Yeah. Decent amounts of experience are hard enough to come by and even harder to keep, so it's been hard to get much that's worthwhile yet, though.

mining and cooking build you up pretty quick, i gather resourses for a bit, and then im about a level 40 or thats how it was last time i gathered, and cooked stone, been a bit as i normally mine for a decent amount of time to build up supplies then build, just about time to start mining again.

Have now put in an automatic cactus farm and an automatic smoothstone generator.

The automatic cactus farm both harvests and collects the cacti automatically - the cacti are rigged to pop as soon as they grow up, then there is a water section below it that carries all of the cacti to a central location. Then, AT that central location, there is a hopper and a chest. The cacti float over the hopper, which then collects them up and loads them into the chest. All I have to do is come by occasionally and collect them. I may be building something like this as a replacement for a bunch of my farms, using pistons to pop them and water to collect the produce to the hopper.

The smoothstone generator is because cobblestone doesn't mine as fast as smoothstone. It operates by first using pistons to push a stack of smoothstone into the sky, then push another stack outward. I'm planning on putting in more pistons to push every single of the outward blocks into the sky, so it'll be 144 total smoothstone blocks when fully generated. And I built two of them, so actually 288.

Reworking my smoothstone generator to build multiple layers of a giant mining compound. It's going to be pretty sweet. Only problem is that I'm having weird issues with my redstone - all of my pistons seem to work, but for some reason, like one piston here or there just won't be pushing anything out. I think it's a timing issue.

 it can be a real pain right now,  especially if your using older designs, timing changed ever so slightly in the 1.5 update. i had a few gates I had to adjust timing on so they would not put holes through walls or flood the place... water also seems to be a tad slower at disapearing 

minor patching going on server will be back up ASAP

back up 19:25 eastern 

I've perfected my spider farm. I figured out a nearly flawless method of luring the spiders down. Basically, the tower spawns them, but that doesn't mean they fall. I could spend more time building it to have water traps to bring them down, but water traps entail a LOT more blocks, and I wasn't about to waste that many blocks.

So, instead, I have to have the spiders WANT to come down. The best way to do that is to be bait. So I built a ladder system up to a platform just below the spider tower. Problem there was that the spiders could then somehow manage to weasel their way onto my platform. You don't want them to be able to attack you. So I enclosed that platform with glass. Spiders can't touch me.

Now I'm considering expanding their fall one more block because I want them to be more easily killed.

But anyways, I just went in there and within five minutes had 13 spider eyes and 39 strings.

HOLY CRAP

I never knew about the whole "bookshelves around enchanting tables makes them WAY more effective" mechanic, but geeeeez! I've wasted so many levels on low-level enchantments.

hmm, yep, i thought you knew or i would have said something, joe designed a room where you could vary the level you needed by some lever pulls ... its in his base on waterworld... 

nibiru and waterworld both updated to 1.5.2