New floor and a better farm
We added a nice pink and white chequered floor. Coloured blocks like these are made of wool which can be sheared from sheep. The wool can be dyed by various materials to achieve the colour. We got the pink by mixing the red dye you can craft from roses with bone meal.
This meant trekking a long way from home looking for red roses. At one point I got so far away from our base that I couldn’t find my way home. I wandered around for three Minecraft days, digging makeshift shelters at night before succumbing to creeper attack. When I respawned I couldn’t get any of my stuff back as I had no idea where it was that I died. I immediately built a compass to avoid that happening again. Compasses are made from iron and red stone and always point to wherever your spawn is in relation to your position. You can see one in my sixth slot in the screenshot above.
You’ll notice we dug around our mineshaft to give it more room. The glass floor and a trench going all the way up to the surface enables us to get more light in to the mineshaft and you can see when the sun comes up if you’ve been mining at night (or you could just build a clock :) ).
Our wheat and sugar farm sprang up well although we found that sheep, cows and chickens would often spawn within our castle walls and trample our wheat so we put up a fence around it and added some doors.
The nice white, speckled door frames are made from birch logs. Building with pure logs rather than planks may seem wasteful as you can make four planks from one log, but it does add a bit more variety to your buildings. We put down a nice sandstone path and some wooden decking as well. You need to make sure that there is no grass in an area you’re fencing off from animals as they will spawn wherever there is grass.
We also played around with using redstone circuits to build an automatic double door in the front of our house (you can see the wooden pressure pads in the first screenshot above). This worked quite nicely but took ages to work out. Redstone circuits can be quite tricky. Tutorials like this one help out a lot.
