Starting a Resource Quarry! ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play) [Part 38]

Hello everyone my name is pixel riffs and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide it’s looking a little Christmasy up here on top of the hill but down there in the valley it’s all still looking pretty agricultural and over here I’ve been working a little bit on the surrounding environment for the

Sugarcane farm not least because I wanted to do something about the connection to the river here I mentioned that in the last episode and as you can see I’ve started laying out a kind of walkway a sort of retaining wall there separated the separating the area around

The sugarcane farm from this river and the problem with this now is that it’s using a lot of smooth stone to build up the side of this cliff here and I want to make it out of smooth stone and stone brick so I’m having to acquire quite a

Lot of stone and I’ve pretty much run out I’ve only got about a stack of cobblestone left in the house oh I haven’t really got enough to smelt into a significant amount more of this stone now I could go strip mining as I’ve been doing off-camera every now and again you

Might have noticed occasional resources in the chests they’re gonna creeper down there just minding his own business what I decided to do today was something a little bit different and it’s some folks something you might want to try if you are in need of a great deal of resources

But you don’t necessarily want to get the precious stuff you just want to get stone and stone variants so the plan today is to start a quarry and quarries can take a number of different forms obviously you can do any kind of design you want with a quarry it could be a

More kind of freeform industrial pit kind of thing people have made stepwells and stuff like that but generally speaking it’s a good idea to start a quarry if you just want a large quantity of resources there are even quarrying mods if you play modded minecraft where

You can just set up an area and it mines everything right the way down to bedrock unless you stop it beforehand and those are those are pretty useful those those temps you generate a whole up amount of resources without you really needing to lift a finger in minecraft vanilla that

Is not so much the case in Minecraft vanilla you do need to put in a fair amount of work and so I’m coming out to somewhere I think about over here is probably a good idea to start a quarry or maybe if there’s like a natural pit

That forms on the opposite side of this because generally speaking if you want to start a quarry it’s a good idea to start it in a location that feels quarry ish and you know what about here actually feels like a good location for we’ve got these natural slopes and all

The sides kind of almost implying that the area has been dug away a little bit already but it’s just gonna be a matter of starting the quarry here and starting just to dig down now I’ve brought a few things in preparation for this I’ve got a couple of shelcha boxes I can bring

With me to put resources in I’m also going to set up a few chests on what I think is probably going to be the perimeter of this area so that I can store resources when I come back up to the surface and the reason I recommend starting a surface quarry instead of

Just continuing to strip-mine even though like I said those precious resources are kind of useful it’s because it makes sense for an area like this we’re working with a kind of medieval set of builds here we’re working with a medieval build style I think it’s going to be kind of natural

To have a quarry around here could because all of these builds all of the stone in these builds would have had to come from somewhere and chances are the people of this civilization would be digging it out of the ground in large quantities so an organized quarry seems

Like it’s something that we could introduce to this area it’s also something that we can build structures around to make it look a little bit more interesting we can build kind of towers with a sort of primitive elevator in that kind of thing we can we can build

All sorts of stuff we can even build cranes to drag the materials out of the ground almost like what we’ve got over in front of the the sugarcane farm over here we could build another little platform like that and have that be dragging my materials and resources up

From the depths of our quarry I feel like that seems like a fun idea I’m gonna light this area up because stuff keeps spawning in here while I’m over here working on the on the sugarcane farm so we’re going to do a bit of digging and in the process we can learn

A little bit more about what it means to dig because we have a few different things aside from our own tools which are you know rapidly losing durability at this point we have a few other things we can use to dig out this area and yes my friends I’m talking about explosives

Where did we put the TNT that we gathered from that desert temple wasn’t in the ender chest was it in one of these somewhere no it doesn’t look like it so we must have it around here somewhere perhaps with the tools yes there we go TNT is a marvelous resource first of all

The basic principle of TNT is that needs to be lit once placed it is in a kind of inert state and it can be activated in a number of ways method number one is by simply right-clicking on it using a flint and steel and then running a safe distance away and as you

Can see that creates a crater of a decent sort of size when it’s dealing with material like dirt dirt has a fairly low blast resistance a blast resistance is something that I’ve covered very briefly in previous episodes when I’ve talked about the differences between lining a tunnel with

Cobblestone and lining it with wood for example or in the last episode I think I mentioned that quartz has a fairly low blast resistance however once you get down to materials like stone stone has a much higher blast resistance than dirt so when we set the TNT here you will

Notice a difference in the amount of blocks that are actually broken it’s not that many it’s not as many as it was with the dirt anyway because stone has a higher blast resistance and is a lot more capable of resisting things like TNT explosions and creeper explosions

