Spidey Senses
Part 5 ~ 20 June 2025
Played: 16 March 2025
Now somewhat geared up (we've still got a way to go hehe), I turned my attention to something that's been bugging me... literally. Since I got to this village, I've been hearing these creepy crawling and hissing sounds coming from below the ground. It only took a few swings of my new diamond shovel to find the cause: an abandoned mineshaft, directly below the village! This sprawling maze hosts four cave spider spawners – no wonder this place is so infested! There were so many cobwebs I went through an entire set of shears clearing them out. I took full advantage of my item-stacking ability to loot everything, including the ores in the walls, in a single trip :D
Side note: The bats were a menace too – so much so that I decided to mod them out of the game lol. I found a datapack called No Bat Spawning, which goes through the list of spawnable mobs (biome by biome) and removes the bat from the options. It works a treat, but has the side effect that my game client flags the pack as "experimental" and insists on warning me that "Here be dragons!" every time I load up the world XD
With the structure thoroughly cleared, I followed a narrow opening into the deepslate layers, which led to a huge cavern. Rather than try to slog through the mobs with sword and bow, I took a more proactive approach: run around and place torches while dodging all the enemies! This way, I can spawnproof the area much quicker, there's less time for mobs to spawn in, and I straight up skip most combat while they fight amongst themselves or lose my scent and despawn. After that excitement, I continued on to the lava floor for some relaxing obsidian mining. I have Efficiency 4 so it's not too terribly slow.
On the way back up, I saw something wondrous in the cavern: a big slime. I though I'd have to go thousands of blocks to a swamp for these! With my shiny new Looting sword, I sliced it into slimy pieces and got 26 slime balls – enough for another 26 sticky pistons, or a couple of slime blocks. Now I can be a redstone engineer myself!
