Pixlriffs – The Deep Dark & The Warden! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide S3 ▫ Tutorial Let’s Play [Ep.47]

Hello everyone my name is Pixar ifs and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide I hope you’re all having a good day in today’s episode we are going back under the mountain we are going to take our first steps into the deep dark biome and we’re going to be talking about the

Skulk family of blocks down there we are not going to approach the ancient city just yet we’re going to save that for another time because that’s another challenge entirely with its own set of rewards but before we do any of that I wanted to leave night to fall for a

Little while because I’ve spent a bit of time repairing all of my tools including some of the tools we’re going to be using today we’re going to need the silk touch hoe that I have stashed here in my Ender Chest but I wanted to make sure

That while I was repairing my tools a few day and night cycles happened without me sleeping because we need to talk about something that we’ve not yet really had a chance to talk about a great deal and that is Phantoms Phantoms are flying creatures that will spawn at

Night if you have not slept for at least three days days and so at the moment I should have a large enough tally of days where I haven’t slept that at some point Phantoms will appear at which point we can start to explain what they are and

How to avoid them I’m also going to take the time to fight a couple of Enderman since they’re appearing around here because we do need some ender pearls For an upcoming episode where we’ll be traveling to the stronghold and potentially going to the end Dimension where Enderman originates so getting a

Couple of extra ender pearls is going to be worth the additional damage to my armor and my shield if I uh end up taking a few hits from these guys and even with only looting two on this sword I managed to pick up six ender pearls so

That’s really not bad well it’s kind of unfortunate that it’s now raining and it turns out that I had slept more recently than I expected to because the uh Phantoms didn’t show up on the first couple of nights and I had to spend a couple more nights hanging around but

These are Phantoms and the way they attack you is to swoop down from the sky and they turn kind of slowly so if you straight brief in a circle you can sort of avoid them which I’m doing here to get a better look at them but they are technically speaking Undead mobs they

Are Knight Terrors of sorts that sort of appear when you end up not sleeping for a couple of nights they are the wraiths that appear almost as part of your imagination from being so tired and not having slept and the longer you spend not sleeping the more Phantoms will

Appear during the night so it is possible to get a great deal of them circling in the sky above you if you’ve not slept for a long enough period of time if you manage to kill them they drop Phantom membrane which doesn’t have a great deal of uses to us right now but

Can be used to brew potions of slow falling kind of gives you the ability to Glide a little bit in the same way that the Phantoms do and that can be quite useful in a variety of situations it will also prevent you from taking any full damage on contact with the ground

Since you simply fall too slowly for the full damage to have any impact but of course in in order to acquire any Phantom membrane you have to spend a couple of nights not sleeping and then deal with the Phantoms when they arrive which is easy enough to do with a sword

And a bow and proper strafing technique but if you’re not expecting them they can be a little bit difficult to manage if you want to avoid Phantoms appearing the solution is fairly obvious make sure you sleep whenever night falls and make sure you sleep at least once every three

Days this will reset a behind the scenes insomnia counter which counts down to a night when Phantoms will appear but Phantoms also do not appear if you are in caves or any kind of indoor environment so as long as you have a solid opaque block over your head

Phantoms are not gonna spawn in the sky they will simply spawn the next time you go out at night when you haven’t slept for a few days additionally since they are Undead mobs if it isn’t raining when day comes or if you manage to sleep in a

Bed both to reset your insomnia counter and to skip to daytime they’ll start taking fire damage and burning in the sun in the same way that other dead mobs like zombies and skeletons do the Smite in Shaman will deal a little extra damage to them so that’s worth knowing

As well but generally speaking Phantoms are actually kind of weak they don’t survive too much direct attack it’s just kind of difficult to hit them if they’re floating around in the air we’ll probably encounter Phantoms a few more times even though I sleep fairly diligently and so we’re going to add

