finnlearnsminecraft

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Sorry no day 16 yet. I’m on vacation so I’ll be taking this next week to spend time with family and enjoy my vacation. Any Minecraft playing will be just one big day at the end of the week if I end up playing.

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 15

We are hopping on the villager trading train!!

As you can see, very different treatment of my tool smith and farmer villager. I'll get something for the farmer soon (eventually). But I got the idea for the tool smith's area as I was falling asleep the other day. I wanted it beside my mine as dug into the side of the mountain. I also finally have my first diamond tools!! Yippeee!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 14

A couple things today!

A couple creative mode path ideas to start the day. Far left is probably what I'm going to use unless I have another idea.

I also made and finished a sheep wool farm in one day. I also found out how to make a minecart unloader. I definitely didn't just watch a YouTube Short to figure it out.

I also had five baby zombies break into my house... Which lead to this. My death rate is at once every 2 hours (if I know how to do math, not likely).

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 13

It's official. I demolished the village!

I wanted to add the original pan around my area but Tumblr only allows one video per post so maybe I'll figure something out. Or you can watch it again on day 1. I left the roads for some guides for now. Day 14 is going to be planning out some builds and working on my to-do list.

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 12 is back up!

Day 12

Not much. I've been working for the last three days and I am quite tired so I didn't get much done. I set up a rail track from my villager breeder to my base area. I can't get the pickup mechanism working so I got a little annoyed. I don't quite know what I did wrong. I think the water may be too high

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Oops! I messed up… I accidentally posted day 12 instead of 11. Day 11 is up now and day 12 will be public again tomorrow. If you saw, no you didn’t :)

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 11

Big day!!

I finished the iron farm/villager breeder and it is working great. I'm very happy. I'm fully geared up and have all iron tools and armor. I also was able to make a lot of lanterns, my favorite!

I got the first floor of my house pretty well decorated. I plan on getting to the rest of my house but I need more wool. I plan on making a sheep farm but I was lacking in cobblestone for dispensers and observers. So I decided to keep digging my mine and I made it to y:-9 which is pretty good. I'm going to keep digging until bedrock just so I have a nice staircase for strip mining.

This was the view out the front of my house. Before and after I took down the farm and the two houses. I think it looks a lot better and cleaner. Especially since I blew up on of the houses while working on moving villagers in the middle of the night.

I finally made my book and quill to-do list which I desperately needed. I have two whole pages of plans and I am ready to get to work tomorrow!

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 12

Not much. I've been working for the last three days and I am quite tired so I didn't get much done. I set up a rail track from my villager breeder to my base area. I can't get the pickup mechanism working so I got a little annoyed. I don't quite know what I did wrong. I think the water may be too high

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 9 & 10

Two days put together?? Yeah... I didn't do much so its difficult to differentiate because there is a lack of photos. Oopsie. So this is what happened.

After drowning and dying in the mines twice on day 8 I was a little upset with Minecraft. I was back to using stone tools and really felt like I was taking a big step back. How do I stop that? Infinite supply of iron! Iron is great and I can never have too much so I started construction on an iron farm. I also wanted a villager breeder as I want to do some more villager trading and four villagers won't cut it. I used ImpulseSV's Iron Farm & Villager Breeder because I saw it on his redstone to riches series and know that it works well for him.

So I set off to start building that. I needed 10 stacks of blocks so I needed to gather some cobblestone (block of choice) so might as well start digging my mine then. I got down to deepslate level and then switched to strip mining at iron level (because I needed iron for the iron farm...)

Everything is really going great. Building with tutorials is easy and I understand it quite a bit. Then, I have to move villagers :| I've done very little with this but I do know it is crazy annoying

So for easy access I switched my villagers to above ground with a two gate system. Easy! I am told by my more Minecraft adept brother (who may not have my best interests at heart) that the easiest way to move villagers is at night with beds. Not for me!

I died twice. Both times I had to run back from spawn. Thankfully nothing picked up my stuff so it was easy to retrieve. This does lead to a death rate of every 125 minutes. Which is still higher than 84, thankfully. I quickly gave up with two villagers in and two more to go. These two days were kind of a slough. Hopefully getting the rest of the villagers won't be too hard now that I switched to a day time workstation based method.

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Spawn Chunks vs. Regular Chunks For Redstone Contraptions

This was the disagreement I was having while deciding where to put my iron farm. Ignoring that putting it in the spawn chunks would entail moving villagers 400 blocks, I wanted to see what the best choice was.

