Spawn-proofing a Wither Skeleton Farm! ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play)[Part 341]

Hello everyone my name is pixariffs and welcome back to the minecraft survival guide i hope you guys are having a good day today we’re going to make a start on that with a skeleton farm that i mentioned making in a seoul sand valley so i’m going to head

Over to that soul sand valley fortress first of all do a little bit of recon and decide exactly what we need to bring with us and i’ve got to be honest folks it’s actually pretty easy to get back here once i know where i’m going it’s relatively straightforward to find because we

Should just head over here to this basalt delta hangar left and there it is and that really doesn’t feel like the 128 blocks i thought it was from the last let me let me do some actual measurements using coordinates here so the center of this crossroads here the one i plan to use

For the actual farm is at negative 13 71. let’s see how far we go until we reach the basalt delta that can’t be 128 blocks surely now this is at negative at 1300 and it’s still a soul sand valley but a couple of blocks over you will

Get into a basalt delta so that’s only really 70 blocks away despite that of course we can make a an afk point over here in the soul sand valley which should allow us to afk at a range where only the farm will be active and the solstan valley around it will produce

Skeletons and ghosts but very few of them so when i was using that locate biome command before it seems to be the case that it will locate a point in the biome that is not necessarily the very edge of the biome i guess because there is a biome

Blend effect at work here but yeah okay i’m gonna have to i’m gonna have to dodge my way into this fortress and have a look around to see exactly what it is we need to do here and okay we’re in let’s take a quick look around there’s a few

Corridors and so forth the usual sort of stuff you expect to find in another fortress got a blaze spawner over there which we can probably spawn proof for now and then maybe consider converting into another farm that’s going to work in tandem with the wither skeleton one but of

Course the fortress is going to be full of a few winding pathways and things like that as well wow it’s kind of cool seeing all of that blue fire when you leave the fortress actually and then over here we have this section extending out

This way but all in all it seems to be a relatively small fortress unless it extends too far out in this direction which it has a couple of offshoots but mostly seems to be okay and once again there is a basalt delta on this biome over here but it’s far enough away that

I think it’s not going to affect that crossroads much much further than the one over here was so yeah it looks like we’re in business at least it looks like we should have a nice easy time i say easy we should have a a straightforward enough time of spawn

Proofing this fortress because it does not look like one of those ones that just expands out into the infinite nether if we can get enough materials to spawn proof this entire structure and just leave this crossroads exposed we’re gonna have a heck of a farm on our hands but what exactly does that

Mean of course at this point in the series we do know what spawn proofing means what i’m talking about is what does that mean in terms of material cost what materials are we going to be able to use to spawn proof that fortress in its entirety given the fact that the structure

Is relatively straightforward it’s all flat but we need to have something spawn proof in the area something like slabs for example and we could take a bunch of stone slabs around to make sure that the area is really obviously spawn proofed at that point we could have

Like a bunch of these smooth stone slabs that i’ve already cooked up for aesthetics we could use slabs of other kinds of materials given that i have so much diorite and i don’t really have any use for it right now we could make diorite slabs and those would really stand out against

The nether we could even thinking about it make blackstone slabs and those would really fit in with the aesthetic of the nether but would end up looking a little bit more discreet when it comes to the wither skeleton farm and kind of on brand color wise as well we could even use

Polished black stone buttons since those are a thing and it’s kind of a surprise to find a button made of a material like this but of course there are stone buttons so blackstone has its own equivalent but i don’t think i’m going to be using polished blackstone buttons i think

Maybe we might go with blackstone slabs mainly for blast resistance and i haven’t checked this but i have a feeling blackstone slabs are still going to be resistant to ghast fireballs i think it’s time to do a little bit of testing okay i see a ghost perfect we’re going to set up

On this little stone walkway because this is already a blast proof area i’m going to put down a an area of blackstone buttons here and i’m going to encourage the ghast to fireball me and let’s see if the ghast actually scores a hit it does and it destroys some of the

Buttons in the area okay that is good to know that’s a good start and let’s try the same thing with black stone slabs presuming the ghast comes back into firing range and from that angle it should actually fire directly down onto us there we go step to one side and

Blackstone slabs are certified ghast blastproof and that’s going to be very important because we are building this whole thing in a soul sand valley so ghosts are going to be one of the most prominent mobs in the area that aren’t from the fortress so we need to be making doubly sure

That we have a layer of blast proof material to spawn proof with and sadly much as the aesthetic of buttons does allow the blocks below to shine through i think we’re probably not going to use buttons for the simple reason that they are just not fireball proof enough the good news is

We now have access to a renewable source of blackstone thanks to the fact that piglens will now barter it so back here at my original bartering hall we’re gonna hopefully get ourselves a few blocks of black stone trickling down into the chest i think these cracked blackstone bricks were there just because of

