Episode 17 of Kill the Dragon, Michael Deering's December 2016 Minecraft Hardcore Challenge, starts in the village with the rain still coming down. The ender pearl hunt can wait for a dry night, so Basket turns back to the other stubborn problem: the two villagers who won't breed. Someone suggested they might not have had enough to eat. "I don't think that they eat steak. Yeah, they don't do steak. They do do bread."
Bread for the villagers
Basket harvests wheat from the village farm, crafts it into bread at the house, and hands it to the breeding pair. "If they don't breed then there's no reason to have the bread anyway." No baby shows up. "These guys aren't going to do anything."
Worn-out armor
Next comes a gear check, and it isn't great. The iron armor is nearly worn through, and there is less iron in the chest than Basket expected. "We actually don't have a lot of armor or iron. I thought we had more." The enchanting room shows what a new bow could get: the top slot offers Power IV, but it needs level 30. The bow Basket already carries has Unbreaking III and Power IV, and combining two could push it higher. "Power five is a good way to go." That settles the plan. "We're going for XP and diamonds."
Back to the branch mine
Basket heads down the shaft to the old branch mine and picks a new direction. "Good old branch mining." "It's against the rules to skip any footage or even speed up, so enjoy." The tunnels stretch on block by block, with torches on the walls and a diamond pickaxe doing the work.
Diamonds
It pays off. "Oh, good. Diamonds." There's no Fortune pickaxe, so the ore gets mined as it is. That's why the armor hasn't been remade yet: if diamonds turned up, Basket planned to make the new armor from them. A little later there's a second vein. "There we go, more diamonds." By the next inventory check there are 14 diamonds in the pack.
A cave full of creepers
The tunnels break into caves with water and lava. Basket blocks off the lava and keeps digging. "Oh, baby zombies." A side passage opens into a wide stone cave lit by torches, and two creepers wander across the floor. Basket switches to the sword and takes a swing at the closer one. Then it's back to the ore. "Ooh, lapis, nice." The luck has turned. "This is much better luck than I had previously with the mining."
Still underground
Basket forgot to set a timer, so the debug screen goes up to watch for the day to roll over. Mining continues past redstone and more lapis, with an eye out for a lava lake at diamond level. The episode ends with Basket alive and still deep in the mine, heading for a grotto. "Let's get down to the grotto." A last look shows Basket in the iron armor, diamond pickaxe in hand, in a narrow stone tunnel. The end card follows, with no gameplay after it.