What Are They?

So a standard chunk is a 16 by 16 box of land that goes from the void under the bedrock to build height in all three dimensions. The spawn chunk is 9 chunks (16x16 blocks) in a 3x3 grid pattern where the spawn point is set. The spawn chunk also goes from the void to build height but it is only located in the Overworld. This is only for spawn chunks in 1.20.5 to 1.21.8. Discussed more in "Where are they going?" The spawn chunk is always loaded compared to regular chunks.

Why Are They?

The follow up question I had was why are they different? Which compared to a lot of other questions this one is easy to answer! If 30 million blocks worth of chunks in all four cardinal directions were loaded at once, the game would be unplayable. I'm playing on a laptop, slightly better than some laptops, but that many chunks sounds like a lot of work. Therefore, regular chunks stop getting loaded.

So why are spawn chunks always loaded? Are they super necessary? Actually not anymore! They were originally a bug fix. If a player had an invalid bed and had to be sent to an unloaded spawn chunk it would cause a lag spike. The quick fix that Mojang did was to constantly load the chunks.

Where Are They Going?

Spawn chunks are going away in 1.21.9 / Fall Drop 2025 (most recent update and currently playing on 1.21.8). So their days are numbered. They were already updated on 1.20.5 to make their chunk propagation default to 3x3 instead of 19x19. If you are also confused about that sentence, here's what it means. The spawn chunks were previously (between Beta 1.8 and 1.20.4) made of a 19x19 chunk area. The 16x16 area was actively loaded and the chunks surround it were "lazy chunks". Now, (1.20.5 to 1.21.8) the spawn chunks are a 3x3 chunk area. This is changeable through the spawn chunk radius command. It goes from 1 to 10 with the default being 2 and the 19x19 chunk area being 10.

From here on out, I'll be ignoring that the chunks are going away (therefore no reason to move villagers 400 blocks to a place I don't go often) for the purpose of learning. There is still much to learn about regular chunks! (or if you are me and spent several minutes with a confused look on your face scrolling reddit for answers :( )

What Will the Removal of Spawn Chunks Do?

Well, if you have a farm there, it will stop working. It will no longer be loaded and won't work without something loading it. Everyone should expect to have less lag as it is one less chunk being loaded. Also, there should be an increase to passive mob spawning as the passive mobs in the spawn chunks won't be affecting the mob cap. So very little, unless you have farms...

How Do Regular Chunks Work?

This definitely took a while. Minecraft Wiki throws a whole bunch of words like tickets, levels, and load types that are a little hard to decipher. So let's start as easy as I can.

If you've been in the Minecraft sphere, for any amount of time you have heard about chunk loading. Whether that be loading glitches or utilizing unloaded chunks or making a chunk loader. Loading is an important thing. In order for a chunk to load is has to be triggered. For the beginning of loading to be triggered the chunk receives a ticket.

There are three properties to a ticket: Level, Ticket Type, and an optional property of Time to live.

Level

The level is typically between 22 and 44 in vanilla gameplay but can be different for modded gameplay. The level determines the load type, the lower the number the more features occurring on the chunk.

So for example the chunk you are standing in is between 31 and 22 and a chunk 30 million blocks away is in the 34 to 44 range.

Ticket Type

Ticket type is what is sending the ticket, what's causing the chunk to be loaded. So this can be the player, a portal, the enderdragon, teleporting (such as going through the end portal or the teleport commands), forced ticket (created with the forcedload command), start (creates world spawn and spawn chunks),unknown (for quick information gathering for mob AI and spawning), and the light ticket (used in world gen.)

The most important for farms in vanilla with no commands (as far as I am aware) are the player and portal types.

Portal Ticket Type

This is why chunk loaders are minecarts going in and out of portals! A portal ticket is open for 300 ticks and has a level of 30 (Entity Ticking). This is stronger than the player but doesn't last as long. The portal ticket also only loads 9 chunks. The one the portal is in and the 8 around it.

Player Ticket Type

This ticket is created by the player with a level of 31 (Entity Ticking). The amount of chunks rendered is determined by your render distance. If you've never touched your render distance and you are playing on 64-Bit Java, then your render distance is 12! This means there is a 25x25 chunk area that is at level 31, which is entity ticking. It is mapped out like this:

This shows how the chunks would be. The 25x25 chunk area of entity ticking would be surrounded by a 27x27 chunk area of block ticking chunks and so on. The amount of entity ticking chunks is determined by your render distance and the formula (l=2r+1). L being the chunk area and r being your render distance.

