How To Farm Dripstone! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide (1.18 Tutorial Let’s Play) [S2 E55]

Hey folks pixar if here just a quick update before the episode begins weird i know but this is the format i decided to go with yesterday while i was recording this video minecraft announced that they had published an experimental snapshot the first look at the deep dark the

Ancient cities and the warden for minecraft 1.19 the wild update while i’m aware that this has happened and i did check the update out on stream i plan to make a video about it but i didn’t want to break my streak of uploading survival guide monday through friday five days a

Week so today’s episode of survival guide is obviously going to be what i was working on at the time but i know a lot of people are going to be very excited for the warden i’m not going to spoil it in this episode but in the next episode i’m uploading tomorrow on

Saturday i’m doing a kind of a bonus video where we’ll be taking a look at that including a couple of highlights from the twitch stream where i encountered the warden for the first time and a little bit of a youtube video analyzing what’s going on with the deep

Dark the warden and the ancient cities since i know a lot of people will have expected me to make a video about that then don’t worry it’s gonna turn up tomorrow it’s just that i wanted to make sure this survival guide episode went out on time so look out for that

Tomorrow and in the meantime i hope you enjoy this episode of the minecraft survival guide hello everyone my name is pixel riffs and welcome back to the minecraft survival guide i hope you’re all having a good day i don’t know why i’m looking at this wall because the rest of the

Cave here is much more interesting to look at and today i’m going to look at a bunch of this cave we’re actually going to go around lighting up some of this area so that we have a few fewer mob spawns to deal with and we’re also going

To take a look at the functionality of drip stone what exactly drip stone does and how we can use that a little bit later i think first though a bit of exploration we’ve done a bit of exploring further down here i think i came here just looking for iron in one

Of the episodes where we were dealing with villager trading but i think for now what i’m going to do is run around and light up some of this especially some of the areas like back behind here that we aren’t necessarily going to see from the front but will spawn mobs if

Given the opportunity so all we really need to do is spam a bunch of torches around these darker areas and we should be okay one of my goals for this as a base location is really to preserve the atmosphere that this is a dark cave

Though so i don’t want to put too many torches around i’m not putting them every other block or anything what i’m really trying to do is eliminate the majority of the spawning spaces in here and then we should be able to handle whatever is left over my main point

Being that one or two creeper spawning spaces in here is not a problem but i don’t want the entire place to be a mob farm and speaking of mob farms we’ll probably get to one of those sooner or later but not at this location i don’t

Think now for the moment i’m planning on concealing most of the torches that i’m going to place around here behind some of the drip stone features themselves and so in some cases where we just need to light up a small area i might choose

To cut a hole in the ceiling and place a torch up there because it will light up the drip stone stalactite formations and the light will just about reach the ground preventing mobs from spawning the rest of the time we’ll put torches a block down in the floor which will be

More effective at preventing mob spawns in this area because we’re lighting the blocks at floor level but i don’t want to have the entire cave so evenly lit that there aren’t shadowy recesses and dark spots here and there within the cave but hopefully in the meantime it should prevent the creepers from doing

Too much damage and hopefully it will help the video look a little bit better as well and i think one of my long-term goals for this area is going to be to light the area up with lighting that feels like it belongs here rather than just torches that are here for the sake

Of utility i like the lanterns and the kind of the street lamps of sorts that we’ve been putting down over there and i like the idea of decorating some of this area so that it looks like it’s been explored but not just by a player placing torches everywhere we can still

Use torches in places where it seems like they make sense but there are so many other lighting options available to us that it seems a shame not to use more of them while i’m running around here i’m also getting a good look at the different angles there are in this cave

And areas that we might want to turn into kind of highlights i guess the places where we can see some of the entrance gives us a good view of the rest of the cave and the jungle biome outside also gives us a good view of the portal from a distance over there give

Or take the zombies that are getting in the way and that allows us to consider the aesthetic side of this base a little bit more where exactly we want stuff to stand out and where we’ll be standing so that we can look over some of the other

Things that we have built sight lines like that a kind of an underrated concept in base building the kind of thing that you want to consider if you’re more about the aesthetics than the functionality and really i think we’re going to try and go for a mix of

Both here i’ve just run out of that first stack of torches and it’s pretty clear to me that we’ve only lit up a fraction of this cave in fact the cave has a couple of offshoots further back which might be worth exploring because i have no idea where some of them go and

