Chapter 22: XP Farm
Bringing all the horses home after taming them took Technoblade an embarrassingly long time. However, he was now exceedingly familiar with the path around the meadow. He knew the ravine he should avoid, the sun's direction to chase, and the river bend he should cross.
"I'll explore that ravine one day," he promised, knowing fully well there was a fifty percent possibility he wouldn't remember.
Now that he had royal steeds roaming freely within his fortress walls and a poorly constructed side gate for horses, Technoblade had other things to worry about. Oh, yes. He almost forgot. Iron armour was great, but it would be better if they had some kind of enchantments on them.
Heading to his enchantment room, Technoblade slapped the enchanting table on the rightful spot. It would be nice to have protection one enchantments on his armour. The beauty of the enchantment shop system was how Technoblade could upgrade that level whenever he had enough resources.
Truthfully, he needed more diamonds. That single diamond in the storage wasn't enough. He needed at least a stack of diamonds, and even so, he was still poor. Having at least a stack of diamond blocks was a basic requirement, but Technoblade would consider himself out of poverty if he could find a stack.
"Do I have enough levels to get fortune three on the special pickaxe?" he asked.
The enchanting shop delighted and disappointed Technoblade when it revealed that the maximum fortune level for any compatible tool was fortune five instead of three. Technoblade was guaranteed a double drop from any ore mined and up to ten diamonds at fortune five. The rates of drops varied for other ores, but Technoblade was only interested in diamonds.
However, he needed fifty levels for fortune five and three blocks of lapis.
"Dammit!"
First things first, he needed to resolve the XP crisis.
Ordinarily, Technoblade would farm monsters. Blazes gave more XP than a regular zombie. Even if he could fight mobs when night fell, Technoblade wondered if there was a safer way. He was practically naked in his unenchanted iron armour. Fighting wasn't the best decision. Most of his levels were gained from breeding his farm animals.
"That's it! I'm a genius!"
Although it was a pain to feed his animals daily, Technoblade knew it would become a great investment in the long run. He had a surplus of wheat going on. Most of those seeds were used to make bone meal. At this point, Technobldae wasn't going to be short on bone meal. He could afford to spare a few hundred seeds from his wheat farm and feed the chickens.
Crafting a modest number of fences and fence gates, Technoblade found a spot in his territory for a small chicken farm. Yes, he was going to gain his levels from feeding chickens daily for a while and farming wheat. What better way to collect more seeds than to expand the wheat farm vertically?
With a trusty hoe and bucket, Technoblade started working on harvesting his existing farm. He should probably gather the eggs and start smashing them on the grass, hoping some chicks would spawn. It wasn't the most scientifically accurate birthing method, but he did not make the rules in Aftercraft.
It was a simple concept that would prove its brilliance with time. Technoblade knew how mobs could climb up full blocks but could not jump from one to another, unlike players in Minecraft. A similar logic worked in Aftercraft, so Technobldae built that special crowd platform before fencing it up. Hoppers were handy collection items, so Technoblade splurged his iron on twenty of them, covering the floor and directing loot into a chest he had access to.
"Here goes nothing," he sighed and started smashing eggs into the breeding chamber.
Originally, Technoblade had over five hundred eggs. However, after smashing them, he only had about eighty chicks. It wasn't a terrible start, but waiting for them to grow up and make more babies or lay eggs would take too long for him to sit around. Hence, Technoblade worked on expanding his wheat farm vertically.
"I remember this brilliant design that used trapdoors to hold water and help harvest all the grown wheat automatically. Would that still work here?"
Even if Aftercraft was a little more realistic with the need to fertilise the soil for planting, the water logic worked. Technoblade thought about it. Maybe he had to redesign the farms a little. Water still flowed in that strange squarish pattern.
After testing the limits of flowing water, Technoblade did the most logical thing and tore down the existing wheat farm to relocate it. If he wanted to have enough seeds, he needed to plant enough wheat. He might have too much wheat by the end of it, but that was fine. He could always use that to feed the sheep on his wool farm. That project was long overdue.