Mob Generation

Mob generation is based off of blocks from player and not chunks. There is a 128 block circle where mobs can spawn around the player. So you would need to keep your mob farms closer to one centralized area if you wanted to AFK them at the same time, where other farms can be more spread out over the chunk area.

I've probably missed some things, purposefully ignored them, or didn't explain them well. If you have questions or corrections let me know so I can clarify. If you have a question it just creates more opportunity for me to learn so I always appreciate them!

No Minecraft day today :( I plan on having day 9 with day 10 as I didn't get much done. I hope this post was insightful! As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

What I've Learnt about Building

After eight days, I finished my house! Here are the videos I watched and the tips and tricks I learnt.

The first thing I did was break it down in stages. I learnt these from this video by Henri Pacca. The stages recommended in the video is shape, color, texture, details. The way I did it was more shape, color, details, texture. I think these two can be switched which ever way you prefer. The purpose of breaking it down in stages is so that you don't have to change as much. Another video by Henri Pacca that was very helpful was this one.

Shape

This is the shape of your build. If you want a house or a castle or a tower its made out of shapes. The best way to make a build is to mark out your shapes first and get them how you like. I wanted a t-shaped house with a foundation that has a porch. I marked out the two major shapes, being a rectangle and a square. After those, I marked out the porch and the roof shape.

This is my shape marked out in survival (left) and creative (right). Using different bright colors on the right was a lot easier than cobblestone on the left. You can do it with any blocks but I recommend ones that are easy to break and differentiate. Once you are happy with shape, move on to the next step. If you aren't and you don't know why, move on to something else. Go mining, play a different game, take a break. This video by Zeeno could be helpful at this stage but it was more helpful for me in the details step.

Color

This step should definitely start with picking which colors you want. I knew I wanted a purple roof so I started with a palette of those blocks. I did end up changing from my original palette.

I originally wanted to use purple concrete and amethyst (left) but I decided to switch to primarily crimson wood (right). There were more color options for blending and texturing the roof.

Color isn't just the color palette but it is important to have it before doing the rest of the color step. This step is about blocking out your colors. This is about the solid base colors. I did my foundation/porch and my walls.

If you plan on doing pillars that stick out from the wall, I would do those before putting the roof on. I typically do the roof one block out from the wall but with pillars that aren't flush with the wall I did the roof one block out from the pillars (two from the wall).

From here, you can move on to roof solid colors. And the step is done. If you don't like the colors together then this is the easiest step to change it up. The reason for the steps is that it makes it easier to change things up.

Details

Yay! Details! This is when I put in my doors, windows, stairs on the porch, and rounding to the pillars.

This is for more build based details where if I was going to do something like porch decor or windowsills I would wait till after texturing. This isn't really a difficult step and was pretty easy to be happy with or to mess around with later.

Texturing

This was the step I was most nervous for. So I watched quite a few videos. These ones by Bdoubleo100, Grian, and Snarple. The important thing to think about is where something would be shaded. Under the roof, shadowed by taller buildings, ect.

This is a little hard for me to explain so I definitely recommend checking out the videos I mentioned. This is where having a block palette with darker and lighter options from your base color is helpful. With floors I would recommend going with something more textured (like from deepslate bricks to cobbled deepslate is what I did) in places where people would be walking more. So straight to the door or another place you are going a lot. If you want to hang lanterns or other light sources it is going to be brighter in that area. What helped me think about this was EthosLab Hermitcraft S10 Ep12, 12:10-13:20. Some times you learn something without even meaning to.

That's pretty much it! Once you're happy with texturing there's not much left to do. Some extra outdoor decor bits, porches, paths, lighting, really whatever you want. The important thing that I learnt was just to wait and fiddle until you are happy. I'm very happy with my house! Maybe I'll do another post on interiors but I need to learn some more before then.

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 8

Today was quite the mix. It was an experience... And I made it through. I kept working on my house and I am finished with the outside! I've done some interior work in my bedroom and the kitchen but I want to do some more.

While working on texturing my walls, I ran out of smooth quartz so I had to go to the nether. Which I remembered all my stuff! The peer pressure sign worked. The nether was great until I saw the glimpse of a warped forest. Then I got lost in it... Even better! My pickaxe broke and I didn't have any wood. So I ended up using my nether lodestone pick a direction and broke netherrack with my bare hands. But I made it home safely.

