My mines, meows

These are my basic mining supplies -- a diamond pickaxe, several torches (I typically carry about 100), a pail of water (to turn lava squares into harmless obsidian squares) and an iron shovel to quickly clear sand, dirt and gravel. I'm looking for iron, gold, diamond and cobblestone; if you mine correctly, you'll find more than 3 diamonds for every pickaxe you wear out while mining. I'm working on my second full stack, and I never use iron pickaxes. (So why iron shovels? I feel it's the best compromise on speed, durability and rarity of materials.)


This is my workstation and base of operations. The forges are typically in use, either making smooth stone from cobblestone, smelting iron and gold or making glass. These chests are all a little more than half full -- some with tools and building supplies, one with cobblestone, another with animal products, like wool.


This is my very technological elevator. The, eh, boat is the elevator car; that waterfall is the elevator shaft.


Boats are very awkward. Though you couldn't tell which way is forward -- at least I can't, I suppose there may be fine differences in the grain I haven't studied -- the boat not only has a front and a back, but it spins in the direction you're heading. That means every time you hit a current, you're spun to face the direction it's flowing. This becomes very problematic when you're using currents to hold a boat in one place (or when you suddenly hit the top of a waterfall).


Going down the shaft. This shaft is wide enough for the boat to sail into and drop; the water at the bottom keeps the boat (and yours truly) from shattering from the impact. Like I said in my first post, water works oddly in Minecraft.


This is the base of the falls. It's about a 100-meter drop; when I want to go back up, I hop in my boat, sail into the waterfall and let the boat's buoyancy do the rest. About 4 seconds later, I'm at the top of the map again.


I want to love minecarts, but they're horrible. Without glitched boosters -- which will be fixed next week with patch 1.6 -- the maximum speed is slightly less than double walking speed. It's hard to recoup the time spent laying the mine tracks. Granted, you're constantly walking about 10 mph, so you move at a good clip. Still, I'm covering a lot of ground. My next mine in this world will be using a zig-zag pattern that minimizes walking distances.


To get an idea of how large my mines are, this minetrack starts at x=185 ...


and ends at -945, or 1130 meters -- just over 1 kilometer. This branch extends another kilometer, along with three perpendicular branches that extend between 700 and 800 meters each.


The branches aren't terribly exciting, unfortunately. They sometimes break into larger caves, which are typically confusing deathtraps with plenty of ores. (Ores aren't more likely to spawn in caves, it's just that you see a lot of squares very quickly -- law of averages and all.) Once I got tired of walking half a mile to begin mining, I started with new main branches and perpendicular branches. I've got two more main branches and about 12 side ones; in total, it's about 15 kilometers of mine shafts.