Phantom membrane to our mob drop item filters here and you’ll notice I’ve already put ender pearls in that Hopper there from having collected 10 overnight since ender pearls only stacked a 16 instead of 64 we’ll probably find that that Hopper empties itself relatively quickly and there’s already one waiting

For us in the chest there but now I’ve had a chance to explain Phantoms we’re gonna Dodge the rain by heading back down into the mountain cave and visiting the deep dark biome for the first time you may recall that our last sighting of a deep dark biome happened down here in

The lower regions of the world when we discovered this abandoned mine shaft in the episode talking about the additions of the caves and cliffs update so I’m going to find a nice easy spot to drop down here probably once again relying on a bucket of water to make sure I can

Make a sensible descent and it looks like the bucket of water I used last time is still left over here this seems like a relatively sensible place to drop our bucket of water so I’m gonna hop on down here and immediately try and defend myself from any skeletons and before we

Go too much further I will note that I’ve brought two stacks of wool with me of a nice visible color I’ve picked yellow in this case and that’s not because I plan to make a bunch of beds or anything while I’m down here it is

Because the deep dark biome has a lot of mechanics that have to do with sound or more specifically vibrations and when the deep dark biome was added to the game wall was given the property of dampening vibrations so that they cannot be detected by some of the blocks in

Here which specialize in detecting vibrations so as you can see right here we have a little offshoot of the deep dark biome that has crept up into the stone layers you’ll typically find deep dark biomes generating lower down in the world usually around the Deep slate

Layers and it is much more likely to be found underneath mountainous biomes we actually need to be quite careful about being detected in here because there are some consequences if we are but for now it is safe for us to walk on these blocks these are skulk blocks these ones

Here which if I break drop some experience orbs and skulk vein which cannot be harvested using your fists or even most tools and even if I use a pickaxe on some of this stuff it is still just going to break down into experience orbs if I use silk touch on

It however that will drop the blocks themselves and that is true of the skulk vein blocks here even though those are kind of similar to Glow lichen or vines in the way that they are placed you can place them on any surface of a solid block and the skull blocks once picked

Up with silk touch can be moved around and they can always be broken later so these form quite an interesting way of storing a small amount of experience orbs they’ll only give you one point of experience per block though so typically speaking it isn’t always worth breaking

These down as any kind of experience Farm the most effective tool for harvesting skulk is a hoe with silk touch I’ve got efficiency Forum Breaking 2 on this one and mending so we can quite easily break down a bunch of the blocks from around here and carry home

As much skulk as we want to which is great because I want to add some to my storage system but as we go deeper into this deep dark biome it is more and more likely that the skulk blocks have generated some of these this is a skulk

Sensor and this is the thing that’s detecting vibrations as we make them in the surrounding environment if I walk around on these blocks without sneaking you’ll notice that this thing lights up very briefly and a particle sort of like a sound wave emerges from me and is

Picked up by the skulk sensor if I sneak on the other hand I should be able to travel around without it noticing me too much although the splashing I make in the water is also going to alert the skulk sensor so the water being here is

Actually a kind of tricky part of this whole environment we can once again pick these up with a silk touch tool and the hoe is the most effective tool with which to do that but it’s worth noting that it’s not just your footsteps that will end up triggering the skulk sensors

In fact anything that makes a vibration nearby can trip these skulk sensors and cause them to detect the vibration so if I place a torch over here which I’m gonna have to do for a few of these videos because it’s going to be necessary to see in this environment on

Camera you can see that the torch being placed is detected by the skulk sensor A vibration particle travels and causes the sensor to activate briefly other mobs will also trigger skulk sensors so the fact that this is zombie spawner seems to have generated here is potentially a problem although the skulk

Sensors activating on their own is not a problem in and of itself it’s the consequences of them activating that are a little more dangerous and as we look back down this way I noticed some of those consequences right there in front of us so I’m gonna do my best to descend

Here without these blocks over here being activated but it’s going to potentially be a little difficult because the water is Flowing down here and as I noted before the skulk sensors might actually detect me descending in the water so I’m going to be a little bit more careful here and I’m going to