After that walls were textured and everything was great. I wanted to go off mining because I am desperate for diamond tools. This is where it goes bad. I'm ready to go home but I can't find the exit, I'm out of torches and food. I find a bit of a water cave and think I can swim to the surface. It is not open to the surface, I drown.

I gather some spare armor and extra tools and head to find my things. I find them! But between me and my things is a gold armor wearing zombie. I fight it until my golden sword breaks and it kills me once again. I once again gather extra supplies and head back to the mines. I find my stuff! But only the second death so its not much but its better than nothing. I am quite sad :( I also used my last iron on decor for my house so I can't make more armor or another shield. I then take a break to write my building post (coming later today!)

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 7!!

One week down! So I wanted to start this post off with what my plans are. The first and easiest is finishing my house, inside and outside. You'll see my progress in a little bit. I also want to make a post about what I've learnt and where I learned it from about building. Once my house is settled, tool upgrades is the next big step. Which means it's time to learn enchanting tables and get to my villager pit for villager breeding and trading. That already seems like another week of work but if not, exploration is what we'll be up to.

So here's the house progress! All I have left is some texturing (roof, walls, and some pillars) and then outdoor decorations. I'm really happy with this and can't wait to be finished. I actually couldn't wait to be finished and already moved my stuff into the attic. I need more space and organization desperately.

I haven't done much interior decorating and it REALLY needs it. White and minimalism is not my vibe in real life and it is not my vibe here. So interior has some major changes coming to it.

This was my punishment after I once again went into the nether with no blocks and no shield... I was going to risk it but I realized I didn't have my boots either so I ran back to the portal and grabbed all my things. Hopefully, this will shame me into remembering or at least going back for these things.

I've been having a whole bunch of fun and I really enjoy my house! I think it looks great and I'm quite proud that I did it without block for block copying something else.

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 6

I finally finish up in creative today! In the creative world it was all about texturing and finishing touched. Which I feel pretty good about. I watched a couple of videos about texturing but I'll be talking about those in another post when I am finally done with this project.

This is what I created! I really like the roof and I'm very happy with it. I really enjoy the roof gradient and thought this was a fun process.

This was some extra details I did on the front. I'll probably just freehand it on the survival world.

These are pretty much all the blocks I used, with some more stair and slab variants but I think they are pretty solid block palettes.

Finally back in survival! While I didn't build or play much, it was pretty eventful. It was mostly resource gathering and unfortunately, crimson wood lives in my least favorite biome(?) the nether. I died. Hoglins... I didn't bring extra blocks to pillar up so they beat me. I was able to retrieve most of my stuff thankfully. Though I do think my shield burnt up in the lava. Which leads to my almost second death. I was trying to get some nether brick because I used it for texturing and blazes almost knocked me off my bridge because I didn't have my shield. I ran away like a coward who didn't want all their things to burn in lava. After that, I decided to just do some chill building and tree chopping in the overworld. Which I promptly almost ragequit because I don't know how to count. So that it for day 6. Almost one week down and I am still working on my starter base... I feel as I can't move on to other tasks until this is done because I need more storage desperately.

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 5

Day 5! More creative mode so hopefully this project will finally be done being planned so I can get back to survival. I started by fixing the roof with the pillars. The easy answer was to pull the roof out further. So instead of it being one block out from the wall, its one block out from the pillars. I didn't do this sooner because I did the roof before the pillars. Not the best idea.

Here you can see that I did some circular accents (? don't know what else to call it) on the pillars. I really like the more rounded feel to the higher floors. I also fiddled with the window color a lot. I decided on magenta for the first floor and purple for the second and attic. I also did a deepslate brick roof accent on the smaller building.

I decided to move the entrance to the little building so I got rid of a portion of the deck/foundation as there was much room to do things there. I like the way it looks but I might get rid of the back entrance as it makes that room more like a hallway.

I wanted to start texturing and I had this idea. It kinda reminded me of those geode cakes but I'm not really a fan. I think if the rest of the roof was basalt it would be cool. That's not the vibe I want though. This was where I stopped as I wanted to learn more about texturing before I started. I haven't picked or watched a video yet so I'll probably do that on day 6

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 4

Day 4 was spent in my creative world. I didn't think I had a lot of time or energy for Minecraft today so I thought mocking up my house in creative would be easier then re-doing in survival. I was right about the easier and wrong about the time. I spent about 2 hours in creative and I'm still not done or happy with my house.

