reasons going to an ancient city is a great thing to do as soon as you have a little food upon starting a new minecraft world:

moving mobs around sucks, just go harvest wool and planks from the city to make a bed instead of messing around with sheep!

don't have to worry about being attacked by hostile mobs at all

can harvest materials for picks, very easy to go from iron -> diamonds due to all the exposed ores, way easier than strip mining

lava and water usually accessible if you want a nether portal

one million experience for breaking sculk !! plus silk touch + mending loot

free books for enchanting

if you run out of food u get glowberries (renewable) and even gapples

it's a little known fact that it's actually impossible to build anything in 1.18+ without swift sneak 3. you'll never go back you have to have it right now

start off with sick armor trims to decorate all those pants you'll be getting

oh, the warden? you mean my girlfriend? she's fine just know your exit vectors (long straight line you can navigate in the dark) and don't make noise, just sneak straight. you'll be fine

this isn't even a joke ive basically started 3 minecraft worlds this way. i have literally dug down to ancient cities because i don't want to look for a sheep. it's so good try it i promise

built a warden farm on vibes and memory only and it's theeeee most jank one i've ever built because, in a fit of "safety"-mindedness, i put the spawn platform two blocks above the shrieker so if i fucked up the warden couldn't spawn on my level (they're 3 blocks tall) but apparently this means that the second warden spawn aggros onto me instead so i have to run 25 blocks away, pause, turn around and check the hitbox is going up the bubble column before stepping back on the shrieker. the upside is i'm so poor that i don't even have a hopper so this allows me to collect the drops that fall from the ceiling as i go. however i forgot i need to damage them personally to get their mob head, so i'm going to have to build a blind-navigation staircase to shoot at them. which btw i have to shoot behind them sometimes anyway to get them to walk into the bubble column bc i think the far edge of the spawn platform is out of the range of their hearing, esp if they aggro a little onto me or the fucking BAT. jank jank jank. but for my girlfriends (the wardens i'm trying to save from drowning by getting them to spawn quickly enough to entity cram)? i'll do anything

dreaming of a warden farm that shoots wardens up to the surface and well actually i think i'm reinventing the warden aquarium concept again because i do want someday to see a) if the conduit darkness effect glitch still works and b) what's the point of having a surface-level warden farm if you aren't going to make a menace of it to other people. unfortunately wardens float but now i'm thinking about hooking up a randomizer to a scaffolding-observer-water dispenser tower and playing plinko with them. why? i don't know. i think it would be funny. maybe you'd have to race them down without getting obliterated in your own separate water column. the possibilities are endless

went to an ancient city with rio yesterday and worked some pretty good strats and game ideas you can play with any ancient city and a few stacks of blocks. also we died in totally normal ways and amounts and the wardens behaved even more normally and i was never stressed at all

hashtag girl talk

nap cancelled. did you know that conduits make you semi-immune to the darkness effect

when I slept all day the other day I had this dream of God's most perfect deep dark biome that branched off from where my sculk/chicken/warden farm is currently in the perfect position with nicely spaced shriekers and a twenty block plus ceiling and water features and it took me a whole day to realize it doesn't exist actually and I made it up in my sleep :(

wardens can't be damaged by conduits but they can drown, which is so stupid. however, trapping them in little glass cubes has given me ideas

latest warden habitat thots is that even if you don't send players DOWN for the game, those little metal ball mazes with the dials on the sides to tilt it to the end of the maze is a kind of labyrinth in this sense. and the warden can be guided with sound, and c.f. previous concepts of glass floors and snowball-throwing holes. the difficulty here ofc is the victory condition - but doc's method of powdered snow tricking them into walking into an entity cramming setup is intriguing. could tripwire the drop to activate a noteblock to keep their aggro focused then too

but then in a large enough arena you could activate a warden at one end from above using sensors & put a contestant at the OTHER end of the arena and spectators play evil air hockey with noise.

thinking abt non-game type warden habitats it would be cool to live in an ancient city. like practically speaking if you kept the shriekers (you'd have to keep the shriekers) if the 15 block range is space and not affected by transparency you could conceivably do 15 layers of glass - or 2 with 13 blocks between, but the cool fade effect - and have the skulk only outside so the warden never enters. like a warden aquarium.

or with the height thing do that as a floor and then use sensors to transfer the noises from within your home down to the shriekers bc if it isn't clear the point is to cohabitation with active wardens with only minimal actual terror of death, mostly coming from second guessing if you built it right. they're not very good at navigating tight spaces and can get stuck with water flowing against them so I think this is plausible

currently running an involuntary experiment to find out if you spawn a warden but never leave its darkness (and blast) radius but you also never make a noise will it despawn before the aggro counter from sniffing you out ticks to full and you get obliterated. it takes for fucking ever to find out