Drop down using these wall blocks you’ll notice a couple of those lighting up and that’s probably because they are detecting a bat flying around in the vicinity but that’s okay because it is only the actions of a player that should trigger the more dangerous elements of this skulk environment dropping down

Onto these blocks of wool which I’ll Place torches against just so they can be slightly easier seen we should be able to descend into this Cavern layer without being detected by these I’m going to try my best not to take any full damage as well and then we’re going

To sneak up to this block here this is a skulk Shrieker and these are the dangerous part of the deep dark because anytime one of these is activated it sends out a noise which is going to effectively function as an alarm for a creature called the warden in order to

Avoid being detected by this one of the best things we can do in this instance is to check that there are not any other Shrieker blocks around and to mine this with a hoe and there you go that block breaking was actually detected by a bunch of the skulk sensors but the skulk

Shrieker could not sound the alarm because we had already broken it at this point it is safe for us to light up this area except unfortunately there was another Shrieker hiding over there behind the pillar and that is when some of the more dangerous stuff starts to

Take effect we get a brief instance of this Darkness effect where this pulsing wave of Darkness rolls in and then recedes and we have received our first strike I’m gonna try my best to deactivate this skulk Shrieker here by removing that and thankfully there were no other skull streakers in the vicinity

So once again we are not going to be further detected by that effectively in order to spawn the warden you have to be detected by those sculpt shriekers four times you get four strikes and then the warden will appear and at that point you’d better have an escape plan in mind

Because you might need to start running the deep dark biome itself does not inherently spawn mobs but other mobs May wander in from adjacent biomes and when they do if you end up killing them near one of these a skulk Catalyst something kind of interesting happens there we go

First of all we get the challenge advancement called it spreads and you’ll notice that the zombies did not drop any experience and Bubbles started to emerge along the surface of the skulk when a mob is killed near one of these blocks a skulk Catalyst that effectively spreads

The skulk absorbing the XP into it and creating more skulk blocks out of anything that can be converted in the surrounding area and down here that’s usually Stone type blocks that is deep slate regular Stone any of the andesite diorite or Granite any of the the Decorative Stone types and anything that

Cannot have skulk spread to it will instead have this skulk vein grown over the top of it and that will include things like ore blocks so don’t worry you’re not going to be missing out on diamonds or deep slick copper in this case or any other ore blocks if you end

Up spreading skulk nearby those will never be taken over by anything other than the skulk vein whereas the stone blocks in the vicinity will be completely converted into these skulk blocks to make the area a little bit safer I’m going to try and tidy up a few

More of these skulk sensors we can also take those with us if we want to and I’ll take a sculpt Catalyst with me as well so we can observe its effects in a place other than the deep dark bio foreign here is a great example of what I

Mentioned earlier though you can see down there that a couple of zombies have wandered into this area where there are skulk shriekers and sensors being tripped by the zombies activity every time they walk around the sensors are detecting their footsteps and they will even relay those vibrations to other

Nearby sensors on the other hand this zombie isn’t tripping any of the skulk shriekers because the shriekers are designed to only recognize player activity as something that sets off the warden in addition to that once you have collected skulk Shrieker blocks you can basically do whatever you want to them

And not be at risk of spawning the warden it is only the shriekers that exist in a naturally generated state in their environment that actually trigger the warden appearing so right now if I jump on top of this Shrieker it’s going to make the same horrendous noise but

You’ll notice no heartbeat no rolling Darkness effect and nothing that’s going to trigger the warden now I’m gonna sneak around to the other side of this deep dark area and intentionally trigger a couple of the skulk Shrieker blocks down here so that we can summon the

Warden and get a Look At Its Behavior and this is going to be the creepiest thing that we have intentionally done in the survival guide so far but I think it’s worth paying attention to so over here we should see a skulk Shrieker block this one seems kind of isolated