This was after I was done marking out the shape. I was pretty happy with this but still changed it around quite a bit.

I then filled in my solid colors and once again fiddled with the shape. Mainly that little square off to the left. I'm pretty happy at this stage too. The only thing I would change is the roofing off the square building. To me, it feels like it hangs off too far. I tried making it flush with the wall and that was even worse. I might try a roof trim to see if that changes or helps anything.

This was after some of the basic details. Adding doors, windows, and some pillars. This is the step that I ended on and needs more work. I think the contrast might be too high between the dark oak and the pale oak. I might try something a little darker. I am also struggling with having pillars out of the front of the house because of the roof. Right now, on the front the pillars are flush with the wall which I am not a fan off. This is where I stopped and will be picking up on day 5.

I would say the one big tip that I would give in this process is to be patient. Keep working on it until you are happy with each stage. Also, if you are like me and like to watch things while you build or play Minecraft, pick something light. I started building listening to people talking about building in Minecraft and it was a lot of info and not as fun as when I put on "But I'm a Cheerleader." I would say pick something light and funny and longer than you think you want to play as it will keep you more engaged to finish the video and play longer (if that's something you need motivation to do).

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!

[finnlearnsminecraft]

Day 3

Lots of exploring! I safely escaped from the nether and decided to go out with Stupid (my horse) to find a Pale Garden. However, in my annoyance with Stupid and his inability to jump I decided to replace him with another horse not too far from home. Stupid was returned and I got another quite fast horse (also with the Bdoubleo Method) that could actually jump. It does have less hearts so I'm hoping to breed Stupid and my new unnamed horse to create the ultimate horse.

We found a giant desert on the way that had a desert well (check that off the list!), a buried ruined portal with chest under the sand, desert village with camel, and a desert temple! I also came across a mesa/badlands. Mesas are one of my favorite biomes as a YouTuber I loved growing up loved them :) (StacyPlays if anyone was wondering)

Emerald! This is the second emerald I've found in the mountain and I have a couple collected from the *many* villages I've gone to in search of wood types. I did eventually find pale oak! Like 3,000 blocks out but that's fine. After looting the desert temple I had enough string to make a lead because they removed the slime ball from the recipe. After that I had a pretty good water crossing solution. I would lead the horse and then swim or boat across. It worked very well and this horse has yet to be named after how annoying I think it is.

I made it home and decided to go gather materials for my house in the cave I frequent. Which went really well, I got some amethyst, calcite, basalt, and deepslate for my house. I also grabbed a couple diamonds and some iron. I found a really big and deep unexplored area where there was a ton of creepers. Then I got to greedy and was shot by a skeleton while mining and lost that battle... I felt fine knowing that I knew where I died and could easily retrieve my items, until I was returned to spawn, not my bed. I forgot to reset my spawn when I returned home from my travels. I had to run to the cave from spawn and didn't feel very hopeful. Despite that, I did it! I was able to retrieve all my stuff, diamonds and building materials included.

Build plans! I've watched a couple videos and have a little bit of inspiration from a house I built before based on this one. I'm not happy with it right now so I plan on working more tomorrow. I'm going to make a full post once I'm done with all the videos I watched and tips and tricks I learnt. Currently I'm working in stages focusing on shape before getting into details. Day 4 I'm going to spend some time in a creative world to make a better shape as I'm not entirely happy right now. I feel pretty good about my color palette as seen in the first picture.

What did I learn:

-Don't be greedy or Minecraft will send skeletons after you. Not really, just that I need to get a better sword or better at PvP.

-Horses are quite nice when you learn a normal and good way to get them over water. I did have another idea but I haven't tried it yet. My method was going to be riding the horse with a Happy Ghast on a lead behind you and then when you get to water, lead the horse to the ghast and ride the ghast over the water. I do think the boat trick works better because Happy Ghasts are super slow.

-Skeletons are still hard to kill even with a shield.

-Houses are hard and that's okay. Taking my time makes sense as you can't speed through something you don't know how to do an expect to improve.

I am technically improving in the death center as I have been playing for 8.43 hours and had three deaths, which is equal to one every 174 minutes. This is better than my baseline of once every 84 minutes.

As always, anyone is welcome to ask questions or give tips in my asks, messages, reblogs, or comments. I would love to learn from you!