If we stand over here near the entrance that’s created some points of light here and there some a little bit stronger than i’d like actually but it does at least give some areas a bit more focus like for example over here that whole shelf back there can be lit up so it

Makes sense i think that we’ll end up building some stuff over there the ceiling is going to remain fairly dark unless we put some light up there and frankly i don’t see a great deal of stuff going up there unless maybe we have some winches or something attached

To these drip stone columns as though the miners are going up there to excavate some of this stone pillar which might not be a great move because it seems like it’s a support pillar for the entire cave but you know in minecraft it’s going to hold itself up so that’s

Not something we need to worry about in terms of what spawns mobs of course we don’t need to worry about anything spawning on the ceiling so we’re gonna focus our lighting efforts on the floor for now there is a narrow shelf back here that leads down into what feels

Like a bit of a ravine we have a touch of drip stone down here but i don’t think this really leads anywhere else perhaps worth lighting up just so we can see that there isn’t anything here there’s a whole section of the cave back here as well some more drip stones some

More copper ore and another entrance out at more or less ground level in the nearby forest that has its own little set of offshoots and ravines as well but it looks like this area is a little smaller than our entrance area which could mean we could do something with it

A little later we’ve obviously got to expand a great deal in order to really want to put anything back here makes for a pretty nice back porch though leading out onto the plane’s biome over there as well we could even fly out through here if we wanted to make a speedy escape

Assuming we had the elytra and the rockets on us but this whole area wraps back around into our central cave and can even peek through at roughly the level of the lake that’s right by our entrance so some of this is going to be a little bit more visible there’s also

An area where the cave dips further down into the ground so we’ve got to consider the depth of this as well instead of just what’s immediately around her the drip stone even continues further down into the world i don’t know if it will reach all the way to bedrock i don’t

Know if the deep slate caves underneath here will still be drip stone but it at least seems to dip down over here where it heads into deep slate territory but it looks like the drip stone more or less ends there once again torches barely lit up a fraction of this the

Space is so huge but it also makes it nice and easy to spot mobs coming at us from a distance as long as part of the area is at least well lit so i’ll take our time exploring and expanding into a bit more of this space and eventually it

Will start to feel a bit more like home for now though let’s talk about drip stone and what we can do with it because as you’ll see from our surroundings there’s a fair amount of water around and as the name suggests drip stone is known for water dripping from the tips

And forming mineral deposits here on the ground this is actually how stalagmites and stalactites form in a lot of caves in the real world is that water dripping down through the rocks kind of filtering down through cracks and and crevices in the rocks will bring little deposits of

Minerals with it as it drips and it’s dripping over potentially centuries and what that does is leave small amounts of minerals as the water like dries on the ground over time that builds up into a small cone of rock and as the water drips on top of that it deposits more of

The minerals until the cone of rock grows larger and larger and larger but since this is minecraft and the base of one of these pillars of pointed drip stone can only occupy the space of a single block it will only take four pieces of drip stone before if we build

That on top like that this won’t get any wider than it is right now and the cool part actually is that there is still a very gradual slope in the space of the hitboxes of these pieces of drip stone as you can see from the wire frame there hopefully it’s

Going to come across in the video the wireframe of the bottom piece is slightly bigger than the wire frame of the piece above it meaning that you can actually use this as a staircase and step up onto pointed drip stone that is four blocks high once it is five blocks

Tall though you can jump up onto the first piece but then these two pieces in the middle are of exactly the same width so it’s unfortunately not possible to use it as a staircase beyond that and if we take one piece off the top there it

Becomes a staircase again that is a very minor very trivial aspect of drip stone which we don’t need to worry too much about unless you’re planning on using it as a parkour course or a sort of invisible staircase somewhere in your build what we are more concerned with is

Drip stones interaction with water let’s use this area over here as an example we’ve got some water flowing down from above us in fact i think this actually feeds in from the large lake that we have over here if we take some water and

Place it on top of a block of drip stone we’ll probably for the sake of this example surround that with some other stones so that the water source is up here and it’s not flowing down the sides there if we now place a piece of pointed drip stone directly underneath that

You’ll notice particles of water forming there and dripping and that will happen with other pieces of pointed drip stone as well but each of these has a solid block above them so they’re not dripping water as frequently you’ll notice that yeah a particle of water forms on that