From any of the skulk sensors so this one isn’t going to be tripped by us triggering any sensors nearby however if I walk on top of it as I just did with the one that I set down as an example you’ll notice that that will trigger the darkness effect and we’ll get that

Rolling yeah there we go the Shadows start to creep in around us we can use this as a kind of test environment in order to spawn the warden and observe its movements we’re going to trigger the Shrieker once more and you’ll notice that every time we have triggered a

Shrieker so far if we take a look at the subtitles in the bottom corner now that we have three strikes it says the warden is drawing closer on our fourth attempt we should get a little bit further away from that origin point because there we go we hear the sound of the

Warden and of course I immediately track myself in a hole which is a very poor idea now the warden should appear somewhere over there in that skulk infested area there it is and within a certain radius of the warden we will have that Darkness effect that I was

Talking about earlier so we need to be a little bit wary of how close we are to the warden because if we get too close we’re not going to be able to see it now the first thing to explain about the warden is it is completely blind it does

Not navigate by seeing the player or mobs around it instead it can sense you in two different ways the first being sound and the second being smell wardens will use those tendrils on their head similar to the skulk sensors to detect the environment around them in the same

Radius that a skulk sensor has more or less it’s about eight to ten blocks you’ll typically find they’re able to hear you and they can detect the same ranges of vibrations that skulk sensors can so anything like placing blocks firing protection tiles stepping near it will all activate the warden’s receptors

And it should try to zero in on your location so sneaking or walking around on wall blocks is going to be vital once you put a bit of distance between yourself and the warden it will still try to sniff you out you’ll hear it sniffing you’ll observe it sniffing the

Air around you and it will prioritize the smell of a player so if it senses a player in the surrounding 25 blocks or so it’s going to try and seek you out otherwise it will prioritize the smell of another nearby mob since the deep dark biome itself does not naturally

Spawn Hostile Mobs you’ll find that typically the warden wanders around aimlessly looking for a Target and after 60 seconds without a Target it will simply burrow into the ground and disappear again but the problem with this deep dark biome we found ourselves on the edge of is that Mobs Can wander

In from surrounding biomes and it’s entirely possible that one of these creepers or skeletons or spiders is going to cross paths with the warden and it’s going to take notice of them at which point if they make enough noise near the wardener if they end up touching the warden it’s going to get

Angry at them and the angrier it gets the more likely it is to attack at the moment this Warden mostly seems inclined to chase down whatever is beyond that wall but I don’t think it’s going to be able to reach it even though it does have a ranged attack and a melee attack

Both of which are incredibly powerful so the reason I’m not trying to fight this thing right now is that is a fight I’m not equipped to win the warden is effectively designed as a stealth experience you’re supposed to sneak around it using the environment and using blocks that you have brought with

You to evade it instead of trying to attack it head on it is technically possible to fight the warden head on but without significantly weakening it buffing yourself and coming equipped with things like totems of undying that can save your life instead of killing you or enchanted golden apples that will

Give you extra health and a bit of damage resistance you’re going to find that the fight is one you lose very quickly but having observed the warden a little bit I think it’s probably best for us to leave at this point because because it seems like the warden is

Going to be constantly detecting whatever is beyond that wall and I don’t really want to resolve this by trying to kill the warden or having it detect me so I’m just gonna make my exit from the deep dark biome we’re gonna take our findings home and at a certain point the

Warden should lose track of any mobs that are beyond that wall they should despawn once we get out of a certain range and the warden itself once its environment is free of distractions we’ll simply burrow back into the ground and leave in the meantime you will still

Be able to hear the noises it makes and the heartbeat that it emits from quite a range so it can often sound like the warden is continuing to give Chase even when it is not following the player but keep that in mind as you explore these environments

And you can actually still hear it even up here on the surface even after we have long left and none of the stuff we’re doing up here on the surface is going to be detected by the warden but the game is probably still spawning mobs

