Wither Roads
Part 56 ~ 31 August 2025
Posted: 8 May 2026
We're back in the nether today to continue paving the highway to Mitosis Swamp! I started by widening the existing diagonal section by just a touch, so that I can get horses through the tunnel without the constant bumping into walls that I experienced on the first pass through. Then, knowing that the swamp portal is almost a straight shot northwest, I settled in to a Luvstar livestream (always a great time!) and mined through a crapton of basalt. Every 25 blocks or so, I paused to lay soul sand for my magical speed boost, and lime carpet to signpost and spawnproof the way. After half an hour of mindless mining, I broke through into an open basalt field, with my broken portal in view (the real portal is at the same X/Z on the roof).
Early-game Ela may have balked at the prospect of bridging the basalt deltas, but now I'm fully geared and flush with resources. So I hit up my barter farm for blackstone, and my villagers for glass, and laid out a polished blackstone bridge across the gap. Mercifully, the ghasts didn't pester me as I built, and I soon had safe passage – with Soul Speed – to the swamp coordinates.
Next, I blasted a hole in the nether roof, complementing the one I'd made earlier during the froglight farm project. I found some coloured terracotta left over from the construction of that farm, which I repurposed towards the construction of Minecart Hellevator #2: Swampy Bogaloo!¹ Like the first Hellevator at my main base, this comes with a drop chute back to the portal – and a new safety feature of a soft landing through powder snow, which I would eventually add to the main hub too XD
Now, if you'll recall, this region of the nether is home to a fortress. Unlike the main fortress, this one isn't surrounded by zombie-piglin wasteland, so it actually spawns some wither skeletons! So I thought I'd have a go at collecting some skulls :) That means it's time to: Start! The! Counter! The stats page says I've killed 13 wither skeletons up to now. I'm gonna be generous and just say those don't count. I wasn't actively seeking skulls when I killed those. Maybe I shot them with a bow, or chopped them with my smite axe. I'm the statistician here, I make the rules! Time to go into the fortress, disable the blaze spawners (with a crapton of froglights), and crunch some bones and/or numbers!
Achievement Get! (Remember that?) Gosh, I've been at it for a while though. What does the stats page say? Ah... Yeah, so 45 minus 13 is 32. With looting 3 the expected count is 18. Come on game! I need MOAR!
UGHHH! FINALLY I have three! I've been flying around here for AGES! The spawn rates here are trash! This fortress doesn't even have an indoor section! What's up with that? Okay Ela, deep breaths... let's take a look at the stats page. It says... 93. So it took 80 kills here to get a set. That's like 27 per skull. So my rates improved after the first one. See? Everything's fine :] (The rates are still bad, everything is not fine, grumble grumble...)
I was packing up and just about to go back to base when I saw a cluster of wither skellies on the bridge, and I thought, why not? And I guess the game thought "why not" too, because from those three skellies, I picked up my fourth skull. Yay for regression towards the mean! I'm keeping this one as a trophy :D
Back to base to prep for the next phase of the withering. A quick cat nap to set my spawn point at Elaville House, and a run through the pumpkin row of the farming district, and we're back on the soul road. This time, I took the left fork, down the pink road to the end portal. Yes, I'm going to cheese the wither under the bedrock in the middle of the end island.
But, there's more to this plan! If I can coerce a passive mob to run into the wither's explosions, it will die and drop a wither rose. What if there was some way to dump hundreds of mobs down there?
Here's a super cheesy setup some server mates showed me. You stand in front of the trapdoor and place snow blocks in the hole. The top dispenser places carved pumpkins to spawn snow golems, and another dispenser lower down shears the pumpkins off so you can reuse them. The observer facing the lower dispenser produces a fast repeating tick that keeps the system running automatically. The sheer number of golems means that they will constantly be running into the wither. And the boss regenerates health with every kill, more than making up for the constant damage it takes from being stuck in the bedrock. Just make sure to go into the chamber once in a while to collect your roses before they despawn. You even make a net positive of snow from this!
I stocked up on 1,000 wither roses, then decided it was time to call it. Smite blade in hand, I put the cursed beast out of its misery, making sure the finishing blow came from my sword and not the bedrock for the sake of my stats. I took my black bouquet and shiny nether star and hopped into the portal, leading me right back to my bed in Elaville House. How convenient! There, I added my new spoils to the collection: a wither skull to the trophy case, and a wither rose to the zen garden to complete my potted plant collection!
Now for the main prize. I dug a water elevator down to diamond layer, y-54, then mined out a 9-by-9 box in the deepslate. I formed a gold pyramid from the loot of a statistically-expected 7,421 zombie piglins. And finally, I crafted my nether star into a beacon and placed it in the centre. Bring home the Beaconator! And hello, Speed 2 :D I get to stomp around my base 40% faster, and as if Big Ela wasn't conspicuous enough, there's now an unmissable beam of purple light piercing the sky!
Thanks to the SpongeBob Time Cards Generator for helping me do the narrator gag. I hope y'all can hear that cheesy faux-French voice in your head like I do when you read those, lol.
- I meant to say "Boogaloo", as in the film, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. But hey, it's a bog! So the typo stands :P
