You would need to go up 11 blocks. Which is the witches range. You do get a window between their potions, so charging in isn’t that dangerous*, I mostly suggested a bow since it can be used even further away, and your cautious style.
I would say getting a blaze rod and netherwart and some soul sand would probably be your first goals in the Nether. I wasn’t sure if your son had already gotten some for you, so it was a poor suggestion. Going in bare bones would probably be best then to limit risk of loosing anything valuable.
I have some soul sand, soul soul, nether rack, abd a few blocks of glow stone and nether quartz from my brief excursions to the nether. My initial portal ended in a soul sand valley.
I clearly need to kill some blazes. Which means getting comfortable with going to the nether.
That does seem like the next step. Finding a Nether Fortress is probably the best (only?) place to find them and nether wart. Fortress are also some of the most dangerous places, because of the blaze and wither skeletons. Unless you already have found one, it may be pretty hard to come across a fortress.
You might also like the Crimson and Warped Forests if you haven’t seen those yet. I think they are pretty cool and give you some new blocks to play/build with.
I’ve been building myself spare gear whenever i notice i have a lot of experience, so it’s not too annoying if i get killed and lose everything in the nether. I’m “rich”, in that i have plenty of emeralds between the string and fruit farms. So buying diamond gear to enchant is easy.
But yeah, i may just bring a suit of armor, a good bow, two pickaxes (fortune and silk touch) and a shovel, along with cheap stuff like stone. I think step 1 is probably to build protection around the portal itself. I want to be able too see out, though, which probably means a few blocks that ghasts can explode.
Oh, and this time i need to remember to bring flint and steel. I didn’t do that last time, and a ghast extinguished my portal, and getting back to the overworld was challenging.
I’m not above cheating with chunkbase. And my mapping mod shows me a fair amount of detail – amusingly, it has mapped a lot of the nether in places where I’ve only actually seen the roof.
Yeah, those both seem relatively safe, although the giant boar things are nasty. And I like the cool wood you can get there. In a previous game, my son fetched me some and I grew it in the overworld.
The best trick for killing endermen is and always has been to take advantage of the fact that they are 3 meters tall, and therefore cannot touch you in a 2 meter high room.
Like cloth-wearers in all video games, witches are wimps. Get a hit in as soon as you can and she will likely stop attacking you to whip out a health potion. Keep up the offense and you can’t lose. Even with a stone sword you can dish out damage faster than she will heal. The most dangerous thing about fighting witches is the splash potion of poisoning which if left unchecked will bring you down to 1hp. A bucket of milk will cure you, but a bottle of honey is even better. In the worst case, grit your teeth, swing through it, and retreat after the witch is dead to lick your wounds.
Or, you know, make a note of where you died so you can collect your stuff. Which is what i did last time i fought a witch.
I do have a lot of dairy cattle. (An advantage of starting near a mushroom fields is that I’ve had ample cattle since the start. I actually had more trouble obtaining wheat than cattle.) I also have generated several bee hives (or bee homes? I forget what they call the natural ones.) I suppose i could gather some honey at some point.
I often deal with pillagers by using boats. If you stick a couple blocks of wood/stone side by side at head height, then throw a boat underneath, you can run around and lead the pillagers to the boat. They hop in and suffocate themselves with their heads in the floating blocks. They die without inflicting bad omen on you.
So… Lots of progress. I killed my first endermen. I stood in a shallow pool of water, and stared at it. It became enraged, and can’t into range of my sword, but water hurts them so it didn’t get close enough to attack me.
I started a new base above the warped forest, and now i have a tower that has two nether portals: the lower one links to an exotic green nether biome that I’m looking forward to exploring, and the upper one links to the nice safe roof of the nether. It’s conveniently located with a deep river valley to one side, and a ravine on the other. So I’ve had two sets of pillagers spawn, but neither came especially close due to the natural boundaries. There were a lot of sheep there, and a few pigs, and i dragged a couple of cows over. So I’m surrounding my base with well-lit, fenced-in pastures. I’ve also installed a small birch grove, made a lot of charcoal, and I’ll add small fields of wheat and carrots for the animals.
Also, according to chunkbase, this area sits above dripstone caverns, and is quite close to the deep dark. So I’ll be doing some more digging, i think.
If you’re not up to storming the nether fortress, forget the potions, build a booked-out enchantment table and put some enchantments on your bow. Power, flame, knockback, etc. Of course you’ll need an anvil too.
If you’re fighting a witch with weak weapons and armor, keep a couple buckets of milk handy.
There’s a fortress close to the new portal i built into the warped forest. Ultimately, i hope to assault it.
But while i have a nice enchanting table (and some anvils) i mostly just buy the enchantments i want from the many librarians in my village. I have a much more powerful bow now than the last two times i confronted witches, so maybe I’d have better luck… I haven’t built a bow with flame because I’ve had unpleasant encounters with catching fire from a monster who was burning. But maybe that would be worth trying for a witch.
