PixlBit

My friend Mark told me about these six new achievements added to Minecraft this week and so I dumped all my other gaming plans and got back into it. I thought it would go quick but it sure hasn't. I got half of them done after 15 hours of gameplay and I'll be at it again on Monday to try and get the last three, which are much harder. 

The first one I got, with my friend Mark (MADKRAMMER) playing in my newly created world, was the Tie Dye one. This has you dye all four pieces of a set of leather armor. I thought it had to be four different colors because of the name, but you only need one. It was pretty easy to kill a bunch of cows for leather and find some ingredients for dyes. I used some Lapis Lazuli with Bone Meal to make the armor light blue. Then I put the armor on an armor stand for viewing because iron armor is where it's at. Later, though, I donned the boots and helmet because I'd lost all my iron armor in The Nether fighting Wither Skeletons. More on that to come. 

Next I got the Trampoline one where you have to bounce 30 blocks in the air off a slime block. You need to kill slimes for this to get 9 slime balls to make the block of slime. Seems easy but it took me a while to find slimes in the wild and then figure out how high a platform I had to jump from to bounce 30 bricks. It was very high, above the clouds. Along the way, I searched for matterials for the next achievement.  

This was Eat a Notch Apple. A Notch Apple is an Enchanted Golden Apple and it requires 8 blocks of gold and a red apple to make. I was collecting for both Mark and myself, so double that number. I found apples in chests in the Stronghold, which I stumbled upon by accident hunting natural caves for gold. 8 blocks of gold is an f'n f-ton of gold. It's 72 bricks and gold is not common. It took me all day to get about 12 blocks. That's enough for one enchanted golden apple and halfway toward a second. At the end of the day, I ate the first one and got the achievement. Now I have to make a second one for Mark.

Along the way, I was doing other fun stuff. I tamed a horse, gathered a dog team, built bridges and a boat for easier travel across the map, and Mark and I built the Nether portal to enter The Nether to hunt for the matterials required for the next three achievements. 

These three are all related to the new boss in the game, The Wither. This is some crazy three-headed black skeleton thing that you have to summon with Soul Sand and Wither Skeleton Skulls. The Soul Sand was easy. We just mined it in The Nether. The WIther Skeleton Skulls were another matter all together. The Wither Skeletons, apparently, only drop a skull upon defeat at a rate of 1 in 40. I watched a video on this and the way to do this quicker is to enchant your sword with a level 5 loot boost to make the chances be 1 in 5. Well, you need a large library of bookshelves surrounding your enchanting table to allow for level 5 enchantments. This means lots of paper and leather. Mark built about half of it before the night was over. I'm still not sure how you get the loot enchantment since the choices in the enchanting table are always random. So the three achievements are:summon the Wither, defeat it, and get the Prism item drop and build a Beacon. Yea, that's a gonna take some effort.

Well, so much for my other games this weekend, Minecraft has my soul until these achievements are done.

Laters, Pixl-patrons.