Minecraft: Villages, Horses, Caves & First Mods

I spent a lot of time chilling out in Minecraft this weekend. I still keep stumbling on things and learning new stuff every time I turn around. I made a lot of progress, though, and finally broke down to install my first ever mods.

Savanna Village

Last time I wrote about Minecraft, I noted that I’d seen another village east of Dune Village, out in the savanna. I decided to check it out, and found this cute, but overgrown little place. I also found cows out there for the first time in my game.

So, I went straight to work on cleaning the place up and fencing it in safely. I don’t know what it is about me and having to fix up every village I come across, but it always seems to become a project.

In the end, it turned out nice, and I made a new pasture for pigs and cows, which I did not find near my original base or Dune Village.

Once that project was done, I decided to chill out and replenish my food supplies with a little fishing. That’s when I made the discovery that changed my game.

Fishing Up Treasure

I enjoy fishing for the sake of fishing. In Minecraft, you can cook the fish for food, which I like a lot better than killing livestock for meat. I don’t have all the crops that it takes to make good stuff to eat, so cooked fish is the most handy food source for me.

When researching fishing, I noticed that you also get a chance to reel in junk or, much more rare, a piece of treasure. Treasure also varies in the items you fish up, so it’s a rare chance to get treasure, and a rarer chance to get exact treasure you want.

Still, in the back of my mind, I was secretly hoping to fish up a saddle since I’ve never had horses in Minecraft… and… well… you know how I feel about horses! But what’s the chance in that?

So, I’m fishing and minding my own business and suddenly… I reel in a saddle! 

Holy crap, guys, it’s time for me to go search for horses!

Quest for Horses & First Mods

This proves that I will do anything for horses. Even mod my game.

I dropped everything and instantly set out the next day, looking for a herd. I read that they can spawn in plains or savanna biomes, but that they only spawn when the zone is first populated. There’s a LOT of both of those biomes on my map, but I’d never seen any sign of a horse.

But I was determined. The only problem was, I was getting lost often. Getting lost was frustrating, a waste of my gaming time, and not finding me horses.

I know there’s some kind of map system in Minecraft, but I’m not super familiar with how that works. And I know that I can use the Overviewer to kinda figure out the lay of the land, but I was on a quest for horses! I didn’t have time to keep flipping back from game to map!

So, I broke down and installed my first two mods: Xaero’s Minimap and Xaero’s World Map. I couldn’t help it. I hate feeling like I’m lost, and I’m too used to pressing the M key in a MMO to see where I am on the map.

And you know what? I finally did find horses… but I probably would not have found them as easily if I didn’t have the map mod to help me see which areas I’d already searched through.

I will also admit that the mods came with waypoints and teleportation built in. And yes, I have broken down and started using teleportation. I went back to my bases and marked them with waypoints so I can travel back to them more easily.

But that still didn’t stop me from building roads between them! Because horses can’t teleport!

So, I went and tamed the whole herd of horses and brought them back to the pasture in Savanna Village.

But, somewhere along the time when I was back getting lost looking for horses, I stumbled on yet another town, which was interestingly stuck in a canyon. I saddled up and rode north to go and find it again.

Canyon Town

Canyon Town was interesting and more difficult to domesticate than the other villages I discovered. It was larger, and some of the buildings were embedding into the hillsides. Some of the villagers were even trapped in their houses simply because the buildings were spawned with blocked doors.

So, I had to dig them out and find safe ways to let them descend from the top of the hills they lived on. I did have to replace some sand with grass, but most of the time was spent fencing the place in and making safe paths for villagers.

The town was also built around canals, which were neat, but dangerous to the silly villagers who happened to fall in. So, I had my work cut out for me this time.

Overall, the new town was a success.

But even better, it had direct access to a natural cave system, right there within the town. I gated it up while I was still working on domesticating the town so that the nasties inside wouldn’t bother the villagers.

Cave Exploring

Once I was done fortifying the town, I turned my attention to exploring the cave. This is the first natural cave that I’ve run across, and it turned out to be quite big! I learned a LOT about making my way through enemies from this place, including making my first set of iron armor, and how to live through Creeper attacks.

But the most interesting thing I found there was this burning cage thing… which I soon learned was a monster spawner protecting two chests in the cave!

And what did this cage spawn?

Spiders! 

Lots and lots of spiders!

Happy day!

Why happy? Well, I was wondering where I’d get more rope to make a replacement fishing pole for when the one I have breaks down. Now I have no shortage of rope at all. 🙂

I just broke out a couple of blocks, so that I could hit the spiders, but they couldn’t reach me, and I went to town on clearing out the cave. The spiders still continue to spawn there from time to time, but once it was clear, I was able to open the chests and raid them bit by bit.

There were a lot of neat things in those chests, including a second (!) saddle, a music disk, a book for enchanting stuff (?), and best of all…

Horse armor! Woo!

I did explore the rest of the cave and lit it up to prevent future spawns. Did some mining. But the spider spawner room was the most interesting thing I discovered down there.

And that’s where my weekend adventures in Minecraft left off. I’ll be looking for my next project/adventure soon enough!

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