Another half episode, and Basket plays it alone. "No Scoti today." The plan is to turn the witch spawner from the last episode into a grinder. The death counter starts at Basket 43, Scoti 27 and ends at Basket 45, Scoti 27. Both deaths are Basket's, and one of them happens off camera.
The tree
First the area has to be made safe, and that takes longer than expected. Creepers, zombies and spiders keep showing up, and Basket can't tell where from. A spawner turns out to be hiding in some gravel, and a skeleton spawner gets taken out because "we already have a couple other skeleton spawners." A zombie spawner gets left alone for now, since next episode is going in there.
Most of the trouble comes from one big tree. Every time Basket gets close to it, things pour out. "There's a lot of stuff in that tree. That was not expected." The witches don't help. When they die they splash a potion of instant damage, and one of them poisons Basket. "I didn't bring any antidote potions. I should've done that."
This time Basket wants to keep the witch spawner, "now that I don't have Scoti to destroy it."
The lava bucket
Lighting the witch room means getting into a corner right by that tree, so Basket's answer is lava. "I should have brought a lava bucket is what I should have done." After a trip to get one, the first pour stops short of the far corner. For the second try Basket climbs up high and drops it from above. It lands right next to Basket instead. "Run! I don't have a water bucket."
That's death 44. "This is the most unorganized 0.5 I've had so far." Basket goes back for the dropped gear, and the third pour finally lands where it's aimed. With the room lit, the witches can be shot from a ledge.
A chest nearby holds a Poison Antidote, leather boots with Fire Protection II, notes from an "Alchemical Priest" and some enchanted books, which Basket leaves for Scoti to look over.
Just regular witch stuff
After killing witches for a while, Basket finds they drop "the regular sort of witch stuff": sugar, gunpowder, glowstone, sticks and glass bottles. Nothing special comes from killing them by hand. The new plan is a water elevator that carries them up and drops them about 30 blocks onto a hopper outside.
That build happens off camera, and the counter goes up to 45 in the meantime. "I forgot that when I put down a sign the water wasn't down there, so I dropped down and died."
Back on camera, Basket shows off the finished shaft, watches a witch go through it, and builds a little shelter on top to wait in.
Splash healing
After about an hour of waiting, some witches are still alive at the bottom. "It's like a 30 block drop, they're still alive, that's pretty crazy." Some of the ones that do die drop healing potions. Later Basket raises the spawning platform so none of the witches die from the fall, kills them by hand, and collects a stack of healing potions. Add the glowstone and gunpowder the witches also drop, and those become splash potions of healing.
Basket takes them to the Scorched Underpass grinder, which has about 300 mobs piled up and the frame rate to match. The idea is to throw a splash potion into the crowd and switch to a Looting weapon so the kills count as Looting kills. "This might actually crash the game." It doesn't. The zombies die, but the skeletons seem to shrug it off. "Works pretty well against the zombies, but not against these guys for some reason."