A wool farm for every dye colour was usually a massive Minecraft flex. Technoblade had no real purpose for all that wool except to contribute to noise pollution. However, there was a strange side quest requesting it. The minimum number of sheep he needed of each colour on each farm was two, but Technoblade was the type of gamer who either went big or went home.
"It has to be at least a hundred of each colour," he nodded. "Anything less than that is a petting zoo, not a farm."
Petting zoo… if the majority of casual gamers heard that, they would probably cry. However, Technoblade continued milling his stone and placing dirt. It was slightly inconvenient to build taller structures without an elytra or scaffolding blocks, but good old dirt did the trick.
Replicating the same farming pattern ten times made Technoblade zone out. It was horrible that he had to do this alone and more horrible that there was nobody to talk to him. When he had to build that multi-level potato farm on Skyblock and repeatedly remodel his island, at least he had friends talking to him on Discord and viewers on his live stream cheering him on. They might not be the wittiest or chattiest company, but he'd pick having any company to none any day.
For hours after painful hours of placing blocks, breaking blocks and listening to the cacophony of farm animals around him, Technoblade decided that he needed a break.
The ten farm levels were finally completed, but Technoblade was too lazy to treat the land or plant the seeds. The wool farm project was unstarted, and his chickens were grown but not fed. On the bright side, now that they were grown, Technoblade could count on them to keep the egg production going while he indulged in running away from his responsibilities.
Sick of overworld vibes, Technoblade decided to do something risky. Yes, he was going to turn the heat up and light his completed nether portal in the forbidden room. He had flint, and he had steel, literally. It wasn't iron because he had a forge upgrade and Technoblade counted down the two minutes it would take the crafting workshop to give his portal starter.
It was probably a suicide mission, but a little adrenaline rush will chase all the stress away. Technoblade studied the flint and steel like an eager child and played his monologue out like a deranged villain on the path of self-destruction.
"Finally! The time has come when I will unleash the wrath of hell onto this world! Behold my latest creation – the nether portal!"
Laughing evilly, Technoblade tried not to cringe at his Tommy Innit-like dramatic antics.
"Sorry," he apologised to nobody in particular. "I'll just get going now."
With a flick of the wrist, the portal opened with a low humming sound. The animation of swirly purple circles remained consistent with what Technoblade was familiar with. The only question was if it would change his entire field of vision purple and give him nausea after he stepped into it.
"Only one way to find out!"
Holding the side of the portal frame, Technoblade put one foot in and noted nothing different about standing on the obsidian ledge and the floor. Reassured that he wouldn't start losing body parts, he stepped onto the portal and held his breath. His vision did not immediately turn purple, but the low humming sound in his ears started to make him feel very dizzy for a moment.
Closing his eyes for support, Technoblade felt his body getting pulled into a different dimension.
The nether looked darker and gloomier than it looked in Minecraft. It looked like an older version, and Technoblade wondered if there was a texture-pack skill from the shop.
Ping!
Technoblade ignored the system notification and carefully stepped out of the portal. He was in a small enclosed area and heard no monsters in the area. It looked safe enough to take a look. However, there was something he had to do before leaving to find quartz.
Mining the netherrack surrounding his portal, Technoblade replaced everything with cobblestone and lit the place with torches. To prevent unfortunate accidents breaking his only portal back to Aftercraft's overworld, Technoblade created a roof and crafted a door.
It was a shabby nether shelter, but it was good enough.
"Time to find quartz and get out of here," he mused.
Walking in the small enclosed space, Technoblade held a torch in his hand and spotted a vein of quartz exposed on a wall. He had no idea if an iron pickaxe was good enough to mine up nether materials, so he used his unbreaking special pickaxe. There were no fortune enchantments yet, which was slightly regrettable.
"That's right. It's my fault I haven't gotten that enchantment yet," Technoblade sighed. "That was meant to be the chicken farm. I got too side-tracked."
With twelve precious quartz, Technoblade hurried back to his portal and returned to his base.
Returning to the forbidden chamber feeling like a new man, Technoblade slept his worries off for the night and decided to hit the to-do list when the sun rose.
Weekly Power Status
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