I learnt quite a few things today: iron isn't that hard to find, saplings can be encouraged to grow with the remains of dead creatures, and mining down often leads to the surface! However, as promised, I spent all day mining to try to find some iron to make a suit of armour or chainmail. I extended the intial staircase so that I knew I wouldn't compromise the stability of the house foundations, and then leveled out to make a large open-plan room. I am hoping to use this as a sort of half-way point between my house and the mineshafts, otherwise it could take some time getting between the two. I then designated three main digging areas, one on each wall to increase the chances of me finding some awesome loot! Although, at the moment I'm mainly looking for iron so that I can explore that weird mossy wall I found yesterday.
The glass column allows me to determine if anything is coming down the stairs, or is already down near the bottom. With open mineshafts I have to be careful... There are MiNES for a reason...
The way in which I designed the three mineshafts allows me to flood them quickly if I exhaust all possible resources there, or if there is a safety breach. In layman's terms: if creatures of the night begin pouring out of the hole, I flood it, and them, back down to hell! I began on the Eastern wall and no sooner had I supported the ceiling, I noticed that I was emerging on the surface... and yet mining down. Then it hit me: I'd put my house on a cliff and the stairwell with the glass column hadn't actually passed beneath sea level yet, merely just above... Initially I was rather annoyed by this because it went against rule 12 of the HoN code: A secure mineshaft is a safe mineshaft... kind of saying the same thing, but the principle was simple. And my current mineshaft was contradicting that. However I turned it into a positive when I dug around a bit more I noticed it was literally under the small wooden bridge I'd built awhile back to get across to another cliff wall. I decided to strengthen the walls with wood and placed an entrance at the external end, and turned it into a back door... which funnily enough was more accessible than my actual front door.
I continued downwards with the initial shaft - no rude innuendos there - and it wasn't long until I hit gold... well, iron actually! Loads of it! I found a huge deposit of iron, plenty to make more durable tools and possibly some armour or platemail. I gotta say though, the stuff was uber heavy! I tried shifting all of it in one trip, but it was too much... seems I need to exercise more. I put the first batch of iron into the furnace to smelt, and went to get the second lot. After that I combined it all and was able to fashion a basic helm, chestplate and leggings using pre-made moulds from fossilised wood. I had to let it cool on top of the furnace, which was a bit dangerous, because the whole house is made of wood! Kinda makes me think I should move the furnace to a special stone room in the cellar. Multiple furnaces would be a great idea too because sometimes it takes ages to cook things when I have to wait for one thing to finish.
My armour looks incredibly impressive, I can't wait to try it on and investigate that strange wall... I'll feel much better in a suit of armour than I would in normal clothes. Oh yeah, and before I forget, apparently bones are good for saplings! I got a message on my PDA from someone at the Hand of Notch Co. and they said that "bones are an excellent source of nutrients for growing wildlife...". I have no idea what this means, and I'm not likely to find any bones... unless I can use the bones of animals I kill for food... I might try that later on. In the mean time, I have to stay in the house until the armour has cooled; I don't want to go out exploring and come back to a smouldering ruin... I've learnt from my past mistakes...
Syenoyx signing off
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