Not only that but the amount of stone we have actually broken here has led to me only getting three cobblestone bag and that is the disadvantage of using TNT for quarrying purposes it destroys blocks you will not get back every block that you destroy with TNT so while it is

Good for digging large holes if you need a hole in the ground for esthetic purposes if you want to use it for a build or something like that if you want to get all the resources back in the process that’s probably not the best idea well we’ve got these cobble stone

On me though I’m gonna craft a lever and I’m gonna show you one of the other aspects of TNT is that it can be detonated remotely using redstone now I don’t have any redstone on me right now and I’m not gonna run back to the house

To get some quite yet but you can actually activate TMT using a redstone signal by just activating that lever next to it I’ve been able to light that TNT and once again it has blown a hole in the ground and left me with only three cobblestones so still not ideal

But if any of the blocks adjacent to a block of TNT receive a redstone signal then that TNT is going to light and detonate and obviously that hasn’t potential to destroy stuff in the surrounding area including some of the redstone wire that you place down and sometimes by destroy I just mean it’ll

Break it and whatever’s been used to light it will just drop on the ground and you can pick it up again but for more fragile stuff like redstone wire chances are it may not last the explosions so we do need to be a little bit careful about that kind of

Stuff while we’re on the topic of blowing things up though there is one more explosive in the game that I feel is sometimes overlooked and that may be mostly because of the expense but I figured seeing as we’re in the mood for blowing things up here I may as well

Show it to you so I am going to craft an end crystal you may recognize n crystals from the time we spent killing the dragon in the end and that is because it is actually possible to regenerate the dragon with these crystals and I mean I can never remember if the recipe

Requires glass or glass paints so let’s find out okay it is glass good I was worried that it would be glass panes around there because what you get looks like a flat pane of glass with something embedded in it but in fact an crystals are a very dangerous and very volatile

Substance and for that reason they can only be placed on obsidian or bedrock now we’re gonna play some hours on obsidian if I can find where I put the obsidian ayah there it is ok because bedrock isn’t something that you can place in the world it’s not a block you

Can acquire and so you could only really place these on bedrock either if you’re in the end and it’s reasoning the dragon or if you’re at the bottom of the world in the overworld at which point you probably not be blowing a huge amount of stuff up that n crystals are a very

Volatile substance and as if you saw the dragon fight episode you’ll know quite how large those explosions can be I mentioned that it is usually best to avoid standing near one of these end stone crystals and that is with good reason I’m gonna pop down an obsidian

There I’m gonna place the end crystal on top and then we have to be very very careful because the hitbox of these things is quite large and if I happen to tap it with anything even my fist I’ll probably end up destroying myself so I’m gonna step back a couple of spaces here

I’m actually going to try and break the obsidian from below like this and there we go the end crystal is live and it’s been live for a little while but the best way of triggering these from a distance is to stand back a good way

Away and then shoot it with a bow and I’m gonna actually going to get a vantage point from up here if I can because we’re about to see quite a large explosion it’s probably going to be about twice maybe three times the size of the TNT and here we go

Yep that’s that’s a pretty big crater compared to what he was leaving and it has left us a few more blocks but once again the explosion has destroyed a lot of them also end crystals as you saw a quite an expensive recipe they require you to make and I

Have ender use up a ghast tear which are not all that easy to farm believe me and a fair amount of glass is involved there as well whereas TNT is just gunpowder and sand both of which you can get in fairly large quantities once you’ve killed enough creepers and spent enough

Time in a desert and once again this has left a fairly square hole have the thing about explosions in Minecraft is that they have a fairly limited radius like that and will temper and will typically just carve out a very geometric area so if we want to turn this into a more

Natural-looking quarry it’s probably best to use our pickaxe and do this all by hand not only that but like I said if we want to acquire all of the blocks from this quarry operation then it is probably a good idea to do this all by hand in any case not least because right

Now I’m using my silk touch pickaxe I’ll be getting a lot of smooth stone which is the material that I want to build with over here anyway but I’d like to acquire a little cobblestone as well so to that end I have brought myself some

Of the spare pickaxes that I I ended up getting from the end City so I’ve got my my fortune pickaxe here my fortune to pickaxe which is the kind of backup fortune one I guess and that one we can mend the 14-3 pickaxe if we want to but

That one’s gonna get us cobblestone where the silk touch one will get a smooth stone I realize I didn’t explain this super well just then but if you have obsidian underneath one of those end crystals it will not damage anything below it the reason I took the obsidian

