Pixlriffs – Expanding the Fossil Dig Site! ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play) [Part 176]

Hello everyone my name is pick Soros and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide hope you guys are having a good day today we’re back here at the archaeological dig site of the site of the fossil that we discovered in yesterday’s episode and thank you so

Much for the support on that episode I’m really excited that people are into seeing stuff like this when we can find it naturally which is very very rarely so I’m very very happy that we’ve got this fossil here and today I’m gonna make good on my promise to expand the

Archaeological dig site a little bit using a little bit of knowledge of terraforming there are a few different schools of thought when it comes to terraforming stuff in Minecraft typically you’ll find people trying to make the landscape either look a little bit more realistic or to make it look a

Little bit more fantastical than Minecraft terrain typically does obviously minecraft terrain is pretty fantastical in itself but it also has this element of randomness to it because it’s all been generated by an algorithm that’s working from numbers and pulling out data for up from your seed number of

Exactly how it’s going to generate the terrain around it which is all very clever and what we’re gonna do is try and emulate the way minecraft builds terrain a little bit to make this desert look like it is the natural desert that would have generated here anyway and

We’re going to try and remove sections of the ocean and water around here just so that I have a little bit more terrain around me to work with and then what we’re going to do is do a bit more terraforming around this site in particular to try and open out the

Earthworks here and make this feel a little bit more like something that’s been set up man-made and I want to avoid basically this kind of hard edge that we have around the outside here with sand and dirt because yeah I’ve basically had to box this whole thing off to make sure

That water didn’t get in and mess with the lava that we have at the bottom of this ravine because a few people in the comments even echoed my sentiment where they said I really like the lava at the bottom of the ravine it kind of gives the whole thing a prehistoric vibe and

Yeah I I agree with those people I think we want to keep that and so we want to avoid any water getting in here as much as possible so what we’re gonna do a lot of the time is work with sand and sandstone and probably a little bit of

Natural stone as well because you would think it that was made entirely out of sand but a quick look at the cave structure in here can tell you a little bit about how minecraft builds the world now anything below a certain level in a desert is typically going to be made out of

Natural stone as minecraft normal cave generation takes over you get stone andesite diorite gravel dirt that kind of stuff that the all blocks that make up the lower terrain generation as you can see from the cross-section of what we have here the sandstone stops a few blocks below sea level

We have sandstone we have sand and then we have the open air above it so anything below that point is probably gonna have to be stone and if you want to emulate the way minecraft builds terrain you have to keep that kind of stuff in mind it’s also all going to be

Full blocks because minecraft doesn’t use any stairs and slabs when it comes to generating the terrain all of the terrain is made out of full blocks obviously you start to get things like slabs introduced in certain sections where there are generated structures like villages mineshaft and that kind of

Thing you’ll see slabs and fences and walls and all kinds of different building blocks get put into those but the terrain is all made out of cubes so that’s what we’re going to be sticking to we’re gonna be sticking to the blocks that are used to make up a desert we

Also have a couple of advantages in the way certain blocks can be placed for example if we are using mainly sand we have the advantage that if we’re filling in a water section here sand is affected by gravity so any sand we place down here is automatically going to stack up

From the bottom upwards meaning that we can stay on the surface place blocks that way not have to worry about breathing underwater or night-vision or bringing a conduit over or anything like that of course if we want to stay true to the natural generation that minecraft has

Then we want to be layering this up with sandstone first and then sand on the top we can use the naturally formed kind of ocean terrain here as a bit of a guideline for where curves are going to start to appear in our in our sort of additions to the desert here and

Eventually we’ll will layer this up with sandstone and then we’ll drop sand in from the top and we’ll create a kind of barrier wall from there we’re going to have to build up the sand a little bit more around the outside because as you can see minecraft terrain doesn’t just

Have straight walls everywhere it’s got curvature to the beaches and the there’s a kind of fall-off that happens as you get further and further out into an ocean biome so we’re going to continue to build up around here we’re going to go to a time-lapse nice and

