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 3×3 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.
The number you need to pay attention to is rl (real light) as long as this is high enough mobs cannot spawn.
Best Answer
Unfortunately if you want to remove the lava completely and then be where that pool is gravel/sand really is the best way to go about clearing that out.
The only alternate that I can think of would be to bucket every block of lava out and then put it into a single block area. This would then just require a single piece of gravel to get rid of. If you are good at bucketing then this might be a bit faster and save you on some shovels.