Out from below the end crystal there was so that it would blow up the ground underneath it but the obsidian because it has such a high blast resistance and is such a tough block will typically block explosion damage to anything directly below the end crystals so they’ll typically damage a lot of stuff

Around them on the surface and they can be absolutely lethal to both players and mobs if used that way but you want to remove the obsidian from below them if you want them to blow a hole in the ground like this what I’m thinking is it

Might be fun to establish a perimeter of sorts for this quarry let’s establish some some dark oak logs here that we can quite easily farm in large quantities and we’ll set out a kind of outer boundary for the quarry maybe we’ll make this about a chunk wide actually and I

Can show you in the process how to see chunks in the world if you press f3 and G together it will come up with this grid like so and unfortunately this one falls on a chunk boundary where you see those yellow lines there those are the boundaries of each of our chunks and

It displays each section of this in a 2×2 square so you can kind of count them nice and easily eight of those squares makes a single chunk and if you look upwards the chunk basically continues from bedrock to build height but there are these things called sub chunks which are

Marked out with those blue lines there which are kind of sixteen blocks high as well as being sixteen blocks wide and sixteen blocks deep since our chests are over here I reckon we’ll probably mark out the edge of this chunk like so and maybe make it a two chunk wide quarry in

The end so we’ll put a couple of logs over here and a couple of logs over here and at this point yeah we’re pretty much deciding anything in between the boundaries of these logs is fair game ultimately I don’t want this quarry to get huge I don’t want it to dwarf the

Landscape around it and I certainly don’t want it to look like and I saw next to all of the nice builds for home planning so we’re going to make it look nice in the end but for now I do want to just strip out a ton of the stone from

Around here so what do you say we go to a time lapse and I’ll keep digging [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] Welcome back everyone hope you enjoyed the time-lapse and with only about 40 minutes work put into that I have managed to get myself almost a full chest of regular stone and another 14 stacks of cobblestone give or take so that’s not too bad I’m pretty happy with

That and at least having this amount of stone that means that we can work a little bit more on that perimeter wall and maybe even start the bridge that I want to build between the farm settlement bit over here and the industrial area where the sugarcane farm

Is because I think it’s it’s been too long where I’ve just been either flying up here using an ender pearl or just trying to scramble up the side of this hill over here I think having a bridge from one to the other is probably going

To be a good idea it’s also going to be a great way of transitioning between the materials I’m using in these two different areas which is going to be quite a subtle transition because this place over here is mainly kind of oak spruce and cobblestone and over here we

Started using stone brick and dark oak woods so we can kind of transition from one material to another and kind of be a little bit more symbolic about the transition between the two areas using the materials that I want to use especially now have got so much

Cobblestone and smooth stone to use but believe me that stuff is gonna run out super quickly especially considering we are building solid stone walls over here and one of the reasons I want to do this primarily is to wall off this section here a little bit better because this

Cave has just kind of been sat here open for a while and it’s the main reason I keep getting zombies and stuff at least zombie noises anytime I’m working around here on the sugarcane farm and so forth so it’s gonna be nice to clear this area

Out a little bit and finish this whole project off so part of the way I’m doing this here is just filling the entire thing up with stoner for right now we could always make this a little bit more Hollow and just light up the insides but

Just in case I want to do some functional stuff with this later and just in case I want to I don’t pave this a little bit better kind of swap out some of the blocks here for some like stone bricks for example here and there it’ll help to make the place look a

Little bit more organized and it’s the same approach I’ve taken with the wall down here which you can’t really see from this angle so me hop down and show you from this side so I’ve put in a few stone bricks just to kind of create the

Illusion that this is a stone brick wall but with less detail and not having to make the entire thing out of stone bricks and that’s a fun effect you can do when you’re building things like castles or any kind of stone wall like this just dotting stone bricks here and there and

Make the rest of the stuff out of regular stone and that’s an effect that they use quite a lot in in drawing in kind of cartoons and stuff like that you kind of leave little areas of detail over a blank surface and that kind of implies that the entire thing is made

Out of bricks without it visually being too noisy and distracting from the details you want people to focus on like the giant building that’s up there for examples so I think that’s a pretty good approach and it’s an approach I plan to take for the rest of this perimeter wall

I might also make a lower wall sort of down here and this is probably going to cover up a few of the materials I built here but one of the things I’ve learned more recently when it comes to building stuff like this is not to worry too much

About bits of your builds being covered by new things say for example that you’ve just built a house that you’re really really happy with but you decide to grow a giant tree out of the front of it and it almost feels at first like the tree is just blocking the view of the

