At Home In The Sky

The lay of my skyblocks world from my mob spawner

Remember when I was scared to even go down in a mine because of the cliff drops?  I have conquered that fear and now I love building in the sky.

Skyblocks is an older survival world where you are dumped onto an island in the sky with a tree a bucket of lava and a block of ice. Your island is made up of dirt and you want to save each piece of it like gold.  You must generate cobblestone to build with and you have to get a sapling off of your tree or you have to start over because you can't make a pickaxe to harvest your stone.

There is a second island with a slice of melon and pumpkin seeds that is made of sand and has a cacti on it.  You have to get under it and harvest it carefully.  There is also 10 pieces of obsidian to build a portal.  Don't make a mistake or you will be done.  There are no diamonds here!

Finally, there is a third chest in the nether that has your second ice block so now you can make a continuous water source.

From there you build out.  You move your grass slowly...always leave blocks with green on them...because grass has to move from block to block one at a time.  When you make a 7 x 6 area of grass then good mobs will spawn.  I was so happy to get my first chicken and bunnies! 

But it was the squid that was really hard to get.  There is this list of achievements for this game and one of them is to have 10 blocks of black wool; so I needed squid.  They spawn between 46 - 62 so I had to make pillars off of the platform and make my way under everything....twice.  Finally, I got a beautiful black, frolicking squid and I was so happy!

I also got two pieces of iron from zombies so I could make shears!

My sister stopped by my Skyblocks world and did some really helpful building.  She worked on my mob dropper.  I had trouble with my mob dropper.  The rules for each version always get me messed up and it was nice to learn a few things. Actually, everyone ended up helping me with my mob dropper.  The spiders kept causing problems.  It is nice to be able to reach out to family members when you need some help with stuff; it is even nicer when they come to your world and lend you a virtual hand.  :)

My sister built me this nice cobble generator.  I really love the way it works!

So, the Nether in this world is nothing but a red haze and you have to build it out.  After making some cobble pathways and platforms I found some new friends.  I thought the 5 gold block achievement would be hard to get but it was really easy thanks to these guys.

After doing some research, I made a new mob dropper and I have been getting the most amazing things!  The problem is that if a creeper sees me then there is sheer panic in trying to fix the thing as I get blown up over and over.  But that is okay because the drops are amazing!  Both my son and my hubby encouraged me to use trap doors so I could get loot when the creepers aren't there and that works really well.  I've gotten records from mobs hitting mobs and a lot of really neat stuff.  Witches have dropped some potions and I have a bunch of enchanted items.  I even got 5 pieces of iron!  If I get clothes I just put them on since I only have one cow still so leather goes to books and I get it while fishing.  Never forget fishing, especially in the rain, can bring you really great stuff.  

But yeah, here is my achievement chest all completed and I am really happy.  This was a fun survival experience...frustrating at times...not all together easy...but fun.  I still want to play with the Nether to see if I can get a blaze rod because I myself, am trying for the actual Minecraft achievements as well.  The lack of a few essential things is making it really hard and maybe quite impossible...but I want to see how far I can push it.  :)

Which reminds me of what I wanted to talk about.  Excuse me as I switch topics to knitting. In knitting when you make a mistake you can tink back to fix it.  Tink is knit backward.  You can rip back to fix it.  In ripping you take the stitches off the needle and either throw caution to the winds and just rip out your stitches or you can rip back to an inserted needle or previously inserted lifeline.  You can ladder down and fix a stitch under your row of stitches and then ladder the stitches back up.  There are many ways you can fix a mistake.

Many times I know that a mistake needs to be ripped or tinked to but I just don't want to do it.  So I try and fix it and then I am left with oodles of yarn that now has nowhere to go.  In this case, it is probably better to rip back to the mistake and retake the yarn.

But then there are times that I amaze myself by fixing something that I thought there was no hope for...so maybe it is better to try then the throw in the towel?

Down in my knitting room is a drawer of things that I lost my way on for one reason or another and I just made a note and put them in there.  One of these is my sister's sweater that I was trying out a new pattern on and then I ran out of yarn.  I was at Starbucks and didn't write down where I stopped and...you can see where this is going...

I pulled out the sweater Monday and swore I was going to figure out where I was and at least finish the lace this week.  Usually, I can read a chart and figure out where I am.  If I could have done that I would have done that long ago.  So I did my last resort and tinked back recreating the chart as I ripped it out for two rows; this determined exactly where I was.

Now, why was that so scary?  Why did I wait so long to figure it out?  Why didn't I believe in my talents more?

So many questions...and I have no answers for them.  I have a drawer of things like this where I just stopped for one reason or another.  I'd like to work my way through them, but for now, I am knitting a sweater and I need to focus on that.

I should have some knitting pictures to show you next week.

Hugs,
Ruinwen
:)