Minecraft and The Guardian Farm

I mentioned at the end of a previous post how Aaron walled up and drained the area around an undersea monument.  Impressive stuff.

Dry monument

As it turns out, he was not done yet.

I had not been paying attention to his monument as I was off in my usual routine of base building in an attempt to populate a bit of the great northern road.  So it came as some surprise when he dropped us an email about his ongoing efforts with the monument.  (Screen shots provided by him, shrunk a bit by me as they were very large.)

First he decided to trade out the sand wall for a glass wall around the monument.

Monument with an undersea view

According to Aaron, the original effort with sand required about 8,000 blocks of sand in order to wall off the whole thing, plus some additional sand segment the whole thing up in to sections to be drained.

On the bright side, he then has plenty of sand on hand to convert into glass blocks, burning through 15 full stacks of coal in the process. (There was no handy source of lava I gather.)

Once that was done, the “what next?” question struck.  After pondering just moving in and living in the monument, Aaron decided to strip it away.

The monument stripped back a few layers

That completed, he went to work and built a monument guardian farm in the space where the monument used to reside.  More work and more glass.

Guardian farm complete

And there it was.  I had to visit this new structure… though it took me a bit.  It is as impressive in person as you might imagine.

The guardians spawn in the large tank then eventually fall through the porous bottom… made so by signs… into a flowing water that drives them over the edge and through a layer of lava.

Dropping through the lava layer…

The lava is also held in place by wooden signs which, unlike all other wood in the game, fails to catch fire when in close proximity of lava.

The fish then drop onto the killing floor where the expire through a combination of burning and the blunt force trauma of the fall.

Flattened flaming fried fish

Below that floor is a series of hoppers that route the remains to a sorting machine that drops the resulting items into appropriately labeled chests.

All sorted out for you

You end up with fish, prismarine crystals, and prismarine shards.  The shards appear to be the most common, followed by crystals and fish.  The shards and crystals can be combined to create sea lanterns, though you need five crystals and four shards, which means you have a lot of excess shards.  But the shards can be used to make prismarine bricks as well, a blue-green block that I will have to build something with at some point.

I addition, the whole thing is located on a chunk that spawns slime at night as well.

Slime visitor

Some trivia provided by Aaron about his structure:

• Once torn down, the materials which made up the monument fit into roughly 5 or 6 double chests.  Temple in a box for Christmas!
• The first filter of the farm alone is comprised of 1,296 signs – which took 702 chunks (~11 stacks) of wood to make.
• I’m not sure what my “sand blocks used” tally was before this started, but presumably it wasn’t much in that I’d only used sand for the glass to the roof of my home base.  Now that number sits at over 44,000.  The “times mined” number is within a hair’s breadth of 60,000.  (Yes, I went through a ton of shovels.)
• The interior volume of the spawn chamber is 25,920 blocks.
• The initial length of the “fall damage” section of the kill unit was too short and I ended up quickly accumulating dozens of guardians bouncing around on the hopper pad.  This meant I had to extend the fall column while it was occupied and new little friends were dropping in at a horrible rate.  That was fun.
• By the time that was done, I had to dig down another couple levels (sadly stopped by bedrock) in order to expand the storage at the end of the sorter because the drops were come in too fast.
• During demolition, I found that there was a pretty sizable chamber wrapped around 3/4 of the perimeter of the temple with no entrance or egress – which means I totally missed it during my initial drying-out of the interior.  Man, were its occupants pissed when I finally broke in.

And then he also made a beacon, which required him to spawn and defeat a wither to acquire a nether star, and then put the beacon on top of a pyramid of material blocks.  In his case, he went for blocks of emeralds, having farmed his villagers for the materials.

Beacon, deep within his base

The beacon itself shoots a beam of light into the sky that is about the most visible object you can create in the game.

Beacon lighting the sky

So that is what he has been up to.  At some point I will have to write something about his base, which includes a slime block based elevator that almost never kills anybody anymore.