You know I had almost forgotten about having a blog on Atari Age. It's not from the lack of visiting the site, as shown by my string of posts in the 7800 and Modern Gaming forums.

My Livejournal isn't doing much better for activity however, if that's worth anything.

Don't really have much to say this time either as I haven't been very active with homebrew in the last year or three, so instead I'll just post a screenshot from my minecraft single player. It's basically a dark room tower trap - using pistons on the platforms to push mobs over since putting signs on the sides of the blocks no longer work with the new mob AI.

The difference here is that this dark room trap is an XP grinder. It's designed to deliver all the mobs down the central column alive but reduced down to 1-2 hp. There's a couple places where it was impossible to prevent damage and there's the potential for glitch damage from the pistons but otherwise it's a success in my book. I typically just use a stone swords to kill the creepers/skeletons/zombies that fall down. Spiders won't spawn in this due to the block placement, and the ceilings are too low for endermen. Even if endermen were spawnable you'd never get them down the chute due to the water that would make them teleport outside the trap.

So from this trap I get xp, arrows, bones, rotten flesh, bows, iron ingots, iron shovels, iron helms, iron swords, gunpowder... and records!

Having a lot of skeletons and creepers in that small 2x2 hole (actually 2x1 with the piston magic) makes the skeletons potentially shoot creepers if they see you when you get too close. It wasn't really intended, but I'll take it since I haven't recreated a record factory in my single player the way I have one made on the private server I play.

Looks like crap, but functional.