Down there and so the warden has a few distractions left in its environment now back up here on the surface with the skulk blocks that we have retrieved from the deep dark we’re going to do a little experiment and for that I just need to find a nice easy set of passive mobs

Like up here where there are some sheep and cows in this nearby Meadow if we place a skull Catalyst down next to this cow and kill it in the same way that we killed the zombie in the deep dark you’ll notice that no XP drop from that

Cow and the skull Catalyst kind of bubbled a little bit although it did not immediately spread the skulk to any of the blocks around it I’m wondering though if potentially it spread the skulk downwards to a cave somewhere nearby that’s currently inconclusive I can’t see anything around here that

Constitutes a cave that the skulk would have spread to so let’s try moving it along there we go at last it manages to spread to some nearby blocks and any mobs that are killed within about an eight block radius of the skulk Catalyst will start spreading the skulk blocks around

Although the amount of blocks that spread is dependent on the amount of experience that marble would drop and in this case cows and pigs and whatnot don’t drop a huge amount of experience when they are killed you’ll also notice that the skulk blocks actually spread where the animal dies not directly

Around the skull catalyst so the skull Catalyst will actually seek out blocks that are adjacent to the area where the creature gets killed and one of the unusual aspects to this is that the skulk will actually spread even if a creature is killed with environmental damage let’s say the Sheep ends up on

Fire well perhaps a bit of a bad example because the Sheep sort of wandered off there ah and I found the perfect test subject let ters on fire which technically will not count as a Kill attained by the player even though these pillages are being killed by fire or each other’s arrows

Technically not the player you’ll notice that the skull still ends up spreading the skull Catalyst here picks up on their death and will spread skulk to the blocks around where they died there we go the Pillager Captain ends up dying and the skulk grows in a line

Avoiding any of the blocks that had something on like grass or flowers so in that way skulk spreads similarly to Moss in that it will not spread to anything that already has a block placed over it there must be empty air above the block the skulk is trying to convert kind of

Funny that it made a p shape there for for Pillager but this also has kind of enormous potential because these skulk blocks are going to give us experience if we break them without silk touch and if we break them with silk touch we’re still going to get the blocks out of

That and in this way we can actually generate experience out of what would otherwise be a passive mob farm take for example our cave spider spawner if we drop those cave spiders onto a floor which had a skull Catalyst nearby they would convert the nearby blocks into

Skulk blocks which we could later break down for their experience and that is something I have done in the past on the Empire’s SMP I had a triple cave spider spawner there that I dropped onto a constantly moving floor of stone with skull catalysts nearby and the spiders

Dying would convert the stone into skulk blocks allowing me to harvest the XP later there aren’t a great deal of ways that you can AFK Farm experience in Minecraft a lot of them require a bit of player input at the very least something to click a sword for you while you’re

Away from your keyboard and we’ll explore some other ways of AFK farming experience in future but for now it is really interesting that skulk has now become an option to us now he visited the deep dark in the meantime skulk sensors present some really interesting opportunities as

Well because these are knives kind of fooled by the sniffer noise then I thought the warden had somehow made its way to the surface note the skulk sensors are actually also a redstone component you see small Redstone particles given off by them whenever you make a vibration nearby and you’ll

Notice that that switch is on and off that redstone lamp there for roughly the duration that the skulk sensor remains lit up it actually turns off slightly earlier than the stock sensor does and when it comes to the signal strength emitted by skulk sensors these actually get really interesting results as well

Because if we step into the radius around the outside of the detection range of the skulk sensor if we’re just making vibrations at a very low level on the periphery you’ll notice that it doesn’t activate a huge amount of this Redstone Dust it’s only the first couple

Of blocks there that light up whereas if I stand a little bit closer if I jump up and down next to the skulk sensor it’s actually producing a different strength of of redstone signal if I dance around on top of this thing it’s going to be producing a very high Redstone signal

