Look On My Work Ye Mighty

I respawned, making a mental note to restock the spawning hut sometime. . . soon (restocking spawning huts is one of those tasks, like folding laundry or putting dishes away, that are just somehow not all that rewarding). . . and hauled ass yet again all the way to Wayhouse #2. This time, though, I did it on Peaceful mode and if that means I’m a wimp, then I’m embracing my own wimpitude with love. I managed to pick up almost all my dropped stuff and then it was dark and I turned everything back to normal and sat around organizing my inventory until the sun came up. I wish I had a Set Back To Normal dial in the real world, I must say, and having an opportunity for Peaceful mode would be even better.

The next day I headed on back to FourFalls, which is still beautiful and, well, done. Sure, I could put in a farm or heat the pool but basically, FourFalls is static and complete and I need adventure. Therefore, I decide on the hopeless quest of finding Mountain House (which isn’t even in the mountains and why I’m calling it that I do not know) by retracing my steps, leaving orange wool behind to mark them. There are only two problems with this strategy: 1) it’s never worked before because I cannot retrace my steps from last week and 2) I don’t have all that much orange wool and I’m stingy with it. That’s why I end up in the desert, hopelessly lost.

However, while I’m in the desert, I remember a project I’ve had in mind for a while. So look on my works, ye mighty, and despair – Shelley is rolling in his grave.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Creepers, Creepers Everywhere

I got home and immediately got bored, so I went off looking for a new cave. I found an excellent one and, wonder of wonders, got some lapis out of it. Only one problem: when I got out of the cave I was lost. I wandered around for a couple of days, heading vaguely north, thinking I would eventually hit my road to spawn at least but nothing. Nope, I was thoroughly lost in the wilderness and even the zone of weird trees I stumbled into was not the same zone of weird trees that I knew. Fuck it, I thought, and built a house by a waterfall, surrounded by weird trees. Mountain and snow houses have to be made of wood – I don’t know why, they just do – so that took me a while but eventually this house, too, was completed and sporting an elegantly blue couch of wool blocks. Then, of course, I was kind of bored and, because there must be roads, I set off to build one.

Back to spawn! I was sure that the wood house was close to FourFalls. After all, I had only left for a day or so, gone caving and emerged, so the two houses can’t be far from each other; it’s just not possible. I’m convinced of this and so my initial road building excursions were more exploratory than practical. I found an abandoned boat, hmmm, and yet. . . no FourFalls. Nothing even vaguely familiar, not even the boat. Finally I gave in and started building a road or, rather, a series of cobble blocks and tunnels and the occasional bridge, in earnest. It took forever and, surprise, ended up merging with the road from the old, old house. That’s peculiar and I don’t begin to understand it. I have to get a map program going; there’s really no other way.

I thought about trying to backtrack my way to Fourfalls from Old House but instead went almost all the way to Spawn. There, I picked up the FourFalls road and headed out, planning to spend a little time hunting creepers in the monster infested wayhouse. Halfway between the first wayhouse (which is scary ugly, but I can’t be bothered to make it prettier) I came upon the zone of weird trees. Or, well, A zone of weird trees. My wood house is near here, I thought. I swear it is. And thus I set off to look for it, marking my way with blocks of colored wool, an innovation of which I am rather proud.

Well. I made a circle and found no house, although I did stop to take a picture of some squids sporting in a half frozen pool with a friendly and slightly bewildered sheep. Back along the colored wool trail, back through the gap and oh damn, it’s nighttime again. How many zones of weird trees are there? There can’t be that many. I think. I hope. But I accept that this particular zone of weird trees may not be MY zone of weird trees.

Following the obelisks, I came to Wayhouse #2. I enlarged it just a little only to find the next morning that my god, I hadn’t been overestimating the number of creepers around here. I killed 7 in a minute and a half, using up almost all my arrows but fortunately, since I don’t have much food, not taking any damage. This is ridiculous but somehow it’s sort of invigorating. I think I’ll stay another day or so and kill more. Oh, and build a waterfall.

Famous last words. Literally. I rushed out the door in the morning shooting at creepers and BAM, that was that. Then I respawned, hauled ass all the way back, proving the worth of the roads and BAM, died again as I was trying to pick up my stuff. Double Death! Oh HELL.