Early in this episode just so I can get a lot of this stuff done first and then we can come back and work on the dig site some more so we’ll go to a time lapse and I’ll see you guys on the other side Welcome back folks I hope you enjoyed the time-lapse and I’ve got to say it really has made a phenomenal difference even doing the basic amount of terraforming and filling in of land that we’ve already done because it really makes a lot more sense to have this thing be an elongated scar in the

Landscape then have it just kind of cut off here in a box shape and I’ve done a very minimal amount of terraforming of the stone down there just kind of cutting away sections of it to make the cave formation look a little bit more natural and I think it has worked

Wonders I have a couple more details I want to add to this area first of all I should also thank folks in the comments who gave me some feedback about which way the grindstone should go and reminded me that you can actually hang a grindstone from the underside of a block

That actually fills in the gap between the grindstone itself and that piece of wooden fence and that really means that the fence design can continue that way while it still looks like it’s being hung from the other side of this as a pulley system which is perfect

Absolutely what I wanted so thank you guys for that we’re gonna use that one more time because we’re going to add a crane to this dig site area and we’re gonna build it behind here as though it’s been used to lift some of these coal blocks and maybe even some of the

Bone blocks from the fossil itself that have been brought up to the surface so we’re gonna build that in just a moment but first of all I thought I would bring up a couple of things related to terraforming this area which you might find kind of useful and worth noting if

You’re planning on taking on a similar project for a start it’s worth clarifying that minecraft biomes are not created by the player they exist intrinsically as part of the world unlike other games like terraria which have biomes that can actually be created if you place enough blocks for that

Biome in a certain area it actually becomes a desert or an underground cave or something like that here in Minecraft the biomes are absolute they do not change the borders of biomes cannot be manipulated and so even where we have put a whole bunch of sand here I mean we

Have not made this beach right now I am standing in a biome which here on this block registers as an ocean likewise in the area over here that we have filled in this registers as a river as far as biomes are concerned and some of the

Blocks that we can bring in here will react accordingly take a look at the grass over here as an example these grass blocks all think they are in a river biome right now and some of them might even think they’re in an ocean biome if we went out into the ocean a

Little bit further in this direction so let’s say here right on the shore if I take away this and I add in a grass block here it has the color of grass that you would expect from an ocean biome whereas if I go a few blocks inland to a section that was definitely

Part of the original desert biome and I place a grass block here you will notice that the grass is of a very different color it’s a lot yellower and kind of has that dried out look to it and that is why I’ve been using grass paths quite

Extensively around here I mean look at the difference you can see the difference quite clearly even with the blending that occurs between adjacent biomes you can see that that color is a very different kind of color to this grass over here so grass paths help to even

Out the balance between those two and grass paths will look the same in any biome regardless and it also looks quite neat as part of the desert both do you have this kind of squashed down and muddy section as though the sand has been trodden down and maybe mixed with

Water and that kind of stuff could also work pretty well around the edges of the beaches here too but it also allows you to even out those biomes a little bit and and to disguise the fact that this section here is part of the river you

Might want to put in a few of grass blocks here and there primarily because you might want to have some grass growing here and there even in desert climates you can still get plants that grow in arid conditions and so having a little bit of grass maybe not so much

With the flowers but having some some grass here and there can definitely help it feel a little bit more like it it can stand out some and so that’s one of the things I want to do over on this side as well although it does have a tendency to

Tallgrass that i don’t want so it’s gonna take a little bit of trial and error or maybe some precision shearing to get the grass over here the way that I want it one other thing we could do in this area which I actually brought some bone blocks of my own remember you can

Just create bone blocks you don’t have to find them as part of fossils if you have access to bone meal you can create a bone block using where did I put that oh there is down here yes you can create bone blocks using nine bone meal there

But effectively a resource block and you can break them back down into bone meal if you want to just by popping one in the crafting table like so but instead I’m going to add these to the dig site over here as though they are occasional kind of bones and bits and pieces

Sticking out here and there that the the paleontologists around here decided to start digging up because they were evidence that there was a greater earthworks to be made here in order to find the fossil that’s actually down there below alternatively they could even have been brought up here to for