One occasionally but those are just the static they don’t actually have any function whereas the one up here that has the water source directly above that drip stone block there is actually affecting the functionality of this piece of pointed drip stone as the drip stone drips down here onto this block

There is a chance for it to form another piece of pointed drip stone facing upwards by dripping like this it’s mimicking the action of those mineral deposits being formed over centuries in the real world and one of two things can happen in fact two things can sometimes

Happen at once the drips falling onto this block can cause a piece of pointed drip stone to form facing upwards a stalagmite or the stalactite that’s dripping in the first place can grow one stage larger and it will do this all by itself by which i mean the process doesn’t like

Destroy the drip stone block above it it can basically run like this indefinitely making pointed drip stone a renewable resource and since as we covered in the last episode four-pointed drip stone can be crafted in a crafting interface into a drip stone block drip stone block

Becomes renewable as well so in order to start the process of farming pointed drip stone and thereby drip stone blocks you need to begin with a water source a drip stone block and some pointed drip stone now it’s very important that the water source is above a drip stone block

If you just put like a regular block of stone here with a water source above it and attach the pointed drip stone on the underside of that it’s not going to work the game requires the water source to be above a block of drip stone and the

Pointed drip stone to be below it in order for this to function as intended and it’s not always immediately apparent that you’ve done something wrong when you set up a farm with this kind of stuff because it’s a very slow process we’ve been hanging around here talking

About this for a couple of minutes already and it still hasn’t formed any more pointed drip stone either up here or down here so i think in order to demonstrate this on a more effective scale we will have to make a much larger farm than just one block dripping onto

Another we’re gonna leave that there though next to the lantern and maybe we’ll come back later and check in on how that one is doing right now i think a more sensible place for us to put a permanent drip stone farm is going to be over here by our big geode portal

Because in future if we want drip stone for other projects we’re probably going to come back here and instead of carving it out of our surroundings we’re going to turn to our left coming out of the portal and a drip stone farm will be over here nice and accessible so we can

Grab what we need and then make off with it go somewhere else and start building so to get us started of course we’re gonna have to take down some of the stalactites in this area grab a bunch of the pointed drip stone we’re going to

Need a fair amount of this in order to start farming it we’ll also need a good handful of the drip stone blocks themselves since the pointed drip stone will need to be placed on those and i’ll need to create an infinite water source around here luckily there are plenty of

Water sources in the floor of the cave so that’s gonna be nice and straightforward there’s also a little hollow down here that i haven’t really pointed out yet but that looks cool actually that leads outwards into this lake bordering on the jungle wouldn’t have even seen this if it hadn’t lead

Out from the cave over here our proximity to that outer wall means that we don’t really have a huge amount of room to grow stuff but that’s okay because this farm can be relatively compact to begin with in fact this is going to be a farm that will set up for

Height more than full width because frankly the main limiting factor here is going to be how tall we can grow these for the moment at least we are going to be farming the drip stone manually we’re just going to be breaking it all up with our own pickaxe although in future we’ll

Look into automatic ways that the drip stone can be broken for now though if we take a look at this it’s not going to be possible for me to mine that last spike of pointed drip stone just by standing on the ground here and that’s actually a

Good thing because it means if we’re walking around breaking off all of the fully grown pointed grip stone later it’s not going to hang down far enough for us to break these and have to replace them so i think up there is where we’re going to make our shelf of

Drip stone blocks and then we’ll hang all of the pointed drip stone from underneath that so yeah this row of stone blocks up here is going to be replaced with drip stone blocks and the key here of course is going to be to make sure we have water sources above

All of these so we’ll need to dig out an area for a pool of water up here as well to make sure all of the drip stone can do its thing and you’ll notice that i’ve been mentioning water sources the entire time because unfortunately flowing water

Will not do the job if for example we just put a water source in one corner of this and it flowed all the way out to cover in most of the area here this block here in the corner is the one with the water source directly above it and

If we place some pointed drip stone on that we’ll start to see all of those drips condensing on the tip of the pointed drip stone and dripping down here quite regularly now we’re going to place pointed drip stone on all of the other blocks around here it’s kind of

Difficult to focus on just one when all of the others are dripping around the outside of it but yeah the others aren’t dripping nearly as much as that one is it has to be a water source over the top of this it cannot simply be flowing

Water if you want the drip stone to propagate and continue to grow i just put another row of the farm in without any water sources above it at all and you’ll notice these pointed drip stone are dripping just as much as all of the others are except for that one in the

