Infernal Bargain
Part 49b ~ 10 August 2025
Posted: 27 March 2026
This is part of a double episode! These parts overlapped heavily and finished on the same day. To see the other side, go to Part 49a: Paradise Garden.
*I haven't finished enchanting my gear yet.* I get a painful reminder of this every time I step out into the nether proper: the soul sand around my portal sucks my boots in, slowing my movement to a crawl. I mean, I can just fly, but it's the principle of the thing, ya know?
I'm plenty stocked with gold already, so now I need some piglins to give it to. I could go to the bastion from the movie episode, but I don't want other mobs getting up in my business. I'd rather do this from the comfort of the nether roof. That means it's time to deploy my trusty Piglin Catcher(TM)! I designed this myself for a server I played on. It works in either the nether wastes (that's where I am) or crimson forest biome. Soul torches spook the piglins, shepherding them towards the pointy end until they stumble through the trapdoors and into the holding cell. Any zombified piglins get lured to the other end by a turtle egg and dusted in powder snow. And the glass roof stops anything wider from spawning in, be it hoglins, magma cubes, or ghasts. The piglin movement is a bit janky, but it works plenty well enough for our purposes :)
Now to move the piglins into position for bartering. This is basically a repeat of what we did for the villagers, except even easier because I want them all to end up in the same spot. I built up this elevated track (it looks weird for now; trust me, I've planned this out), complete with an automatic ejector system so I don't need to manually move an angry piglin into place. I'll add a nametagging station later when I'm ready to keep a permanent bartering team. Oh by the way, everything here is spawnproofed, either with a rail, redstone component, slab, glass, or button. We CANNOT have random mobs popping up in the barter area.
On to the actual bartering. This... is where the Stackwell Curse strikes me with a super effective critical hit. Almost every barter item is stackable, at least by my rules. But there's ONE THING on the loot table that ruins everything: *the iron boots*. If it weren't for those, I could dump everything into one chest, and my only concern would be hopper throughput. But nooo, these stupid boots have to come in and clog up everything. >:( Forget Curse of Binding; the real curse here is the Curse of Unstacking!
Determined mot to let the curse hold me back, I racked my brains to recall how they set up the barter farm on that server. They had this cool system where the items would get pushed by pistons along an ice track. I've lost all the screenshots though. Not to worry, I'm a redstone expert! After some time in creative mode, I'd cooked up a contraption with three pistons that push the items off the piglins, over ice track #1 into an item-aligner chest, and then on track #2 across the hoppers. Attached to this is a dropper that spits out gold ingots, with a cobweb and pressure plate toggle that limits the outlay to batches that a few piglins can keep up with. All this action toggled by a single lever :D
So, about that line of hoppers. Try as I might, I couldn't think of a way to remove the boots from the system without holding up the flow of items. So I'm forced to resort to traditional item filters for every other item, and a fire to burn off the boots at the end. But thanks to The Curse, I have to stack every single filter with *731 banner patterns*. And the items don't drop into the barrels until they stack to 438, which will take a long time for things like potions. But you know what, it works, it's automatic, and thats Good Enough For Me.
One "vacation" to Floral Paradise later, I'm back with the requisite materials (14,000 flowers and sugarcane), and it's time to put this bad boy to the test! To start with, I loaded the filters with sticks so all the items would gather in a chest at the end. That way, I could grab items from there to set up the filters. I pulled half a dozen piglins from the catcher, fed them 500 gold ingots, and pulled the lever to start the barter party!
Score! We got some of everything, including the top prize: Soul Speed 3! This is going straight on my kit. I went through and filled out the filters, blocks first, roughly in order of rarity. Blackstone and gravel get two filters each, because in testing I found that sometimes there would be too many items in one batch for one hopper to catch – the in-world item blobs still stack to 64, even though my inventory can compress them further!
I tested with another 500 gold and it worked with barely a hitch. Every block and item fell right into place. I did forget to remove the hopper under the last chest, which meant the boots dropped into there instead of burning in the fire – but that only served to confirm that nothing else had skipped to the end of the line. So, task failed successfully? I placed some blocks over the track to mark the items for easy reference, then hit the nearby gold farm to reload on ingots!
I'm so happy to finally have fully enchanted gear! (Still undecided on if I want Thorns.) And some of these drops are gonna be super useful – gravel for my lovely purple concrete, quartz for redstone parts, soul sand for speed roads, obsidian and pearls for ender chests... And spectral arrows. Aren't those just worse than potion arrows? Perhaps. But if the game wants to give me a ton of free arrows, I may as well find a creative purpose for them :D
