got five cows into my new cow farm.

The semi-automatic cow farm

Then I found a secluded spot away from the village for the iron farm and started building, occasionally operating the cow farm to obtain more leather for bookshelves.

Transporting Villagers

I picked three villagers from the villager breeder and started transporting them via rail.

The first leg of the villager journey to the iron farm. Rails are so broken.

Here's where I made a mistake that cost me a lot of time. As it was turning to dusk, I saw an enderman about 30 blocks away. I went to fight the enderman because I was collecting pearls when the opportunity arises to travel to the End. Not 20 seconds had passed when I turn around and all the villagers were zombies. I turned around for seconds and when I come back they are all zombies. This really perturbed me, and I am surprised I did not rage quit.

There was a zombie infestation in the villager breeder as well, something else very perturbing because I torched up everything in and around that village. I couldn't just take more villagers from there. And I was halfway to the iron farm destination, anyway. So after I fixed the breeder, I took a stressful trip to the nether.

Potion Making

I needed blaze rods and mushrooms in order to create potions of weaknesses to cure the zombie villagers. I walked around the nether for hundreds of blocks, like, half an hour, before giving up and using /locate fortress. Then I killed blazes and almost died multiple times. Super frustratingly, I ended up dying 10 blocks from the portal due to fall damage, after I though I was out of the woods.

I retrieved my things, brewed the splash potion of weakness, crafted 3 golden apples and finally cured the villagers.

Right before curing the villagers

Here they will stay for the rest of their lives for wasting so much of my time

The Zombie

At this point all the work to get an enchanted rod was basically thrown away. I had died multiple times at this point, losing a lot of my XP. I just started fishing with an unenchanted rod. After just a few minutes I got a rod with pretty good enchantments, which probably made the process of fishing out a nametag faster.

Fishing for a nametage with an enchanted rod

I then lured a zombie into the farm and tagged it "Life's Work" because at this point this iron farm basically was my greatest achievement in this world that I had struggled so hard for, and not managed to rage quit, somehow.

Finishing The Iron Farm

The last stages were to place the walls to contain the golems, the water to direct the golems, the lava to kill the golems, and the hoppers to collect the golems' items. There was also a second trip to the nether in there for some nether wood for the fence gate that stops the water.

The finished iron farm

So that's my frustrating story of creating an iron farm in Minecraft. To recap this circus, I built a villager breeder, dug out an area to farm slimes, rangled some cows into a semi-automatic farm, journeyed to a nether fortress hundreds of blocks away for resources to brew some potions, managed some villagers on rails for what felt like an eternity, and placed a bunch of crappy blocks for this pedestrian iron farm. 3/10 would not recommend.

What Next

Next for this minecraft world I will probably start designing the storage system. I have some really unique (as far as I know) ideas for a very complicated system, but we'll see if that pans out.

See you next week

-Fractured