Speaking of bows, are there any advantages to crossbows? I leveled up several fletchers after building a string farm (they’ll buy string for emeralds) so i could buy a crossbow. But i have so many regular bows from my skeleton experience farm that I’m literally burning them for fuel, so I’m wielding a regular bow.
You can also check villages nearby to see if they have a brewing stand you can take for yourself, you still need stuff from the nether for the potions, but it means you can keep inside and not have to take on blazes as much. And if you can run in a raid a patch of netherwart you can grow it somewhere safe in a base or farm.
I have been playing a few hours here and there on a friend’s server and I got pretty lucky with where I decided to plop down. I just found a small little island to grow a giant tree for a base. And not too far away I found an entrance into a seemingly largish but interesting cave. Turning out that this cave system ran all the way and ends just under my little island and keeps going out. There’s a huge open area with lava and water. Almost an actual basin for water and glow squid, an abandoned mineshaft area that’s pretty big itself, another branch has led me to some underground lush caves and on and on. It’s going on for hundreds of blocks away from my base and has plenty of depths to explore. Which is fine because that’s what I like best, and have trouble doing anything else for long.
Tip on the nether fortress… if possible, it’s safer to navigate by tunneling around it through any terrain it intersects, or to tunnel up through a pillar and traverse the elevated walkways by bridging under them. That way you don’t spend much time wandering the hallways where you’re exposed to spawning mobs. And bring plenty of food plus a bucket of milk for when you get hit by the wither skeletons.
Main advantage - you can carry them pre-charged in your quickbar, so you can rapidly fire several times immediately without the delay for charging. Also, if you have one enchanted with multi-shot and piercing then it could be like a decent shotgun for when you get jumped by multiple enemies simultaneously.
I never found any use for them because (1) the mobs generally approach slowly enough that a normal bow is fine, and (2) my sword, bow, and armor is usually leveled up enough to keep me alive.
You seem to be encountering a lot of witches. They’re generated by lightning hitting a villager. You should have your villagers trapped in their huts, or create little safe booths for them.
Naw, none of the witches I’ve encountered was anywhere near villagers. And i think it’s only been five witches, total. But two were right after each other in the same place (no, not a witch hut) so it felt like a lot.
I’ve added a lot of lighting near my new base, and while it’s not as safe as my original base, on the mushroom fields, I’m no longer constantly looking at new pillagers, and the monsters that spawn seem to be doing so fairly far from my fields.
Although i created this base as a place to get to the nether, I’ve decided to stock it as an agricultural resource-independent place. So I’ve fenced in a herd of sheep, representing all the natural colors. (I’m probably going to start dyeing sheep, as a source of colored wool, but haven’t done it, yet.) I have a few head each of cattle and pork. I have a small carrot patch and a small wheat field, and a dozen birch trees which provided all the wood for the animal fencing and the sticks and charcoal for the numerous torches I’ve scattered around.
I suppose the best plan is, “expect to die a couple of times, getting the hang of what i need to do, and don’t stress too much about that.” I’m not really good at the “don’t stress about dying” thing, though.
That last one hit particularly close to home for me. I remember that every time I submitted a Fightingmania FAQ to GameFAQs, I got a warning that it was probably going to be rejected. Reason? The word “fistful”, which got it flagged for “STFU”. Of course it was never actually shot down on those grounds, but it taught me how any kind of automated moderation system was an oxymoron. If there aren’t ten thousand players beating the system on the first day, I’ll be stunned.
Mostly I can’t understand who Microsoft is even doing this for. This is going to completely kill of the “anarchy” servers, and the private servers who were okay with “profanity” and “threats” are going to get nailed hard as well. Any degree of automation will result in all manner of horrific injustices. Even if Microsoft tries to hire moderators, the sheer enormity of this game, combined with the difficulty in finding intelligent, diligent moderators who understand things like context and patterns of behavior (and I’m not convinced there are enough of them in the entire industry to fill a damn classroom) will make their task hopeless. And is this going to bring more children into the game? I think the appeal of a building block game would be inherent, and any parent who wanted to modify their kids’ gameplay would do so (but that’s the crux of the issue right there, isn’t it?).
What I completely don’t dig is why there isn’t any level of restriction between allowed to run completely amok and booted from the entire server. Twitter has two levels of shutting out posters, mute and block. I don’t see why Microsoft can’t institute something similar, to quiet irritating, rude, or obnoxious players without throwing them out entirely.
The end of the first video you linked says they there are already some mods that have been released to disable moderation. I guess i should look into that.
Mind you, i believe in moderation. Heck, I’m a volunteer moderator on this website. And if i had someone who was being obnoxious on my server, i would stop that. But I’m completely capable of moderating my own server, thankyouverymuch.
I’m “rich”, in that i have plenty of emeralds between the string and fruit farms. So buying diamond gear to enchant is easy.
Of course it was never actually shot down on those grounds, but it taught me how any kind of automated moderation system was an oxymoron. If there aren’t ten thousand players beating the system on the first day, I’ll be stunned.