Caves and More Caves

Spawn was closer than I thought it would be. Yet again, the compass plays its magical tricks and the old house that’s far to the north of me is further away from north than I am. This makes no sense but there you have it. There are mapping programs for Minecraft and I keep looking at them but they seem intimidating: either way too complex for me to use or as if they will take weeks to work. One review of a map says, well, it took it four hours to generate my 20 MB world but then, that’s a big world. Oh. My worlds are around 90 MB each.

Still, I’m pleased that it’s not as far as I thought and I head back in good spirits, planning to build wayhouses along the route. I build one – my houses are getting as standardized as any cookie cutter development, which worries me a bit – and the next day I find myself in the zone of weird trees. I kind of want to build a house here but instead I go into a cave for the next three days or so.

It’s a good cave – it has the requisite waterfalls and lava pools and a couple of fabulous lavafalls as well. I get out 9 diamonds, which is wonderful and will yield me not only a diamond pick, which is invaluable, but a diamond hat as well. Bling out! I get a diamond hat! Yay me! Unfortunately, though, there is no lapis in this cave or at least no lapis that I find. The shortage of lapis is beginning to get on my nerves. Yellow flowers for yellow dye are everywhere. Red flowers are only slightly less available; bones to make pink are as a plague upon the earth and green cactus is easy enough in any sandy area. But blue? Blue is impossible. This is not only annoying; it’s historically inaccurate. Plant me some indigo, Notch! I need blue dye that’s not ridiculously difficult to obtain!

After the cave, I run on for a day or so and decide to build another wayhouse. I’m in a sort of grassy desert, what I call the prairie biome. That is to say, lots o’ grass, few trees, some yellow flowers and – that’s it. Lots of creepers. Oh yeah, lots of creepers. Creepers love the prairie even more than they love the thick forest. I build a tiny little square house out of what’s in my pockets, which is to say, some stone, some wool, some dirt and some glass. It’s not too terrible, although a bit cramped, but as the night wears on I realize that it’s going to have to have a second story.

Creepers can and will blow you up through a window. You have to see each other, though, so if you stand in a corner staring obdurately at the wall, they’ll just hiss and spit from outside. Woe betide the one who turns her head because the minute your gaze meets that steely green grin? You’re toast. Skeletons will shoot you right through your own front door given half a chance and we’ve already explored the tendency of spiders to climb onto your roof and down, down the stairs. Really, zombies are the only monsters with the proper respect for personal boundaries.

This wayhouse is located in the heart of monster territory. It’s funny how that works – some places just have more monsters than others. I stay and work on the wayhouse for three days and nearly die each morning. Finally I’m fed up and flee. I’ve abandoned nicer houses than this due to monster infestation and screw it. Just because I can get back from spawn now doesn’t mean I want to.

Stately Manor Homes in Distant Climes

I did follow that long, long way to the house I built a long time ago, which was in fact quite a long way away. I got blown up halfway there but survived; got mildly lost and then found my way on across much of the sea to the old homestead. It was an okay house but hey, it turns out that Thomas Wolfe was right after all: you can’t go home again. I didn’t feel like modernizing my old house or doing much of anything, actually, except getting the hell out of there - sort of how you feel on Christmas break from college when you have to stay with your parents. Therefore, the next morning I made my excuses and split to the South, heading for adventure. Or at least another homesite. Or some lapis. Or something.

Woods. Oceans. Mountains. Sand. Lots of clay, which I duly gathered. Things looked okay but not exactly what I was looking for. No waterfalls, and I like waterfalls. Yeah, okay, I can make my own waterfalls and I was about to settle for that when I came around a corner and found not just one but two waterfalls. They were gorgeous and I thought, okay, I’m building another house right here. First, though, I will check out what is on the other side of this mountain.

The other side of the mountain, as is so often the case in folklore and song, was even better. Not only were there two more waterfalls, there was a big expanse of what I like to call parkland – fields of stone interspersed with bits of dirt, just like Washington Square. This, I thought, this is the place for a gracious neo Georgian edifice of brick. A home. An elegant, four room home.

So I built one. Naturally, I ran out of brick and had to use some sandstone and had to keep gathering sand and so on, all the challenges faced by a contractor in today’s world, but I remembered to build the fireplace first and eventually it was done. Not finished, but good enough to move into. This house even had an attic right there under its peaked roof – I was considering putting some chests up there just to make it more atticy, even - but after a night or two I decided that a vaulted roof with a chandelier was more what I wanted for my study, so that morning I started to take out the ceiling.

Whoops.

