I wanted to build a potion shop and factory and got inspired to do something witchy.

I started with the idea of a witch living in a haunted house; it would have started small and simple, then she would have added on rooms and extensions as she needed space to grow. I represented this with different build styles indicating the stages, thinking a witch wouldn't care to keep the same build style as she added on rooms. I wanted it to look dirty, cluttered, and very used which I think I pulled off; the interior is split into a lab area and a kitchen, with a few upstairs rooms for living. Using the invisible item frame vanilla tweak, the more mob heads vanilla tweak, and the armor stand vanilla tweak, I think the yard and interior do a good job of telling the story.

The zombie nitwit (Frank Stein, not sure why replaymod rendered him out on the roof) lives in the attic, and Bellatrix lives in her tower. The Dinnerbone'd and charged creeper was a ton of fun to get in place, and the bubble column in green panes was a really cool element in the room...even though it's a huge threat you can get right up next to it. Getting the endermite into the cauldron was another ordeal as well. Minerva the black cat was the last decorative mob detail.

I dug out and blackstone brick'd the entire footprint, then set up the bubblevators. The potion brewers were easy enough to make; this is the first time I've worked with candles, and I think the denser pattern on the nether brick walls helped make the sconces make more sense. I crammed a few other micro farms in there, and in theory need to build a small slime farm (1/4 of this is in a slime chunk), a small creeper-only mob farm, and use any remaining space to farm nether wart.

This was a ton of fun to make and I'm glad I got it done in time for Halloween!

Lucas wanted a "Diagon Alley Door" in the style of this from the Harry Potter movies.

So I made this:

He's been learning redstone, so I prototyped it in our creative area to make a schematic that he can rebuild in his base. To make it look "random" it's 6 flying machines going in somewhat different orders when opening and closing. To activate it from the outside, you throw any item in the cauldron (and you get it back as a dispenser pops it through the floor on the other side). From the inside, you press the button; it auto-closes in about 5 seconds.

It could probably be compacted, but for his needs this is perfect. Also things like the water column for vertical signal transmission are fun because it makes bubbly noises which "is like potions" so it works!

Here's the Schematic!

Here's the spacing; yellow and green are above ground level, blue and red are at/below ground:

After we established base camp in new 1.17 chunks, we sent out a tunnel bore to get deepslate. The tunnel bore hit a mineshaft with about 9 cave spider spawners and a zombie spawner. We also found 5 geodes in close proximity, so we started building farms. The problem is, the entire area is under an ocean, and the buildup of mobs under the water caused severe lag.

We decided to build a perimeter, but because farms had already been built, world eaters or raining tnt wasn't an option. We were going to work mostly by hand.

Thanks to the spigot plugin Geyser, we are pleased to announce that our server now supports Bedrock clients!  Thanks to The_Banana_Bunch for bringing this up...as his computer died and all his remaining options are Bedrock clients lol.

To use this, Bedrock players will still need a Java Minecraft account.  From the bedrock client, players will simply add our server, mc.teh3l3m3nts.com, using the default Bedrock port 19132.

If you are connecting from a console (Xbox, PlayStation, or Nintendo Switch) you can still connect, but the instructions are more complex.  Geyser provides their own instructions here; they require using the BedrockConnect DNS servers and we recommend the official BedrockConnect DNS IP here: 104.238.130.180.

Once the bedrock client finds our server and tries to connect, it will prompt you for your Java account login credentials, whether that be a Mojang account or a Microsoft account.  Enter those, and you should be in as your java player with all your inventory, positioning, and permissions preserved.

I created a datapack which helps with villager lag in trading halls.

If you name tag a villager with "Stillager" or "stillager" they will stop moving and path finding altogether. This is done by setting the "NoAI" tag of the villager to 1. This typically eliminates restocks, so I have a function to manually restock all trades at 8:00 AM and 2:00 PM. This is mostly consistent with vanilla behavior, villagers restock twice a day at slightly random times, but their 4 phases of the day (work, gather, wander, and sleep) can be divided into 4 segments which is the logic behind the restock times.

If you want to disable this, you tag the villager with "Moveager" or "moveager" and the name disappears and their AI is restored.

This is particularly useful for trading halls where villagers are locked in 1x1 spaces. In my test world where I have a trading hall with ~150 villagers, it took the tps from 15 to 20. This has tremendous lag reduction impacts without the headache of doing double-carpet tricks, and is completely optional so villagers in mob farms or those that are naturally spawned are completely unaffected; this is opt-in.

It can be downloaded here:

• https://teh3l3m3nts.com/stillagers/v1.0.8.zip For 1.20.5-6
• https://teh3l3m3nts.com/stillagers/v1.0.7.zip For 1.20.3-4
• https://teh3l3m3nts.com/stillagers/v1.0.6.zip For 1.20.2
• https://teh3l3m3nts.com/stillagers/v1.0.5.zip For 1.20.0-1
• https://teh3l3m3nts.com/stillagers/v1.0.4.zip For 1.19.4
• https://teh3l3m3nts.com/stillagers/v1.0.3.zip For 1.19.1-3
• https://teh3l3m3nts.com/stillagers/v1.0.2.zip For 1.19.0
• https://teh3l3m3nts.com/stillagers/v1.0.1.zip For 1.18.2 and Older

More information can be seen here: https://www.planetminecraft.com/data-pack/stillagers/

Special thanks to the VanillaTweaks team; this was made using their "SilenceMe" and "Track Raw Statistics" datapacks as templates.

This is my first datapack, so feedback is welcome.