Some renovations i was doing but hopefully sooner or later some of these piglens should start dropping blackstone that we can use and i really need to organize maybe even filter these chests but there we go we got some blackstone there i’ve also been grabbing it here and there when i have been

Getting some ancient debris here in the nether which is going pretty well at this point by the way so hopefully with a combination of gathering blackstone from these piglens and getting it from the lower regions of the nether i should be able to start spawn proofing this fortress using blackstone slabs

Okay we’re back here at the nether fortress and the first thing i want to do is hop into this corridor and set up a kind of staging area basically to avoid situations like the one i just found myself in where there are blazes constantly firing fireballs at me i want

To make sure i at least have a little area in here that i can safely set up some inventory and some shulker boxes because of course if the shulker boxes end up getting into a fire then they’re going to end up getting destroyed and we don’t want that considering i brought over a

Lot of materials another thing i have brought over of course is a shulker box full or at least half full oh apparently i placed that against the torch a shulker box of fire resistance potions because blazes while they can melee you are mainly going to try and attack from range

And having a fire resistance potions probably means that i’m going to be on fire most of the time visibly but i won’t take any damage from it and that’s going to be the key i think to making sure that we can continue to spawn proof this fortress i’m also going to stick a

Crafting table up here in the top corner and we’re going to use that to make all of this black stone into slabs if we can bring the black stone over as full blocks and then make twice the amount of slabs as the blackstone blocks that we brought that’s a difficult sentence to say

Basically if we don’t fill up a shulker box with slabs and we fill it up with blocks instead we can carry twice the materials with us which means twice the materials that we can use to slab the fortress now i’m gonna make my way out of here probably chug my first fire resistance

Potion pretty quickly but then get started on slabbing off of the crossroads that i’m eventually going to turn into the central part of the farm of course another thing worth noting is that any solid blocks in the area basically any of the soul sand or soul soil blocks in this area

If they fall within the hitbox of the nether fortress are going to be spawnable blocks for nether fortress mobs which means we are going to have to do a little bit of spawn proofing of the surrounding terrain but only in so much as it impacts the hitboxes of the fortress structure which should

Hopefully not be all that much most of it is just kind of blocks piled on top of there and up there i think is probably too high for fortress mobs to spawn we will see because once i start spawn proofing the fortress itself it’s going to be a lot easier to tell

Which blocks are considered part of the fortress and which aren’t but once we’ve done that like areas like over there we probably need to spawn proof all of the soul sand blocks along here and then we shouldn’t need to worry too much about the rest of the terrain here

Since that’s only going to spawn skeletons and gusts but as you can see right now i’m having a fairly easy time we don’t have any gusts fireballing me at the moment the blaze fireballs are going to do very little and i can check my inventory just to make sure that my fire

Resistance potion is going to last for long enough and then once i’m indoors i should be able to tackle the blazes head-on and not have too much of a problem with that but we’ve always got fire resistance potions i can fall back on if need be

So after a short bit of work that is the crossroads section slabbed off and it actually looks pretty cool like this i think that kind of looks a little stylish having that top part all be blackstone slabs but ultimately that is now all spawn proof which is great and there shouldn’t be

Any other stuff in the surrounding area here that needs spawn proofing these are not corridors they’re just walkways and all of the corridors around here are gonna need slabs in them and on top of them unless we destroy part of the structure of the fortress which i think is probably just gonna

Take a while so i won’t end up doing that in the end so now i make my way into the central part of the fortress and there are some blaze spawners nearby there is one there and i think there might be one around the corner

Here so i think that might actually be a double blaze spawner as well that’s a pretty good find for this area if we can afk at a double blaze spawner while with the skeletons are being farmed in the background that would be pretty cool to be honest so this is gonna look like

A pretty good project fortress the idea here of course is that we can block with a skeleton spawns most of the time using light level blazes will spawn in a higher light level but aside from the ones that spawn from the actual spawner cages they still need to spawn on a solid

Block which means if we slab this area over we shouldn’t need to worry too much about blaze spawns inside these corridors and if we want to i have brought a bunch of blocks that i can use to block off the surrounding area of the blaze spawner this wither

Skeleton has decided to just pop in from above there we go so if a blaze does spawn here we can just take care of it like so and then block off the remaining area around the blaze spawner making sure that nothing else will be able to spawn here

Of course the alternative would be to use a higher light level block like glowstone or something like that but realistically we can just make a nice barrier around the spawner here and that’s going to avoid blazes spawning around it at this point our main enemy really is the wither skeletons because they’re

Going to pop out of nowhere a lot of the time during this process and it is more difficult to stave them off than it is the blazes because you can’t take a potion off with a resistance or anything but luckily for us we’re gonna see fewer and

Fewer of them spawning in the fortress as we go and we can always take advantage of putting up barriers to prevent them from following us because of their three block heights so realistically it really isn’t going to take all that long for us to spawn proof this fortress and there are