Further inspection you know these are ones that have already been unpacked from the crane we’re about to build but yeah I like the way this place has come together quite a lot and we could always do a little bit more kind of terraforming around here we could build

Some more sand bars and that kind of thing but I really want to keep as much of the sand as possible because I want to smelt it and turn it into glass and use that in my nether hubs so I’m not gonna do any more terraforming over here

Today instead we’re gonna get on and built this crane idea that I had and I think it’s going to look really great over in that area so I’m gonna take this crafting table with me so that we can make a few things like stairs and trap

Doors and this will be a crane design that you guys can build yourself it should be fairly straightforward now that the platform is actually down here the platform is all the way down there I don’t think the crane needs to be coming out over the top of this

Section where the the kind of cargo elevator is I’m going to build it instead back here a little way but with the implication being that it swings around to pick stuff up off the platform once the platform is at kind of ground level if you like so let’s pop this down

Let’s get some of the resources out of here it’s going to be a fairly simple design I also want to go grab some scaffolding out of my scaffolding box which I should have left over here somewhere so when we see cranes in the real world you’ll tend to see them made out of

Kind of lattice they they tend to be made out of struts of metal because those are light and easy to carry around but also can be quite strong when reinforced together like a scaffold right so I thought we could use scaffolding blocks for this however they look a little bit

Insubstantial by themselves even though bamboo is quite a strong material and gets used for scaffolding throughout the world I think it could look a little bit more strongly reinforced and you could imply that it can rotate a little bit better if we add a little something to

It so I’m going to grab these armored stands from out of here and we’re going to do a quick trick with the scaffolding but first I’m gonna go and sleep because I don’t want it to be nighttime while I’m playing with this fairly delicate stuff let’s say that we are going to

Build our crane with the center of it here like so I’m gonna count six blocks back we’re gonna go one two three four five six and that’s going to be the maximum length that the scaffolding bridge we’re gonna make off the top of here will go before it starts dropping

Scaffolding off of the end because remember there’s a build limit to scaffolding once we go one two three four five six the next one we place is actually going to drop down directly onto the center of that piece of scaffolding that we’ve already put down there and that is integral to the design

I want to do here I’m gonna build another scaffolding tower over here so I can use that to place some stuff and this is a design that you guys can copy at home I think you’ll find this kind of clever so we’re going to build out scaffolding to one side and the other

And we’re gonna drop one piece of scaffolding down there like that that’s gonna form the base of our crane and we’re going to surround it with some spruce tears in a moment now we’re going to add two armor stands but dropping them from height so that they can land

Directly on top of the scaffolding platform we’re gonna place one facing that way and we’re gonna place another one facing that way and if we come back down to ground level now you’ll see that these have actually dropped and slotted into each other with a kind of almost

Cog like formation they kind of like that there are right angles to each other so that the shoulders of the armor stands and the kind of hips of the armor stands stand out and they could look like a little piece of machinery if you use your imagination of it then we can

Drop another piece of scaffolding from the edge here but we all have to shift on the scaffolding so let me get out onto one of these pieces there we go so that we can hold shift and drop a piece of scaffolding on top of that that has not broken that has

Actually passed through the armor stands thanks to it being a gravity aided block and has landed so that it around the armor stands now we’re going to repeat this pattern a few more times basically until I run out of armor stands here we’re gonna place two of those and then

A scaffolding block and then just repeat that a couple more times and then eventually when we take down this scaffolding and we take down this setup the set of scaffolding what we end up with is a tower of scaffolding with a reinforcing pillar of armor stands going

Up the middle and I’m really proud of this I think this looks really really nice as a detail you can still come up through it like so and obviously you could put stuff on the armor stands if you wanted to you could add armor to them if you felt like that enhanced the

Look of it but right now we’re just gonna keep it simple we’re just gonna have this wooden pole running up the center of it using armor stands now we’re gonna build some spruce stairs around the outside of that so let me quickly whip up some spruce stairs that

We’re going to use as the base of the crane like so and then all we should need to do is wrap those around the bottom there and that looks like the base of our crane coming up to the top of the scaffold here we’re gonna place one chiseled stone brick that’s going to

