Continuing to build out my railway system, if you can even call it that. It's not the prettiest or most sophisticated but it works, I guess.

Monsters burning up.

I went to explore some caves because I wanted to mine obsidian to build a nether portal, but was met with an untimely death via a horde of zombies and skeletons. I lost my diamond pickaxe in the process. Thankfully I'd already used up half of its durability so I grieved and moved on pretty quickly.

Actually I died again while trying to retrieve my items lol, so this time after collecting my stuff, I went back and sorted my inventory out, and made a full set of iron armor and diamond pickaxe.

Remember the cave I stumbled upon near my house a couple posts ago? I went back because I remembered seeing some lava pools from which I could mine obsidian with some water, and I thought I'd already finished exploring it, but seems like I left some pockets of unexplored areas because I found this skeleton spawner.

I'd been meaning to make a mob farm out of the spawners I'd come across, but this is the first one that spawns skeletons, and out of all the mobs in the game, I think skeletons drop the most useful loot (bones for bonemeal, arrows for bow-firing), so I'll have to revisit this in the future and make it into a mob farm.

Managed to find some obsidian to mine.

And diamond! Only one though.

Squiddies.

I tunneled my way out from the spider spawner and marked the entrance with a tower of cobblestone. Here's how far it is from my farm. I'll either build a floating bridge or another railway to get to the spawner in the future. There's also even more unexplored areas of the cave that I discovered while tunneling out, so a revisit is definitely needed. I might even turn the whole cave system into some sort of underground operation because of how extensive it is.

Got a little ahead of myself building the nether portal and misplaced a couple blocks...

All complete.

And I promptly left because I was not prepared just yet to explore the nether. Not pictured is the ghast expelling a fireball and breaking my nether portal. Thankfully the obsidian was still intact and I could flint and steel my way out. I forgot you had to build shelters around your nether portal to protect them from ghasts in the early days of Minecraft. I'll have to do that the next time I'm there.

Also, I found a couple of typos re-reading my last few posts. I'm too lazy to fix them. Hope you don't mind, I don't really proofread these things...