Just by accident the other day, I noticed I didn't have 100% in Minecraft on Xbox One. I found out they added a new achievement. So, of course, I had to tackle it today.
The achievement is for acquiring 1000 emeralds. Emeralds are very rarely found in the ground, but they are plentiful in the hands of villagers. To get them you must trade for them. The villagers who trade all want something different but common to a few of them is coal and iron, two very plentiful resources. Of course, it isn't just as easy as collecting coal and iron and getting a ton of emeralds; villagers accept only so much at a time. Then you have to wait for them to do their sales, or whatever they do on their own, and return needing more resources.
So, I spent my time harvesting a variety of stuff needed by these villagers. I mined a ton of coal and iron but also: sugar cane (to make paper), andicite (a type of rock), flint, sand (to make glass), rotten meat (dropped by mobs when you kill them), gold, and nether-quartz. As you give them resources for emeralds, they level up and then will accept other resources. They will also make things for you at the cost of emeralds. It's ok to use up the emeralds, the achievement just counts the transaction not the amount in your chest. I bought a sweet pair of enchanted diamond pants that saved my life several times - attractive and usefull. You can't beat that.
I managed to get about 175 emeralds this afternoon.
Another thing that happened of interest was that I was attacked by a giant mob of Drowned. I saw them in the water as I boated across, and then when I landed, they started streaming out of the river to attack me. I couldn't believe how many of them there were. Usually you come accross three or even four mobs together from time to time, but this was more like a dozen. I thought I captured a video of it but something went wrong, and it didn't work. I think, in my panic I pressed the wrong button, or didn't press it firmly enough. I was running for my life to a defensive position after all. I got a lot of rotten meat out of that fight. It's weird how the village priest is the one that accepts rotten meat for emeralds - gold too. Rotten meat and gold for the church. Ha ha. Like souls and riches.
Enchanted diamond pants do not sound comfortable.
Ha ha, yeah. I was thinking about how impossible diamond armor would be. Diamond studded armor may be possible.
Hmmm, that achievement sounds a little intense and time consuming!
It is. I got another 50 today but it took me something around four hours. I read about how to cheat by copying the file, or some such thing, but I'd rather do it normally. It's been fun to think about how to optimize trading with villagers to get the most emeralds.
I think I saw that Minecraft is celebrating it's 10th Anniversary, it's good to see the developers still adding achievements to this game to keep people playing.
It gets updated regularly. They're also doing a dungeon crawl adventure, but I'm not sure if it'll come to consoles, or be a mode in Minecraft or a seperate game. I'm excited to try that out.
I'm in a similar boat with Shenmue's toy capsule achievement. I don't think it'll take me as long to get that as this will for you, but the way you get emeralds sounds a lot more exciting than the way I get toy capsules (literally pressing left to say I want to buy one over and over and hoping they're all new ones).
Having to repeat something for a random drop a lot is not fun. There's an achievement in Borderlands to collect items dropped by Claptrap in the last piece of DLC. The drop rates for some of the items are very low and I never get all of them even after several playthroughs and probably thousands of destroyed claptraps.
Yeah, I hate the tedious tasks games make you do for trophies. I still do them if they're the last one I need and I have time though. Guess I'm part of the problem.
I persist for a while but I'll give up eventually. The Minecraft one I'll get though. I'm at 20% and I'll just play a little bit every week until I finish it. I totally felt like I was playing Animal Crossing today by just harvesting and selling a lot.
Yeah, doing it piece-by-piece helps. I'm actually pretty far into the Shenmue achievement already and I only just started this second save file. Just going to the toy capsule machines until I hit one I've seen before every "day" in the game.