Strength and so it can actually detect how close you are to the skulk sensor and emit a redstone signal that kind of matches that The Closer you are the stronger the Redstone signal alternatively if you choose to detect the skulk sensor with a redstone comparator then it’s going to emit a

Redstone signal dependent on what kind of vibration it is picking up so right now if I’m jumping up and down or if I’m walking around it’s only going to emit a signal strength of one or two depending on which vibration I am making whereas

If I place a block in the vicinity if I put down let’s say a piece of stone right here that produces a different signal strength to when I’m just walking around nearby but the other thing we can observe here and something that we can also use to our advantage in the deep

Dark biome is that wall and carpet are the exceptions to this they will actually occlude the sound detected by the skull sensor the vibrations cannot be picked up if it is muffled by wool on the sides where the vibration is being made so if I walk around here while this

Thing is surrounded by wool it’s not going to detect me until I leave the radius of this wall and walk around to this side that has exposed it will still be able to pick up on me doing something directly over the top of it as well so

This is a full spherical range in which it’s going to detect whether or not there is a sound being made and even walking directly up to the corner of this it’s going to be occluded by these two wool blocks on the corners so this is actually a really powerful mechanic

We can do a lot by occluding the vibrations using wool and in the deep dark biome down there in the cave if we are worried about one of these skulk shriekers detecting our sounds thanks to the skulk sensor transmitting that vibration we can simply Place wool around the skulk sensor and prevent it

From hearing us it will also prevent it from passing the vibrations to any nearby skulk sensor says let’s say if I end up breaking this comparator the vibration from that is unable to pass through this block of wool and reach the sculpt Shrieker so in a similar fashion

We can block off the skulk Shrieker from receiving any vibrations from the skulk sensor and that’s going to also prevent the skull Shrieker from being tripped finally and we’re going to cover this very briefly because it’s going to be quite a complicated topic to get into in a single episode with three amethyst

Shards it is possible to turn a skulk sensor into a calibrated skulk sensor which is only capable of picking up a specific frequency of vibrations without any other kind of redstone input these will act in much the same way that other skulk sensors do although you’ll notice

That the redstone lamp doesn’t stay lit for as long if we’re using one of these calibrated skulk sensors however these have a line of amethyst running down one side of the block and if we input a specific Redstone signal into that it will only search for vibrations which

Produce the same amount of redstone signal output so if anything else I do around here now without needing to occlude it with wool if I jump up and down if I run around if my footsteps can be detected by a regular skulk sensor they cannot be detected by these

Calibrated skulk sensors and in this case I believe that even stuff like breaking and placing blocks will not be detected by the skulk sensor it has to be a very very strong vibration if we extend the length of this Redstone Dust a little bit so that the signal decays

And it reaches a power of 13 before it gets input into the calibrated skulk sensor now we can place a block down in the world and that will activate this calibrated sensor but it won’t detect when the block is broken normally without any kind of redstone input it

Would detect if the block was placed it would detect if the block was broken it would detect any vibrations nearby but now we’re able to limit this so that only a block breaking that trips the skulk sensor and activate the connected Redstone so hopefully you can imagine the possibilities of that for creating

Redstone contraptions that are only triggered by a specific vibration or set of vibrations since these are actually organized into categories and for that it’s probably best if you look up the Minecraft Wiki article about skulk sensors because that will give you a full list of the actions and vibrations

That trigger skulk sensors to produce various signals for now we’re going to leave that there for our introduction to the deep dark biome but it’s a truly fascinating environment and while it’s kind of scary it’s also capable of producing a whole bunch of really useful stuff and we’re going to be taking a

Closer look at those in future along with traveling to the structure that we found down there the ancient city for the moment though I am quite happy to be adding the skulk blocks into my storage system and that’s where we’re going to leave it for this episode of the

Minecraft Survival Guide folks I do hope you’ve enjoyed this look at the deep dark biome trust me we’re going to be spending a lot more time focusing on elements of the deep dark in the near future and thanks for watching my name has been pixel riffs 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