Next on my list of Minecraft todo's is building a slime farm. I looked up the spawning locations online and chose my location.
I dug out the spawning plateau (16x32x5 blocks) and dug out an extra surrounding 3x3 blocks for tunneling. All went well; 2-3 diamond pickaxes did the trick. After that I lit up the place with glowstone so no angry mobs would spawn.
I think it will be a successful project, because slimes spawn in constantly already.
I've started to work on the collection area. Basically, I want to build a large room there that looks out over the spawning plateaus. The problem I have is that the exact area I want to work with is filled with lava pools.
When I visited that place earlier I poured water over the lava, which turns it into obsidian. That was stupid; now it takes me ages to harvest, and I can not blast it away.
Now I use the gravel method: just filling the lava block-by-block. When I am out of gravel, I dig up the back parts and go on. This really takes a while though.
I wonder if there are any better ways to clear a large-lava filled chunk.