150 Minecraft Secrets You've Never Seen Before: The Secrets Handbook (14 page)

You can find emeralds in extreme hill biomes. They generate ONLY in the Extreme Hills biome, so if you're planning on getting Emeralds here is where the treasure is laid.

To get your fair slice of the emerald pie, all you have to do is make a strip mine within an extreme hill. Basically, this means you have to dig into a hill and keep digging until you find emeralds.

The swamp biome spawns slimes a lot more easily than other biomes. Slimes spawn in layers 50-70 (y=50 to y=70) whereas in the rest of the world, slimes spawn below level 40. That saves a lot of digging time.

Because the superflat land is on level 4, you will see a lot of slimes there because you will see tons of slimes spawning since they always spawn under level 40.

Mooshrooms live in the mushroom biome. These red cows have mooshrooms on their backs and can't be found anywhere else in the world. Most players don't know that they have at least, some use in the game!

If sheared, they give mooshrooms, which you can eat or make mooshroom stew with. If milked with a bowl, they give soup. Strangely they also give soup. Plus, if you milk them with a bucket you'll get milk too! Kill the mooshroom and you'll get steak and leather. Now that's a handy animal! You can get a full meal from one cow plus a load of other things!

You can also find red hardened clay in the Mesa biome. You know the biome that looks like the surface of Mars? That's your best source of hardened clay. You can mine out as much hardened clay as you want, there's tons of it!

If you're on other consoles other than the PC, you can find clay in the surface ground of lakes. When mining clay, don't mine it underwater. Instead, mine the clay over the water as it will mine three or four times faster. Then, you will have to heat the clay in a furnace to change it to hardened clay. Or, you can make bricks if you prefer. After that, you can dye the hardened clay into virtually any colour you want.

For that homemade, rustic "granny's cottage" effect, hardened clay or bricks work.

If you want to organize your chests without signs, you can name your chests

For example, you can call five of your chests, "Weapons", "Food", "Ores", "Building", "Smelted Ingots" .

Organization is the key to a happy experience in playing Minecraft. There's nothing more excruciating than losing those melon seeds you found in the dungeon, or not knowing in which chest you left the redstone.

To name a chest, you will need a name tag which can be obtained from dungeons, abandoned mineshafts etc. You will then need an Anvil. Place the name tag in the left slot and then type in the name into the grey bar on the top. On the left you will see the named name tag, to get it you will need a mere 5 enchanting level. Now just hook on the name tag and you're sorted.

Don't have a compass to lead you to North?

You don't need one! Just look to the wind and stars, just like the sailors of old.

Only joking. What I mean to say is that all you have to do is look to the forces of nature and you'll find North.

For example, here are four of them:

• Clouds drift to North.
  Just watch the clouds drifting, and you'll see them to the North.
  
• Dig two blocks down. Place a glass block on the second block you dig out. Attempt to place a glass torch on it and the torch will go to the North wall.
  
• The sun moves from east to west. From that, you can work out South and North.
  
• Pumpkin stems all point to North. I covered this in a previous tip. Go read it.
  

You can block attacks with a sword and it will reduce the attack damage by half. All you have to do is hold down the right button click. Your sword will go in front of you, and will act as a shield. Then, you can hit again and quickly put your sword into the "shield" state again. The advanatage is that if they hit you, you'll only get half the damage. For example, if a zombie attachks you, instead of getting two hearts you'll only get one heart.

It's quite simple. You can simply fight it from the comfort of your own house. Open your door and get out your sword. Since spiders are 2 blocks wide, they won't come into the 2X1 space of the door so they'll just stay outside and you can freely kill them with ease. Hop out and collect the loot that the spider drops. The annoying hiss is gone.

Shears are the most efficient tool to get rid of leaves. You'll also collect the leaves just in case you need them.

Of course, you can also use shears to collect items such as vines, dead bushes (in the desert) and other "green vegetation" in Minecraft.

Getting bored of building up? Build downwards for a change.

You'll g
et a ton of new room which you can use to expand. There isn't that much room in the "overworld" anyway, with lakes, seas, trees, hills obstructing your space so why not build downwards? You can either make one basement, or else several rooms on a few levels.

Plus when you're building, you just might find a few lucky veins filled with iron, coal, redstone and even, gold and diamonds (depending on the level of your basement of course).