Build your windmill at bedrock level. Bust your ever-lovin' ass to get waterwheels to work, get rid of the windmill, or use it as a lure. Simple enough to fix. You can use the hole you made for the windmill as part of your mob trap later.

Looks like my cows are gonna have a long boring swim ahead of them then. :)

Hiding one is a lot easier than you might think. The only block that has to have a clear line to the sky is the one directly over the axle so the rest of the windmilll can be covered completely. Even fully underground.

From the positioning of natural glowstone deposits I would be under the assumption that they were crystals formed when zompie pigman piss was flitered through netherrack. Keep looking under your pigman farms. :)

I never saw that post before. Hrm. And here I thought I'd found something interesting and new. :(

Nevertheless, I got wolves thanks to a very long boat trip and I'm still waiting to see if I can spawn cows.

I'm hoping I can somehow force a spawn if I create enough grassland. Once I get some livestock I'll tear out the grassland and make an underground spawner. This should be interesting if it works.

In my search for a seed to offer a real challenge and possibly a way to push it to the limit, I may have found one that I'll actually stick with. Some folks like huge cliffs and waterfalls, some like a wide, flat basin, etc. I'm still not sure how I'll make this work yet but I'm gonna try. I put in ...

I'm considering building my mob trap below the ocean. since there won't be any spawn above besides squids that will help eliminate my need to light up caves as Thalarctia recommended. I like to live underground and I already know how to make a windmill work underground so I can advance to water whee...

I should clarify a bit... I had to swim for 30 minutes, not 3, and I'm already mining under the island for the materials to build the trap. I love the fact that I have an endless food supply too, thanks to those poor ugly mooshrooms. Soon I'll use a boat to find the edge of the biome and make this w...

Rightclicking on your pets will make them sit and not follow you uless they are injured or glitched in some way. As far as untaming, I've never had that happen. Just don't feed them wolfchops. :)

I did find a world that spawned me in the ocean, the closest land was a 7x7 or so mycelium island with 2 mooshrooms on it. I had to swim for almost 3 minutes to find a tree. That might not be a bad place to start assuming I can get cows and such to spawn there.

I considered that, and even though it would mean a massive undertaking I may still do that. I considered asking FC if there would be a way to change terrain generation and maybe make it an option but I really don't want to ask him anything. He's busy enough as it is, and I really don't feel the need...

I've spawned a number of worlds using random seeds and what I've found is that every one of them is simply lousy with underground caves and ravines. It's like the devs are actively trying to discourage mob traps by making it impossible to shut down the underground spawns. Has anyone got a seed that ...

Sounds like you might want to invest in Pyrex or at the very least glass dishes designed for cooking. Glass dishes are great when there's a reduced chance of detonation.
And stop cooking hellfire dust on high heat. That's just asking for trouble.

I'm not really concerned about enchanting my tools for now since I generally go through 2 mattocks a day. Plus I got ganked by a creeper and went from 53 levels to 6 in a single bang. I hate those little beasts. I'd like to make some discoveries but after rebuilding my mob trap (62 pistons in total)...

Ah, gotcha. I was thinking about putting the saws lateral to the water flow. For some reason it just didn't occur to me to have the water push them against the blade. That would really allow me to expand the size of the trap indefinitely. EDIT: I built a trap on a test world with the saw oriented th...

Urian: I didn't place it vertically. I placed it horizontally (blade facing upward) so it should act as a half slab, if nothing else. I'm really stumped about this, but I'm going to use a gravity kill method until I can sort out the saw problem. Graphite: Wher else would I put the saw? I tried on th...

I'm actually enjoying designing my mob trap. The trap I have now is functional but bland so I'll be building a piston type with a gravity kill system. Still struggling with the sorting though. I'm constantly tired and have a great deal of difficulty concentrating lately. I'm getting there though. Ha...

The checkerboard trap is working rather well but I tested a piston setup that pushed the mob into a stream of water and onto a saw. Works well but for one problem. Dragon orbs fall through the saw. I have the blade facing upward, surrounded on 3 sides by cobblestone and one side by the hopper but th...

Or meticulously extracted from seawater. Can't wait to run a pump with a hand crank. :P

Lighting up underground certainly helped though I spent almost 3 hours down there and went through multiple stacks of torches. The mob trap is doing much better but I still might use the piston in the very near future becase it's far more expandable than this current design.

Maybe it'll be a system in which food slowly rots, and salt prolongs the freshness. Good call. They do a lot of that in that series. While it's been a side-line the entire time for them, I hear in season 8 Sam & Dean are going to give up hunting beasties entirely and set up a booth selling pres...

Pressure plates are an excellent idea. I found a design while browsing You Tube that looked like it might work so I built one like it but I think I may have made a mistake. I made it 80 blocks high and hardly anything spawns there. I'll be attempting to light up caves to see if that helps but I don'...

I couldn't care less about spiders, honestly I can get all the string I'll ever need from the abandoned mineshaft under my place, and hemp strings aren't exactly in short supply. I can't remember if they can be used as bowstrings, but oh well. I've heard of vine traps but never understood how they w...

Oh, thank goodness. I thought it was something I hadn't heard about yet.