Corner that’s actually going to be growing stuff because it has a water source above it and a zombie pigman seems to have snuck in from the nether portal so i’m just going to quickly deal with him just to fully illustrate my point here i’m going to leave this section of the

Farm alone for a while with just one water source over there in the corner and we’ll come back we’ll see how much that has grown and how much all of the others haven’t one last note before we do that though the block on the bottom

Here as long as it is a full block of some sort of material does not matter it will grow pointed drip stone on wood if it wants to it doesn’t need to be a drip stone block on the floor below the pointed drip stone it just needs to be a

Drip stone block above it pointed drip stone does rely on random game ticks in order to grow though in much the same way as crops like sugarcane and all of that kind of stuff does as long as i stay within 128 blocks of this drip stone over here that’s going to be what

Matters but the other side of this cave might actually be further away than that so i’ll have to spend a bit more time around here doing a bit more pathway building and seeing what we can come up with hey folks welcome back so i did a little

Bit more building which i’ll show you in a second and i was logged in for i’d say about two and a half hours give or take some of which i wasn’t really around this area i did end up going and exploring a bit more of the caves and as you can see

What i was saying earlier holds true this back corner here is the only one of our drip stone pieces that has grown and the only one that has left a piece of pointed drip stone coming up from the floor so it’s pretty clear at this point

That the only ones we’re going to be able to harvest from are the ones which have a full water source above them so i’ve decorated this out a little bit i’ve added a bunch of fences and fence gates to give this thing kind of a framework and put a bunch of spruce logs

Around here since spruce logs seem to be really what we’re going with to decorate this place our last move of course is going to be to make sure this whole thing is closed off so the water doesn’t escape in fact i think i might lay a couple more spruce logs up here since

I’ve got a decent amount of those with me and we’ll combine the water sources to flood this area making sure that all of these drip stone blocks have water above them they should now all be capable of producing pointed drip stone and as you can see they are dripping a

Whole lot more i might have to make sure this lantern gets moved as well maybe we’ll hang it from the center here there we go that sort of lights the place up quite nicely make sure this back corner doesn’t have zero block light no we’re good so these things aren’t running on

Any kind of timer it’s all based on random ticks so expanding the field of pointed drip stone here is going to mean there are just more chances for these pointed drip stone to grow or to deposit drip stone here on the ground and if we were going really industrial with this

We’d probably make this thing about four times as big there you go we actually saw one grow right in front of our eyes that’s quite nice and when i just looked down from that this one behind it has immediately produced another piece of pointed drip stones so it’s already

Working as intended and in future we will look into ways of farming this with a bit more of an automated angle but as of right now i think this is really just for demonstration purposes to show you what can be done with drip stone because considering all of the pointed drip

Stone that we have in this area it would be much easier for me to just go and tear down some of the sections like this that we’re barely even going to look at and bring a bunch of that pointed drip stone to whatever building project we

Had in mind then it would be to farm it this way the main reason you might want to learn about farming it this way is if you’re in a situation where you’ve had to buy drip stone and pointed drip stone from villagers and the wandering trader

Because you can’t find a drip stone cave and you really want to build with it or if you’re stuck in a situation where your resources are limited other people on your server have taken the drip stone caves over and don’t want you moving any of the resources that kind of thing it’s

Possible to farm this thing which is why we should know how to do it there are a couple of other things worth knowing about pointed drip stone though and for that we’re gonna have to go looking for a little bit of iron in this cave because i didn’t bring any with me over

From our main storage area luckily for me the iron in this cave while not quite as plentiful as the copper is still around and if i remember to switch to my fortune pickaxe i might actually be able to bring home enough of it 15 iron will

Do and while that smelts over here in the furnace i can take a brief detour to show you what i’ve been doing when it comes to building i think we get the best view of it all from this still dark section of the platform over here

Because i’ve been working a bit on the entrance and on these platforms we wanted to make sure that they looked a bit better supported so i’ve started to put in sections here where the beams double up with still having a little bit of space in between because i either

Want to put some accent blocks there or just from below at what i think of as ground level in the cave i think it looks quite nice you can kind of see through these to the walkways beyond but you can’t tell that the walkways are only one block thin so it’s a neat

Little illusion i’ve also been working on this area down here and what you see here is some moss that i went and farmed in the deep slate sections of this cave a few azalea leaves arranged around the outside and growing into the water as though they’re kind of like algae or

