Better Than Wolves Forum

Hi guys,

What with the changes to Hardcore Villages and the requirement to find a priest villager to continue on to the End, I've been having trouble finding one. At the moment I have a nether tunnel at the bedrock level, tunnelling in one direction and creating a portal occasionally, and I'm creating a new fully zoomed map whenever I reach the edge of an existing one, so I can track where my portal is coming out relative to my previous one. Every time I resurface I search the area for plains and deserts for villages, as well as the various temples and huts in their appropriate biomes.

I've found a couple villages, 1 abandoned, 1 semi-abandoned and 2 complete, but no luck with the priest so far. I'm confident this will work out eventually, but I'm wondering if there's a faster way to do this? Any help would be appreciated.

How far are you tunneling between portals?
How far are you walking out from the portal?

Boats are pretty fast if you're by the ocean, otherwise you can't really go much faster.
(I guess you could set up as a server, and bring a few mates on)

Fastest method for me has been portal to the calculated center of the next big map over and biome hunt. Takes about 2.5 minecraft days depending on terrain and the biomes you encounter. Pretty quick, just cross your fingers you don't portal right into a town :P

EtherealWrath wrote:How far are you tunneling between portals?
How far are you walking out from the portal?

Boats are pretty fast if you're by the ocean, otherwise you can't really go much faster.
(I guess you could set up as a server, and bring a few mates on)

I try to broadly hit the middle of the next map, and explore to the three edges that I haven't been to yet.

Sounds to me like you're doing everything right. A lot of it is just luck; in my case, I rather quickly found three desert temples and 2 villages, all of which easily fit on the same map. This was in spite of my incredibly inefficient methodology of exploration, where I seldom walked further than half a day out, and pretty much retraced my steps on the way back. (At the time, I had largely forgotten that maps existed >_>)

EtherealWrath wrote: Boats are pretty fast if you're by the ocean, otherwise you can't really go much faster.
(I guess you could set up as a server, and bring a few mates on)

Eh, I'd pretty much leave the ocean alone unless you're looking for mushroom islands. You may be covering a lot of ground, but it won't have what you're looking for.

Alright, thanks for the advice. I managed to find a boat load of Desert temples (I think I've got 5 enchanting tables now haha), 2 Jungle temples and a Witch Hut, so it's not like these adventures aren't coming up with good loot, including a lot of gold bars. My village count is 4 so far, but no priest, so I looted what I can and abandoned them.

I've found that ocean biomes are just too big and risky to tackle. Squids are downright lethal, and the prospect of a very flimsy boat being between me and a one-way ticket to the depths just doesn't add up to sounding anything like a good idea. I have a memory seared into my brain of sailing out to sea in the morning and never seeing land before being taken under by rubbery appendages.

I'm running a co-op Hardcore game with a friend, we're trying to prove that it's possible to beat Better than Wolves (Complete SFS factory + SFS Beacon) legitimately without either of us dying. It's proving tough. We could separate to double the search area, but there's been too many times where one has saved the other's skin, so we're sticking together while adventuring.

ExpHP wrote:Eh, I'd pretty much leave the ocean alone unless you're looking for mushroom islands. You may be covering a lot of ground, but it won't have what you're looking for.

Try following the coastline.

EtherealWrath wrote:

ExpHP wrote:Eh, I'd pretty much leave the ocean alone unless you're looking for mushroom islands. You may be covering a lot of ground, but it won't have what you're looking for.

Try following the coastline.

or using lilypads

Frankly I don't think squid are *that* dangerous. Once you have a diamond sword (or even iron) you can kill them fairly quickly before they can do serious damage if they get on your head and as long as your armor is light enough to allow swimming you should be able to survive any attack.

Sarudak wrote:Frankly I don't think squid are *that* dangerous. Once you have a diamond sword (or even iron) you can kill them fairly quickly before they can do serious damage if they get on your head and as long as your armor is light enough to allow swimming you should be able to survive any attack.

the problem is that, in oceans, most of the times there's at least half a dozen trying to get you, and that's not easy to get rid of even with a battle axe

RalphKastro wrote:

Sarudak wrote:Frankly I don't think squid are *that* dangerous. Once you have a diamond sword (or even iron) you can kill them fairly quickly before they can do serious damage if they get on your head and as long as your armor is light enough to allow swimming you should be able to survive any attack.

the problem is that, in oceans, most of the times there's at least half a dozen trying to get you, and that's not easy to get rid of even with a battle axe

Oceans become rather easy if you remember to bring some lilypads and other ressources to build a platform and rebuild your boat.

The lilypads allow for a quick construction of an ocean platform, should you be caught by the night or a thunderstorm. Just slap it on the water and continue building from there.

They can also be used to build some buoys to mark your way over the ocean, which helps a lot in finding mushroom biomes.

Huh... A serious use for lillypads. Who woulda thunk it?

Sarudak wrote:Huh... A serious use for lillypads. Who woulda thunk it?

I assumed this was common knowledge. Huh.

I also use them in farms to stop me from falling in the water, causing me to trample crops.