Learn from my example: you need to light your attics. I removed a couple of ceiling blocks, la la, I’m renovating - and two creepers and a skeleton fell on top of me. Fortunately, they got all tangled up in their fall and ended up killing each other while I escaped, with, admittedly, quite a bit of damage and a sudden pressing need for new clothes. As in the punchline to the old pirate joke: bring me my brown pants! And fresh armor while you’re at it. I also needed more brick and glass, because they took out half the back wall, but all in all it was not anywhere near as bad as it could have been.

I repaired that damage and did a whole bunch of landscaping, taking out a couple of hills and a lot of trees so my view of the waterfalls was perfect, built a portico on the house, ventured into a cave, dug down until I found one measly block of lapis, put in fabulous carpet and paintings and then, lo, I was done again and we are now up to date. It’s time to build a path to spawn, even though I don’t much want to travel so far, neither do I want to lose this house, which is the ne plus ultra of houses so far. Every house just gets better – although I grant you there have been an awful lot of houses. It occurs to me that I am slow to learn and that it is probably a good thing I never became a contractor in the real world.

Now I am huddled in a shelter in a wintry biome. There are a lot of cattle here and some sheep and it’s noisy. Perhaps they’ll keep the creepers away, because I don’t want to deal with creepers in the morning. I just want to build my road across the ice instead of the ocean: building bridges across the ocean is a big pain in the ass, which is why, even in this day and age, we cannot drive to London from New York.

The Tiki Bar is Open

Okay, I’m in a cave. Not the cave near the hut of four furnaces, that turned out to be a dud. There have been a bunch of dud caves around but now I have found a real cave in the best way: by falling into it while I wasn’t looking closely. I’m also having a glass of wine, my first alcohol since acquiring either the world’s worst hangover or a stomach bug last Wednesday – or some kind of deathly, horrifying disease, the jury is still out – and it’s making my cave exploration far more sort of joie de vivre infused than usual. I’ve been blown up by a creeper, shot at by a skeleton and hissed at by a spider and I’m not even scared. Much. Plus, I found a brown mushroom. It used to be that brown mushrooms were everywhere and red mushrooms were impossible to find but somehow in the last few weeks that equation has been reversed. I have tons of red mushrooms and no brown ones so I’m psyched. Yeah, not that psyched – the mushrooms that make everything change colors are apparently waiting for another update.

And there are some cobble blocks, which mean a dungeon, right? I chop out a cobble block, anticipating my soon to be acquired pig saddle aaaaand. . . what the fuck? Monsters have taken to using torches? They’ve put cobble all over the place? I’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE! Damnit. Here I was, all excited, convinced I was exploring all new territory and lo, this cave has already been fully mapped, except for the place where I clearly walled off some monsters. There is definitely not going to be any lapis in this cave. This is the problem with old worlds: you dig a tunnel, thinking it’s the first tunnel ever but no, some pesky Romans got here before you. I should start leaving stuff around for my future self to discover but right now I’m not feeling that charitable. Drat. Double drat.

I climb out of the cave and continue heading north. The game starts lagging badly, which usually means that I’m somewhere new, which is kind of the opposite of Earth, where things begin to lag when you’re somewhere really old that you have been a thousand times before, like the DMV. Still, I don’t trust it. However, there are squids in the bay I come to, which makes up for a lot. I swim around with the squids for a while and wonder about the possibilities of a Swim With Squids franchise in Burning Woman Bay. Conveniently located off Creeper Park! $5 buys you all the squid face time you could ever want! But I decide that in a world of one, there’s little demand for the sleazier aspects of the tourism trade. Nobody ever seems to visit my tiki bar.

Another couple of dud caves and then I come out on top of a cliff and look down to see a portal. Yeah, that’s the portal that I built in the Nether as far away as I could stand – covering a lot of ground is tough in the nether, what with the flying flame throwers and the giant lava seas - from my original portal, thinking it would toss me up hundreds of miles away from anything and I could walk back and have adventures. Not so much. It’s an easy run from the portal to spawn and here I am, spending the night in the spawning hut. Hmmmm. Perhaps it’s time to go back the long, long way to an island house I built long, long ago.

