Had another close call tonight, an ultimate example of risk vs reward stemming from something that I thought would be pretty insignificant.
I had gotten bored (spent most of the day digging a massive hole), so I decided to use my raid farm for some easy emeralds before heading to bed. I use a bell to track the raid through the ceiling to see if they all make their way into the trap I built or if I have to hunt them down. One of the times I hit the bell I noticed a witch outline close to one of the walls of the room. I figured there was a cave there, so after I finished the raid I dug towards where I had seen the witch. I didn't have to go very far....
I ended up not finding a cave, but a mineshaft. I ran back to my storage area, stocked up on torches and began exploring. Almost right away I was rewarded. The second minecart chest I found looked something like this...
But then I ran into the close call. We all know that mineshafts mean one thing. Cave spiders. I had found a couple spawners here and there, but as I neared the center of the mineshaft I was overrun by a swarm of them. It was a struggle, but I managed to fight them off. I could see that there were two spawners close to each other. I decided to save them for later to build a string farm. But even after I lit them up and killed off the spiders I could find, I could still hear more spawning. A couple right turns down some corridors discovered a third spawner. Since it was still spawning spiders as I cleared the first two, I knew it had to be in range of them as well. A little digging and this was the end result of almost being wiped out....
What started as "huh, there must be a cave there" turned into a near death, a notch apple, and a future op string/wool farm. Not bad for digging 15 blocks.