World of Oz

I only meant to use MCWM as a map for myself, but I've noticed plenty of downloads of this world lately so I thought I'd clue ya'll in on some particulars, and tell you why it won't be updated too frequently anymore.

*** World of Oz - single person vanilla survival - 1.7.2 through 1.8.4 - 6000+ in game days (April 2015) ***

I started playing MC about the time the 1.6 update occurred. Started this world four months later with 1.7 because of terrain generation.

Most farms in the World of Oz are based on cumulative lore found on the wiki/youtube/random MC forum sites. They're almost always modified a bit to my liking; the exceptions being the particulars of the blaze traps, which I experimented with and deemed best, and the wither skull fighting arena, which I just pulled out of my butt.

Playing less, short story:
As of the 1.8 update this world is overpowered. At spawn there's an automatic reed farm and a pair of librarians that have two slots each for trading paper (they started in 1.7 and the 1.8 trades were added on after) so emeralds are super easy to get and a lot of villager items are risk-free, including all the blacksmith trades from 1.7. Combine this with dual-blaze spawners where it now takes 31 kills to max out your enchantments instead of 85, and you have no waiting. Additionally, the wither skull farm is kind of cranked to eleven. It's plenty fun (for a while) being high on five beacons effects, to collect gold and skulls, but it's actually difficult to die here.

Long story:
The blaze farm started out with the typical funnels that lead to a crusher below the spawner. After way too much experimenting I decided on a flat "dance floor" with corner crushers. Accidental found that some corners were more popular that others. After more experiments (I don't read code/didn't bother to ask) I found blazes are afraid of light. Who'd of guessed? So each blaze farm now has three crushers instead of four, with a light source near the off corner. Seems to work as well as/better than funnels and looks nice. When enchanting was modified the auto-crushers were changed to crush at 31 blazes, which gets you from level 27 to 30. I also pimped the blaze room in red and yellow carpet, which, although flammable and proly a bad idea, is better than looking at nether brick. No problems so far. The old Ender Bender doesn't work as well as it did before the update so I pretty much use this instead for xp.

The wither skull farm is actually terrifically simple. Several bridges over lava provided a reasonable place to start filling in gaps to make a big flat arena of sorts. Grab a looting sword and start fighting. I think it was supposed to be bottom slabs in these gaps so other mobs wouldn't spawn so much, but for whatever reason it's top slabs and lots of nether things spawn everywhere, which was bad at first but became good after a few beacons were set up. There's a room at the end of the Nether pathway that has horse parking, enchanting, storage and brewing. A nearby portal links to an underwater dome that's really only for getting more water for potions. If you take night vision while in the arena it's already "too easy" and fire protection helps with blaze attacks, but they're unnecessary. The strength beacon makes pigmen one-hit kills with a good sword so they don't go agro on you. Bad thing: if a blaze hits a pigman they'll go agro on you. It's like a little brother telling mom you did something you didn't. Easily dealt with, though, cause one-hit kills. There's a "safe room" in the middle of the arena that's hardly necessary anymore, and because you've got jump 2 effect, you can jump 2+1/2 blocks up on slab paths where no one else can be, or hide underneath them when ghasts show up.

Other stuff:
Actual spawn chunk is just fenced in between two small hills. Door to the west is the big base. Spawn base has a little pedestal to stand on, against a gate that's just there to make sure you're placed exactly. You actually have to stand a tiny bit to the left in order to access 95% of the chests and whatnot around you. Standing in one place while getting things done is the theme of most bases. Clicking on a chest with an item frame has become more difficult in recent updates, so I've just adapted to clicking on the very edges of the chests and I'm still happy. The brewing setup just brews three separate potions, but changing them is very easy and there's lots of storage right there. Not fully automatic, because I think pushing a button and taking the potions out is plenty easy already. I hate the roof of the base, but no plan to fix it anytime soon. You have speed II beacons through a long strip of spawn chunks, and haste II at the tree farm.

The item elevator between the store rooms has lots connected to it – Iron farm, gold farm, slime farm and reed farm. They all go to a large chest called "one" and will spill over into several other chests if you don't empty the first one out. If hoppers get clogged just clean them and the whole thing should start working again.

Also, if you're going to fart around in this world you ought know there's a simple but intense Nether transportation network. From spawn use the portal by the item elevator, or the one outside in the fenced area with horses. From this Nether nexus you can go NSE or W. I'm the only player, so there's only a few signs here and there, but this will totally get you started if you're just poking around. I once dug two kilometers south and popped out 16 kilometers from spawn, found a bunch of horses, started a new life, got bored, slowly walked home. I never bothered with rail in the Nether as horses seemed so badass, and there's lots of horse parking while still in the Nether.

I breed too many horses/donkeys/mules and had too many ideas on how to name them. Some have cocktail names, some have demon names, some conventional. The demon-names ones are fast but poor jumpers – meant to stay in the Nether for transport. This is why the hallways are two-wide and three-tall. Some donkeys and mules have blocks and arrows in their last inventory spaces which indicate how high they can jump and how fast they are. Speed was measured with the score generated from a timer at the big horse ranch in the NE. 16=very fast, 24=average, 32=meh, 38=way slow. The "jump blocks" will be stacked in two spaces – 4 in one, 6 in the other means that horse can jump 4+6/8 blocks. That's what the crazy hedge/snow fences next to the timer track are for.

Ask away if you want to know more about the world. I'm going to play more, and discover all biomes and such, but fighting is becoming too easy. Time to start a new world.