Look like the kind of fulcrum I guess it is of the the kind of pivot point of the crane and then from below there on this topmost piece of scaffolding we’re going to add some spruce trapdoors on either side just to conceal the fact that there is scaffolding at work here at all

Because the top part of the scaffolding can look a little bit obvious we’re going to do that on three sides excluding the sight that we want to use as the back and then we’re going to make the crane arm out of stripped spruce wood so I’m gonna place it down our

Spruce wood first we need a couple of different joints of it here and it’s just going to be a diagonal length of wood so we’re just going to make it fairly straightforward like so and yeah I think that’s probably where it’s going to end up now we need to balance that

Out on the other side with a longer arm on this side but we need to make a counterweight for this thing too to make it look like it’s actually a proper crane because cranes have counterweights on the opposite side to balance the load that’s being picked up by the front half

So let me quickly grab some oak fences if I have them no I guess I’ll just use some regular oak wood fair enough let’s just turn those into fences like so perfect that should do and oh do we still have a grindstone in here yes okay

I will grab that for now because we will be using that in a moment so on the back here we want to counterweight I’m probably just gonna put one length of fence on there and then make a big heavy looking stone weight like so we’re just

Gonna have a a plus shape of stone and that looks like it could function pretty well as a counterweight let’s build the arm out on the opposite side scaffolding is also pretty good for this as well acting as a kind of temporary block if

We can see the side of it which I will need to scaffold along a little further there we go that’s pop to on there and that is where the crane arm is going to end we’ll strip the rest of this would take out the scaffolding blocks and on

The underside of here is where we’re going to hang our final grindstone from there we’ll build a kind of neat to access the grindstone there we can build a kind of cage made out of fences from the top down here and then that can hold up a platform that’s got coal blocks and

Bone blocks and that kind of stuff on top of it it’s got to clear a little bit of this stuff out of my inventory before I go to sleep we will need the fences but the rest of this stuff like the stone will bring a little bit of coal

And we’ve got the bones there but the most the majority of this I think we can leave out now I do want to make a little bit more oak wood into trapdoors though if I’ve got it to spare which I think I have plenty at this stage so let’s throw

That back in there and one more thing I was thinking about doing is maybe including rails to make it look like whatever load of cargo we’ve got in here has been strapped down maybe with a detector rail on the top how about that so the fences are once again going to

Act as ropes holding up this kind of stable platform in the middle we don’t want that one there let’s bring these out one more time in a kind of step formation like this and on the other side of each of these we’re going to add a spruce stair inverted like so

Connecting this framework of fences to the platform which we’re probably going to make exclusively out of oak slabs it’s actually going to begin one block below that like so but we’re going to have the corners raised up a little bit so that it’s kind of cradling some stuff

In the middle and that’s where around the outside we can start to place these trapdoors that look like they are kind of holding the stuff in place a little bit more firmly in the center here we’ll place a couple of coal blocks maybe a bone block or two like so

And I think that will probably do maybe we’ll throw a torch in there as well just to make sure stuff doesn’t spawn up here in the night if we don’t want it to and last of all we’re going to build rails over the top here like so so that

It looks like the cargo is strapped down we’re gonna take that one out and we’re going to add a third rail on the back there and with the detector rail in the middle that looks like it’s being held down pretty well if I was to use a

Fourth regular rail for that it would try and curve towards one track or the other so I decided to use a redstone rail it could be a powered rail or an activator rail if you prefer but I like the fact that the detector rail has that

Kind of square thing in the middle as though that’s like the release that’s going to unpack everything if they need to take all of the cargo out so that’s our cargo crane all done and I really like how that looks in the context of this dig site I think that’s a really

Good addition to the area along with all the terraforming and stuff like that we could add a couple of these around the site if we wanted to just help it kind of have a more coherent feel but I think this is turning out really really great

I’m super happy with it and I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode of the Minecraft Survival Guide that is where we’re going to leave it for today but don’t forget to leave a like on this episode if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and I’ll see you

Guys soon take care bye for now You