I have been playing a bit of Minecraft, spending some more time in the world where I established a castle for about 20 hours a few months back.
After not really getting any ideas of what to build, I decided to explore my tunnels. I quickly realized that some of that had been built with a rather haphazard approach including one ladder that covered only about half the way down. And since the bottom is at the bedrock… well, it was a long fall. And I had no clue where the other exit for that shaft was, so that I tried to add the rest of the ladder from above (!). Not too surprisingly it resulted in a few more deaths. XD
Since then I have replaced most of the resources and my iron armor that I lost that way and have been removing some layers around my castle. It’s mostly about the aesthetics since I want - where possible - the surroundings to basically be plains of a significantly lower level than my outer wall. I don’t think that will help my security issues though. The inner area seems to be safe enough, but I had a few Creepers crawling around between my outer two walls. Maybe it was just a lack of torches along the walls, but it may not be the worst idea to take some more security measures.
Aside from that I have discovered a rather large natural cave-system, which I explored yesterday. It has reminded me that I still have not established a mining outpost. Not that it’s really needed, but I just like the idea of having safe outposts for specific purposes. Especially since this world is mostly about trying to emulate that old lost project of mine and I had something like that in there. Basically a foundry with a good amount of furnaces for processing ore and sometimes sand which was part of my old tunnel-system and served as the antechamber to the mine. It had some basic amenities and storage as well of course. I still need to decide on a sensible place for it.