Pond scum or something like that i’ve left the natural vines that came in here from the jungle all down there but on this side i put in some cave vines with glowberries so that those can illuminate the area a little bit better i don’t want to light the entire area underneath

This up but i do like the fact that it’s got a bit of light and dark down there directly under the entrance i’ve doubled the depth of these pillars although i’ve left the width more or less intact it’s a two by one now and i’ve started growing some glow-liking up from the

Bottom of them which serves to highlight them in the darkness of the cavern but also kind of has this impression that stuff is growing up or the water is leaving deposits of minerals or salt or something like that i’m not certain what kind of acidity this lake would have but

Maybe it’s affecting the wood around here last of all our copper lamp shades over here have started to weather a little bit oh they started to oxidize and these are the exposed types now and you’ll notice that the exposed copper has a little bit of a kinship in terms

Of color with the drip stone of our surroundings i’m not certain if that’s a good thing or a bad thing yet i don’t want them to blend in too much as we look around here but from this angle they look quite good against the green backdrop of the jungle we can maybe

Choose to wax those and preserve them quite carefully so that the ones nearest the elements the kind of exposed area where the wind is kind of blowing into the cave and everything could potentially be more weathered than the ones further inside that are slightly better preserved because the atmosphere

Inside the cave is a little more stable these are all decisions that we’re going to have to make over time as we expand this area into a bit more of a base but i think i’ve got this platform to where i want it now where i can start to have

Um maybe a cargo elevator kind of thing down just like a big platform over there that’s going to lead down into the center of the cave and it’s not going to be functional in the sense that we’ll be able to use it as a player but we could

Maybe work some functionality in here and there least of all we could have a ladder somewhere around because otherwise it’s a heck of a drop down there and one thing i’m really happy about actually is that these lamps are spaced far enough apart that the areas

Of the bridge that get kind of dark are roughly in the middle and this right here is the only block that has a zero block light rating meaning that mobs could spawn here except it’s got a trap door in that space which is going to block mob spawns because it’s obstructed

It’s not a full air block everything else around here the guard rails the platform itself any other solid blocks where mobs could spawn are lit with at least light level one which means they can’t spawn up here and the entire platform keeps some of that aesthetic of

Shadiness that i really wanted the light and shadow in here is something i want to play with a lot and i’m very happy that we’ve been able to do that anyway back to where we were we want to grab the iron out of here and i’m going to

Use the crafting table over here which i should probably move to where the rest of my materials are really we’ll plunk that down over here and we’ll use it to make two cauldrons because one of the things we can do with the pointed drip

Stone over here is use it to fill up a cauldron with water we’re going to pop a couple of those down here the drip stone is going to drip instead of onto the floor into the basin of this cauldron which isn’t going to have a huge impact

At first but slowly but surely the cauldrons will start to fill up with layers of water in the meantime some of the pointed drip stone pieces are growing and propagating more pointed drip stone on the floor so i think we’re going to grab a bit more of this from

The ceiling and shortly after that we can take a look at our cauldrons and we find that one of them has already filled up about a third of the way with water and these correspond to the levels of water that you’ll normally find in a

Cauldron if you fill it up with a bucket of water and then take out some of the water using glass bottles so this can effectively be an aid to potion brewing if you want to have the drip stone automatically fill up a cauldron full of water you can use that in your potion

Brewing to have effectively like a renewable water source and we know that we can fill up glass bottles from an infinite water source anyway but it acts as something that makes the cauldron a bit more viable to use in brewing before we wrap up this episode i should note

That it’s also possible to do this with lava if you place a lava source above the pointed drip stone block instead of a water source drips of lava will come down from the tip of the pointed drip stone and with a cauldron underneath it it will fill the cauldron with lava that

You can then collect with a bucket and effectively that allows you to farm lava sources if you remember back to the time we talked about lava not forming infinite sources this effectively bypasses that by allowing you to farm lava from cauldrons and that is something we are definitely going to do

Around here in future but for now i think we’ve covered enough about the mechanics of this today and done a bit of base building i think that’s where we’re going to wrap up this episode of the minecraft survival guide as i mentioned at the top of the episode

Please stay tuned for tomorrow’s special video about the warden snapshot that was just released today when i was recording but in the meantime thank you so much for watching this episode of the minecraft survival guide my name has been pixelriffs please don’t forget to leave a like on this video if you

Enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and i’ll see you folks soon take care bye for now you