Violet Skies and Spider Eyes
Part 50 ~ 18 August 2025
Posted: 2 April 2026
Author's note:
I got carried away with the indie rock mood while editing, and put Death Cab for Cutie lyric edits in all the image title texts. Enjoy, and maybe sing along if you know the songs!
~ Lemming
Stellar news from the Indigo Empire! I found a new way to make my world EVEN MORE PURPLE! I've got purple hair, purple blocks, purple GUI, what more could I possibly purple-ise?
The night sky. Yep, even the HEAVENS bend to my will now. This indigo skybox comes courtesy of the Custom Stars mod by b3spectacled. And it's not just the background colour that's changed – I've spawned a whole new constellation! The mod lets you randomly generate your own Milky-Way-esque cluster with a random seed, so I popped in some digits from my world seed and got this gorgeous sweeping arc that bends around the moon. Oh, and I cranked the number of stars WAY up for maximum effect.
As a fun side-effect, the purple sky looks extra spooky when it rains. It's like there's city lights illuminating the sky of my uninhabited world. And during rainy sunrises and sunsets, it looks positively *trippy* with the orange layer under the purple.
I got a little inspired when I came up with the title for this entry. It kinda sounds like an album title from an indie rock or emo band. And we need cover art for this album, right? So I went out to the open-air mesa mineshaft from Part 18, cranked up the purple, and went to town. I even gave myself an indie-esque yet Minecraftian moniker, inspired by the likes of Death Cab for Cutie and Better Oblivion Community Centre. What do we reckon? :D
Back on the surface... and below. I spent another lengthy session torching up the caves beneath Floral Paradise, this time braving the vast open cavern to the northeast of my farming outpost. It's a remarkable sight: from the grassy edge, you can see down to deepslate layers – and also glimpse two cave spider spawners, close enough together that both can be activated at once.
Sever HOURS and 1000+ torches later, I had... some percentage of this cave system torched up? Did I mention the caves around here are INSANE? I'm still hitting mob caps constantly. And I barely even ventured into the deepslate levels! On my way through, I ran into ANOTHER mineshaft, just through across the way from the first, with a spawner out on the open cave floor. I had all kinds of monsters following me as I ran by spamming torches! I even bumped into a spawner room full of regular spiders, connected to the tunnel complex. Almost makes me wish I had a Bane of Arthropods sword... lol, jk!
Now back to the surface for a moment, before I dive down into the underworld. It's past time that I set up a portal here, rather than flying a thousand blocks each way! I've been putting it off because I couldn't think of a good place to put it, but I had a fun idea to put it over this pit. The vertical drop into the cave (some 40 blocks) serves as a pre-made trap for any zombie piglins that wander through my portal – I just need to bait them with a turtle egg.
So where does this portal lead? Basalt field. Not ideal. Buuut, a little freecam scouting of the area reveals that I'm directly above my tunnel to the horsey plains village! Which means I'm free to break the portal, dig down until I pop out into my old path, and rebuild the portal in the tunnel wall. Quick check that it still links... and we're good!
But I'm gonna be running back and forth to base a lot, so now that I have Soul Speed, let's make this faster with a soul soil path! I excavated this big soul soil patch at the end of the watchtower tunnel, netting me a couple of thousand of the spooky speedy blocks. Then I layered soul soil under the bridge (carefully!) and in the tunnel to create my soul-sprinting expressway! This cursed dirt buffs my speed from 5.6 to 9 blocks per second. Worth trampling the souls of the damned under my boots for. It's ok, it sets some of them free! :D