Awesome build you’ve built but then when it comes to stuff in the real world people don’t avoid planting trees just because the front of their house looks pretty you know people put trees there because trees are kind of awesome and a lot of the time the trees are there

First and it helps the house feel a little bit better blend it in with the terrains so you know covering stuff up that you’ve already built is not such a bad thing that’s probably something we’re going to cover when we end up making a few custom

Trees later in this series because I do plan on building a few trees from scratch here and there but like I’m saying with this you know we’ve already put some materials into here we’ve already put some stone and some dark oak in here and if we were being really kind

Of careful with how we’re using materials we could potentially save some of the materials which are now kind of buried behind here if we wanted to just by removing some of the stuff that’s behind here and plowing this out a little bit better but for now all we

Really need to do is fill up this area with stone and given the amount of stone we have just finished collecting it’s not going to be too terrible to be honest like you know you can be as conservative as you want to with your materials but I think it’s easier just

To build as much as you want to and then maybe we can figure out ways of conserving these materials later on but in the meantime we get to lend a little bit more structure to an area and have this kind of like low walkway around here which could lead around the

Side of this hill to something else and it means we get to copy the structure of the wall up there but on a smaller scale put in these logs as supports and so forth I need to harvest myself a little bit more dark oak before we can continue

With that but it’s already lending so much more structure to this area to include stuff like this now maybe instead of the pile of grass here we could put in a tree growing out of here or something or we could maybe put a little storage area where there

Are crates and chests and barrels and that kind of stuff although barrels aren’t technically in the game yet there are a lot of fun things we can do with the existing blocks that would simulate the appearance of a barrel at least and working on this low wall down here has

Actually made me realize that we need to widen out the river not just because the river naturally comes to a stop there and then continues into this winding section through the mountains over there but because by building this wall out we are actually narrowing the river even

Further so it would help to do a little bit of artificial terraforming around here just to make it look like this River kind of flowed around and give a reason for this to exist widening out the river might also kind of imply that there could be canal barges kind of

Taking supplies from the sugarcane farm out to whatever sea exists in that direction and already we can start to see how the city might take shape in terms of its trade and that kind of stuff like I said in previous episodes when we approach projects like this it’s

Always a good idea to consider the story that you’re telling here the law that you can weave into the world and you don’t have to take that to heart if you just want to build cool stuff but if you’re stuck for what to build and you’re lacking in inspiration that’s

Definitely something to consider this is also going to give me a chance to go into the perfectionist level of detail that I like to put in build because look at around at the the wall here for example and you’ll see a few things that to my mind really need correcting for a

Start we do not want dirt showing down here at the foundations of our wall you want the wall to look like it disappears into the sand and could go down as far as possible likewise with the trunks of wood here it’s gonna be unreasonable for them to just sit on this fragile looking

Wall of sand so we want to actually put the trunks so that they are right down into the sand there and they don’t have to go down any further than this if there’s a couple of blocks covering them like that but it doesn’t really look all that great

To have them just resting on top of a block of gravel that could easily just kind of fall away and lead to structural instability you know that’s the kind of thing that realistically speaking it wouldn’t make sense for it to be there and of course you can build up sand in

Front of it so you can always build a little kind of sand bars like this as though the current of the river has kind of pushed the sand up against the walls like this that actually might be a pretty good justification for there being sand here kind of building up around the

Bottom of the wall could be a great detail to add they load the waterline you could even add in some mossy cobblestone or mossy stone brick to give the impression that the water is affecting this part Oh help there’s an Enderman up there but yeah give the impression that the water is affecting

This part and it’s causing kind of damp environments and causing the moss to grow up the site’s here even above the waterline like so you could even give the impression that there is a higher point to which the river rises in like periods of high rain so that you could

You could give a a slightly darker line around there by using some slightly different material maybe working some andesite in here here and there or maybe do a an andesite kind of stone brick combo along a certain level to ensure that the water doesn’t get any higher

Than that include drainage in the wall even kind of have holes carved out into there with iron bars in front of them there’s so much you can do to detail even a small area like this which is going to add so much more character to your bills but now thanks to our little

Quarry project I can go ahead and complete the rest of this little area around here and I think it’s gonna look fantastic maybe throw a couple of leaves down here as well as the little bushes are growing up the side I think it’s gonna be fantastic but I think we’re

Gonna call this episode there folks thank you guys so much for watching this episode of the Minecraft Survival Guide my name has been picks or ifs don’t forget to leave a like on the episode if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and I will see you guys soon

Take care bye for now You