Various different ways of dealing with more or less anything that will spawn inside its walls at this stage it’s really just a matter of being systematic and careful about it so hopefully we can manage that for the next little while i’m gonna go ahead and spawn

Proof a whole bunch of this fortress and maybe we can do some of that in the form of a time lapse So [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] So Hey folks welcome back i hope you enjoyed the time lapse it is eerily quiet around here now now that we’ve taken care of all of the fortress and there are a couple of spots that i did notice as i was reviewing the time-lapse footage that i missed out

On like this section over here i’m gonna quickly slab over on camera and i also noticed thanks to a couple of pieces of that time-lapse footage where i clipped through the scenery and you could kind of see underneath the terrain what was going on there are a couple of spots in the

Nether fortress that i’m surprised will actually still spawn mobs even though we’ve spawn proof the area around them because i was thinking that some of these areas would naturally be kind of spawn proof and it turns out they’re not and it comes down to staircases some of the staircases in nether

Fortresses like this one here as you can see a couple of mobs here already we’ve got a couple of wither skeletons and a blaze to take care of the soul sand at the bottom of these staircases that generates the netherwart in it as the fortress generates like this will

Actually spawn mobs as you saw right there those were not just mobs that spawned elsewhere in the fortress and wandered in here they actually spawned on the soul sand itself and there was me thinking that some of the netherwarton stuff growing on here was going to mean that those were blocked

As far as spawning attempts go no apparently stuff still spawns in there so need to cover over that with the slabs like i’ve just done same with this section over here just got to make sure it’s all covered over so that no mobs will spawn there and all the bottom half slabs should

Eliminate the spawnable spaces i’m pretty sure there were only two or three of those staircases in this fortress so those two covered up i feel like we’ve eliminated most of the issue here and yeah i don’t think i can recall if there was a third one where it is so

I might just do another quick sweep around the fortress to make sure that i’ve got everything but i think this is going to be pretty successful and now i think the last thing i want to do is unspawn proof to take up all of the slabs on the crossroads outside of here and

See quite how hectic the spawns get in the center of that platform because if they get really really going here i imagine we will see a pretty large amount of skeletons and blazers spawning in this area so let’s get right to it i’m gonna take down some of the

Railings of the fortress here and i’m fairly certain that the crossroads section only extends about 11 blocks in each direction i could be wrong about that i’ll look up the dimensions of the hitbox a little bit later but in theory we can fit in three spawning platforms for with the skeletons once this

Is expanded i think it probably goes out to about the tip of this section here or maybe it’s to right here where this section of the walkway ends either way i will take a look at that a little bit later and we’ll take a look at the full dimensions for

Using the entire hitbox of this crossroads section and if you can find a place where that more than one of these crossroads sections are very very close to each other then of course you can make a much larger farm than this but i have a feeling that once we’ve got all of

This laid out even the small crossroads section that we have here is going to be adequate for our needs here in a single player world the main reason i want to build a with a skeleton farm right now is not actually purely for with the skeleton skulls although those are

Quite nice to have of course it’s mainly for the coal i’ve been thinking about the future of fuel sources in the survival guide world while of course we can dig up coal anywhere we want to in the overworld going out and fortune in coal is kind of a time-consuming process at

This stage when we could be spending a little bit of time afk at a farm like this and getting some pretty high spawn rates of wither skeletons means we’ll get a whole bunch of coal in fact if we throw looting into the equation we’re gonna get a huge amount of wither

Skulls and coal not to mention a few bones that we can reuse for bone meal elsewhere in the world as well so having expanded this platform out a little bit i don’t quite have enough nether brick to finish it off and we could use basically any solid block for

This while it’s in the bounding box of the fortress but i felt like using nether brick just as an example here i’m going to see how many mobs this spawns if i fly away to a safe distance but within the mob spawning radius we’ll try and fly away

From the basalt delta as well so that we get optimal spawning rates here and those of you with eagle eyes in the time lapse probably saw a decent amount of blazes and with a skeleton spawning on this stretch of the soul sand valley so if i fly away now

Maybe land up here let’s see what we get spawning in that area down there already yep that’s looking pretty promising to me we’ve got a couple of batches of wither skeletons and a whole bunch of blazes that looks like it’s filled up the mob density cap in that area for now

But imagine that completely full of weather roses and dropping with the skeletons into an area where we can kill them nice and easily that right there is actually fantastic spawn rates for the area how quickly the mobs are popping in and out of existence there is clearly indicating

That this is going to be a very effective mob spawning area and that is where we are going to wrap up this episode of the survival guide safely up here on this outcropping of the soul sand valley folks we are going to attack this project in the next episode and hopefully turn this

Into a really effective with a skeleton farm but that’s gonna be it from me for now thank you so much for watching this episode of the survival guide my name has been pixel riffs 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 Foreign