150 Minecraft Secrets You've Never Seen Before: The Secrets Handbook (13 page)

If you travel 20 blocks in the Nether, and use a portal to get back to the Overworld, you would have travelled a whopping 160 blocks in the Overworld. This means that for every block you travel in the Nether, you will travel an astonishing eight blocks in the Overworld.

You can use this little cheat to your advantage because you can travel a short distance in the Nether and then go back to the Overworld with a portal, and have travelled eight times the distance! If you need to travel a looooong way in the Overworld, why not go to the Nether, walk in the same direction and then travel back to the Overworld? You would cover a fair amount of ground, in a small amount of time!

Make sure that you have an empty map with you! You will need to see which direction you're going and you'll also need to have the materials for a Nether Portal to build in the location where you want to return in the Overworld.

It would be a pity to travel a long distance in the Nether and then, go back to your Nether Portal five hundred blocks away just because you forgot to bring the materials for a Nether Portal.

The Ender Dragon drops a WHOPPING 12,000 experience points which is a staggering 200 times more than anything else in the game. Pretty impressive, right?

If you want experience points and you need a TON of them, the best place to go is the Ender Dragon. However, it's almost impossible to defeat the Ender Dragon with the sole materials you have. The journey to the End will use up quite a lot of resources and you'll need to be quite the accomplished Minecraft player to actually get to the End. You'll need to defeat Endermen, for example which are hard enough to FIND don't mind kill and get ender pearls from.

If it gives you any hope, Micheal (co-author of this book) defeated the Ender Dragon in Survival and did not cheat in any way. You can do it too.

Silverfish are super annoying fish like mobs that come attacking you whilst replicating at the same time. They come biting at your feet and can really damage your health. Most players
try
to kill them by hitting them with a sword but somehow it doesn't really work out. The definitely win the award for "Most Annoying Mob" in Minecraft. No question about that.

The easiest way to kill a bunch of silverfish quickly AND stop them from quickly multiplying is to set them on fire with flint and steel! The fire will kill off the current silverfish whilst also stopping them from multiplying. It's definitely the best way to kill off a ton of them at once whilst preventing future silverfish from spawning.

Shears are the most effective tool to get rid of Wool or Carpets. You can mine wool or carpets a lot faster with shears than any other tool.

You get better enchants the higher your level is but that stops at Level 40 so don't go more than 400. If you are just getting experience points automatically from mining items, that's fine. However, if you are mining coal or killing mobs just for the sole purpose of getting experience points, you are probably wasting your time.

A little trivia for you: The maximum Level you can ever reach in Minecraft (in terms of experience) is Level 24,791. No one really knows why it's exactly 791 but it might be to do with Mojang's view on numbers. Maybe it's a lucky number, or a limit in the code. All I know is that no one will probably ever reach that level. Since the higher you go up, the harder it is to get to the next level (getting to level 10 from level zero, would use the same experience points as getting from level 54 to 55, for example).

Void fog can be easily seen in deep ravines and mines. It can block your view for miles and you won't be able to see what comes next in a mine. Void fog is usually dark grey, light grey or black in colour depending on the time of day. It occurs from lack of natural light in the mine. Whilst void fog isn't hugely annoying, it can obstruct your vision when you look down a mine and you won't be able to see anything that lies further down the mine.

The best way to get rid of void fog is to nerdpole up to the surface and dig a hole which will allow light into the mine. When you descend back into the mine, the light will flood in and get rid of any void fog.

You can make a potion stronger with glowstone dust. Or, it also turns it into a Tier 2 potion which makes it more powerful and last longer.

Eg: The potion of healing recovers two hearts but a Tier 2 potion recovers four hearts.

You can make a potion last longer with redstone. This is because redstone makes a potions status effects last longer.

Eg: The Potion of Swiftness lasts three minutes but with redstone added, it will make it last a whopping eight minutes.

Enchanting pickaxes are always for mining, but did you know that you can get other goodies with the Fortune enchantment?

By enchanting a pickaxe with Fortune and then using it on trees, gravel and grass – you can get more apples, flint and seeds. Apples are a great source of food and you're sure to get tons of them with an enchanted pickaxe! Did you know that you have a 1 in 64 chance of getting an apple from tree leaves? Not that high, but with an enchanted pickaxe your chance of getting apples will increase dramatically.

The same goes for gravel and grass. You can get tons more flint (which all players desperately need, no doubt!) and wheat seeds for farming.

The appearance of your house can be improved a lot, with a few basic changes. This is just one of them. It's a simple change but can really make your house a lot nicer looking. Check it out!

All you have to do is get rid of the corners on the exterior of your house. Go to your house and look for the place where both walls meet. Get rid of the corner so that the corner no longer exists. Do this for all four corners.

The result will be a tidier looking house that's a lot easier on the eye. Check out the before and after images below!

Did you know that half slabs are faster than stairs to run up? It's strange, but it works.

Try making two sets of "stairs" and see foryourself. One side should be with slabs which gradually make it to the top, and then the other side should be stairs of any type.

Then, test it out for yourself. See how you run faster on slabs? If you're worried about speed and want to go up as fast as possible, you should consider slabs instead.

Dig a hole one block deep (just get rid of one block in the surface) and place a red mushroom in it (with white spots, you know, typical mushroom). Then, place Bonemeal on the mushroom and it'll make a mushroom house! Quite literally! You'll be enclosed in a little mushroom "cabin" of sorts which will protect you from mobs and give you a source of food. It's quite cute, you should take a look at the image below!

You will be transported to where the stronghold SHOULD have spawned in the Overworld.

A stronghold is an underground fortress with empty and dark rooms, where you'll find lots of mobs and silverfish. You will find an End portal which will bring you to the End where you can fight the Enderdragon.

There are three strongholds per world.

The best way to get Enderpearls is to enchant a sword with Looting 1. The best sword to enchant would probably be a diamond sword, because they have the best durability so you'll get more mileage from the sword.

If you have Looting 1, you are guaranteed that for every Endermen you kill will give you one Enderpearl. Also, it takes less hits to kill an Enderman if you have a diamond sword so you have less chance of them fleeing or running away.

Did you know that Notch left a secret message to all Minecraft players? It's a pretty sad message, but very deep too.

Unless you've fought and successfully defeated the Ender dragon, you probably didn't see the secret message that Notch left for all players as part of the game. This message was displayed before the credits and marked the "Official End" to the game. Notch didn't actually write it, but Julian Gough, an Irish novelist did. Notch asked someone to write it on Twitter and Julian said he'd love to do it.

If you want to read the whole thing, you can

Here is the end of it. Warning: It's deep, man.

You can easily make an automatic firework system which will send a ton of fireworks into the sky at the push of a button, or when night falls. This can be done on all consoles, not just the PC. You can manage this in Survival, but you'll need a ton of fireworks which means a lot of gunpowder. If you like playing with redstone, but don't have much of it or gunpowder, try this in Creative instead.

Firstly, you need to place down a line of about ten dispensers. Then, fill the dispensers with fireworks. About five fireworks per dispenser is enough. Then, connect all the dispensers with redstone and bring the redstone to a lever or a button.

When you turn on the system, the dispensers will shoot fireworks into the air. However, you'll have to crane your neck to actually see them, since you're looking at the fireworks from ground level.

You can create a raised platform (or even a nerdpole if you want something more basic), and bring the redstone up to that platform. You can then press the button from the raised platform and then watch the fireworks without craning your neck. The best is at night, obviously.

If you're on the PC, you can also use a night time sensor to detect when it turns to night time and then, the fireworks will shoot into the air.

To view a full tutorial of this, check out this video on Youtube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2fB50WWhAE