zwolanerd

Endermen: my favorite mobs in Minecraft

You might remember a few months ago that I accidentally deleted my Minecraft save. If you don’t remember that then just know a few months ago I accidentally deleted my Minecraft save. I went through all five stages of grief, though I still struggle with Acceptance when I fire up a saved clip that shows my old world.

I did start a new world, though, and I’ve set about doing what needs to be done, which in my case means digging a 64 long x 60-64 deep x 15 wide pit out back of my house, with the door of the house at coordinates x=0, y=64, z=0, of course. In case you’re wondering, a pit that big has somewhere shy of 54,000 blocks in it, since there are underground caverns and the bedrock is variable. in all of that digging, I found 6-7 diamonds, which is a pretty poor return rate on digging, I feel.

Thing is, now that the pit is dug, I don’t know what else to do. I don’t have any interest in building giant castles or 1:1 models of the Enterprise (even though I think those things are way awesome when other people do them). I’ve though about starting another pit, but I can’t bring myself to do it. This might come as a surprise to you, but digging pits in Minecraft can be a tedious endeavor… which is why I don’t really understand why I feel compelled to dig them.

I don’t have much interest in building machines or other automated processes, either.

One thing I did do was load up a Creative version of my world. You can change your Survival world to a Creative one, but it turns off achievements and other things if you do, so I just made a new world with the same seed. I should probably be ashamed to admit this, but I did this for one reason: I wanted to find the End Portal.

Finding the End Portal requires throwing an Eye of Ender up into the air and following the direction it goes. It only goes 10 or so blocks, so you have to keep doing it, and sometimes the Eye you are using just blows up for no apparent reason, so you have to use another one (and another one, and another one, and…). Making an Eye of Ender requires getting Ender Pearls and Blaze Rods, which you get (sometimes) by killing Endermen and Blazes. I’ve been able to kill a few Endermen, but haven’t ever gotten a legitimate Ender Pearl, to say nothing about getting Blaze Powder. And, once you find the End Portal, you need 12 more Eyes of Ender to activate it, so you really need a lot of these things.

In Creative mode, you can just get these things, free of charge. So I got a bunch of Eyes of Ender, threw them around to find the End Portal, and wrote down the coordinates. Then, back in my actual world, I just went to those coordinates. It’s basically cheating, but I still can’t really do anything with it, since I need Eyes to open it and go through it.

…I mean, yeah, I went through the End Portal in Creative mode. I wanted to see the Ender Dragon! He is pretty awesome, and I really don’t understand how anybody kills him in Survival mode, because he is a megabeast.

So I guess I can just start trying to farm for Ender Pearls and go from there, but that’s going to take a long, long time. Endermen are random, I’m terrible at killing them, and they rarely drop pearls.

Any other suggestions?

Tags: Minecraft