Mushroom farm

With the restriction of mushroom growth to 5 within a 9x9 area in 1.8, it is impractical to have a large scale mushroom farm. Instead, you can build many small mushroom farms spread out your land.

I saw a nice convenient and compact design from Ethoslab: episode 112. 13 minutes in.

http://www.youtube.com/user/EthosLab#p/u/2/PcVABZIQCLA

[edit] on second thought, just littering mushrooms everywhere would accomplish the same thing. Or, growing mushroom with bone meal is fantastic.

Water Elevator

I now understand water elevator better and I made one myself. I will post a picture later.

One insight I had recently was this. There is water source block. And water flow block. If you have a 2x2x1 water pool, infinite water, and dig down one layer. The layer below the top layer contains water flow blocks.

The key to a good water elevator is to have water source blocks instead of water flow blocks. Water flow blocks have downward velocity associated with them.

I just saw a very elegant elevator design from Etho. I love his videos.

http://www.youtube.com/user/EthosLab

XP Farm For Enchanting in Minecraft

I have been struggling with getting enough experience points to get good enchantments. At the same time I have seen more and more designs for experience farms posted on reddit and youtube. It usually requires a dungeon, and the way it works is to have a large number weakened mobs delivered to your doorstep.

Most useful is a skeleton XP farm, because the arrows and bones that they drop are also quite useful.

I found this youtube video to be most useful guide.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QSXWlPvGAo

The producer's name is KaspersMC. He is Danish and he is very funny as well. He also has very insightful tutorials on the proporties of Minecraft water.

http://www.youtube.com/user/KaspersMC

[Update] I found a zombie spawn and built an XP grinder myself! It was fun and not too hard and I learned a lot when building one by myself. I got lots of cool enchantments now.