Setting up our Mansion’s Base Camp

Now that we have secured the front of the Mansion we can start setting up our base camp to be more functional. We have the furnace, crafting table, and a single bed. Next we tracked down a few more sheep and brought them back to a temporary pin outside of the mansion for shearing. This is a lot easier when you can breed them and feed them so we took down some of the wheat from the garden room inside the Mansion since we don’t have buckets to setup a farm yet. We replanted the seeds for later as well as adding torches to keep it growing faster.

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Mob Proofing the Base Camp

While we were out setting up the pen for the sheep a zombie and a creeper spawned inside of our base camp area. Even with the torches we had setup there were still dark areas in the upper corners above the stairs and a few spots under the stairs. We spammed torches around the area temporarily to keep them from spawning while we worked on mob proofing. I’ve never been a fan of torches strung down every wall and luckily in Minecraft Bedrock light will shine through slabs and stairs. So we pull up the floor in our base camp area-

Then dig down holes under the floor in a 4×4 pattern for torches to be placed in. You can go larger on the pattern, 5×5 works as well but I’ve found the 4×4 works better. In corners you sometimes need to stretch one or two rows out to even out the lighting. When using 5×5 I ran into several corner areas where I had to go to a 5×3 or have a darker area near the wall.

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Quick Tip –

 If you have door openers or other redstone builds planned for the area you can also dig out trenches to run the redstone wire in. It can always be added later but “two birds with one stone” and all.

Adding the torches under slabs is something I’ve done in most builds for quite awhile. Even if you do plan to use decorative lighting such as sconces or lanterns having the extra light hidden under the floor gives you more flexibility in the placement of the decorative lights. When we have more iron we will be making chains and lanterns to hang around the mansion as well.

Clearing the Mansion

With the base camp secured we can now begin clearing the mansion. Bring extra fencing and gates and when you have cleared a room you can light it up and block off that area from the rest of the mansion. This will keep Illagers from moving back into the room while you return to camp or are down the hall in another room. More than once I have had an Evoker slip by and go into a Library or other room. Which is a surprise later when I thought the room was cleared.

I have a love/hate relationship with the chest rooms in Mansions. It’s nice to be able to quickly grab a chest when needed. But walking into a room full of chests and knowing they are always going to spawn empty is just annoying. Especially when playing with kids and they want to open every single one just to make sure.

Cool Rooms and Loot

On the first floor we found 2 small chest rooms, 1 large chest room, 2 garden rooms, 1 flower room, and one of the Illager wool statue “idol” rooms. Best part was the idol had the lapis lazuli block “brain”. When checking out the seed before we start a world I intentionally just do a quick look through so there’s still the cool element of surprise when finding the treasure. It just takes too much of the fun out if you explore the whole thing beforehand.

With the first floor secured we will be moving on to exploring some of the surrounding area next. We need to get some more coal and get started on a mine to get some diamonds as well. Thanks again for checking out our adventures!

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