Episode 17 opens with the INVERSION logo over the ocean, a beacon beam rising out of the water, and a title card reading "Episode 17, Shifting Floors." Then Basket is underground in a stone junction room just east of the ice tray intersection. "I actually moved my beacon into this junction room because I'm going to work on the shifting floors this episode," Basket says, "and so I need to dig out a lot of space."
Digging out the room
The shifting floors are a mob farm. Monsters spawn on a floor that moves under them, they fall, and the drops collect at the bottom. Basket first saw the design in another YouTuber's video.
With the beacon's Haste II running and "my lightning pick number one," the digging goes fast. The plan is a 12 by 12 floor of half slabs, with water at the bottom to push everything into one corner, "so that way instead of having to have hoppers all the way across this whole thing," only that corner needs them.
Slabs, pistons and comparators
The stone brick slab grid goes in first, with a gap down the middle so the two halves can shift. Rows of pistons line both sides, pointed at the floor.
The timing runs on comparators. "It's a little bit more costly, but it doesn't put any light in the area," Basket explains. Then come a row of hoppers, sticky pistons on top of them, and one cobblestone in each hopper. Tripwire hooks and string go across the top.
The first test
The first test fails. "Oh, these are all pointing the wrong direction," Basket finds. Once they are flipped, the floor starts moving Basket back and forth, and then "oh, I fell through that time." Basket guesses that players act a little differently on it than monsters do. One spot still will not fire until a missing block goes into its hopper.
Chat lights up while the string goes in: EPiC_HERO_NBK types "Deh Herro!", xPROxGR33NY types "yo!" and PsychoSFK types "Hello." Both EPiC_HERO_NBK and xPROxGR33NY leave the game a few minutes later.
At the bottom, Basket pours water from a bucket so it carries the drops toward the hoppers. "Should have brought ice," Basket says, since aiming the water is hard.
A look through the rock
To see how dark the area around the farm is, Basket crafts fence posts and makes "a quick x-ray." The view through the stone shows dark caves with lava and water. "Oh, diamonds right there," Basket adds.
Back up at the platform, the floor is not moving. "Yeah, it sounds like there's a spider in there," Basket says. "Oh, the spider wouldn't trigger it." A skeleton did not set it off either. "So there's some sort of flaw in the way I've set it up."
Debugged, mostly
After a cut, the ceiling is higher, which seems to help, and Basket has spent time caving to light up the area. Spiders still spawn on the floor and never trip the string. "For now, every now and then I just come up here and kill some spiders."
Down below, hoppers carry the drops into a corner, and an item elevator lifts them into the same sorting system Basket uses at the skeleton spawner. The gunpowder chest has a little in it ("there's not a whole lot"), next to bones, arrows and string.
A second x-ray finds skeletons in a pocket that is still unlit. "So there's still some caving to do, so that's why the spawn rates aren't real great." Any more floors will probably be stacked on top of this one, so they can share the same hoppers. The episode ends in the chest room at the bottom of the farm, and the end card plays to the last frame.