Another World, Another Spider Proofing Job

I decide that I have to spider proof my main World 3 house. I like this house, which reminds me of Falling Waters and is very modern and groovy, what with lots of glass and cobblestone, which is what passes for concrete in Minecraft. At least, I thought it was modern until I got there fresh from my various building endeavours in World 2. Then it looks as clunky as an earnest 1960s post Bauhaus kinda endeavour in a field full of 2009 container cottages. This picture is the old version. Heavens! This house will not do! It must be modernized, spiderproofed, furnished, enlarged and generally redone. This takes a while but finally I am pleased with the results. Lo! My modern house is post modern. Also, it has flaming nether rock blocks on the corners of the glass roof and I get to hang out up there and listen to spiders die all night. Rock on, flaming blocks, rock on.

Okay, so my house is modernized, I’ve fallen into and explored a cave, I still don’t have any lapis, what now? I guess I’ll have to journey out to try to find lapis and cacti, because I want cacti as well as flames on my roof. One of the issues with Minecraft is that every time there’s a big update, you get cool new things – on the parts of your world that haven’t been explored yet. This is awesome, in that you can go exploring and find new stuff, and frustrating in that you have to go further and further afield to get this new stuff. Still, it’s an excuse to explore, so I hop in my boat and head south. Yeah, south. South is everywhere.

I find some cool stuff and barely survive falling into a pit of creepers and then as I continue my southward journey I discover a perfect place to create a project I’ve had in mind for a while now: The Potemkin Apartments. Well, actually, this isn’t my first iteration of Potemkin Apartments. See, there are a lot of flat rectangular cliffs in Minecraft and they’re perfect for apartment buildings. I go through and put in windows with torches behind them and lo, suddenly an empty desert has a huge, thriving population of burrowing apartment dwellers. It makes me feel less lonely. Also, as demonstrated by some vaguely remembered NYC mayor some years back, it stops crime. The only problem with Potemkin Apartments is that they take more work than I’m usually willing to put into them and this particular cliff proves to be no exception. I put in a couple lines of windows and then look out of one.

Clay! I like clay. Clay makes bricks; bricks make snazzy houses; I try to gather all the clay I can whenever I get the chance. This is a lot of clay and after I’ve gathered it I decide that even though I still have no lapis, it’s probably time to head home. However, clay takes up too much space. That’s why I’m huddled in a hole in a mountainside with four furnaces going right now, cookin’ me up some clay. There’s a big cave around the corner and I think tomorrow I will renew my quest for lapis so I can have blue sheep.

Flaming Fields

In Minecraft you can build a compass. When I first started playing and was still afraid to go into the caves and thus dependent on any iron I found hanging around at the surface level, making a compass was the pinnacle of my desires. I thought it would fix everything. “Goodbye, being lost!” I thought. Ha. Finally I managed to get enough iron and redstone dust (by boringly digging; I hate digging but it’s safer than caves) to make one. I was quickly disabused of my notion that the compass was going to save me because the compass, frankly, makes little sense. This may be my fault: I’m still not entirely sure if the general annoyance factor of the compass is so high because I’m not one of those people who can be dropped off in the wilderness with a compass and find my way to Albuquerque in a week or whether it’s a Minecraft thing. I lean towards it being a Minecraft thing, because, you see, the compass points toward spawn, not north and all points heading away from spawn are south. It took me a while to figure this out – I even blithely wrote “Head South!” on a sign at a spawning hut, only to find, of course, that South can take you anywhere at all. This confuses me – I think it would confuse anyone who doesn’t live at the North Pole - and leads to my making long and strange circuitous roads that could have easily been combined with other roads if the compass made more sense. In all honesty, though, here on Earth the command to head South can lead to all kinds of different places as well. It is a quandary.

That’s how I discovered the flaming fields. They’re right around the corner and up the coast a bit from Sandstone House but I found them the bass ackwards way with a compass heading “north.” I’ve seen huge forest fires before but this one has to be the biggest ever. Whoa, I thought, and then I thought, wait. I’ve been here before and there was no fire. I started looking around, feeling that déjà vu feeling, and sure enough, up in the sky was the little floating island I had sheltered on before I built Sandstone House. So the fire was brand new.

“Did I do this?” I thought, “Oh no.” Torches don’t catch things on fire, luckily, and I thought that flaming monsters in the daylight didn’t either. I didn’t remember using my flint and steel anywhere but here were acres of burning trees. It must have been my fault, right? It’s been my fault before – using fire to clear a tree or two can easily lead to the kind of experience that makes Smoky the Bear cry a lot. We won’t dwell on that experience. But I honestly couldn’t remember doing anything that would lead to fire this time. I’ve been more careful, Smoky, honestly. Was it my house fire? But none of the trees anywhere near my house were burning; in fact, the tree cover, which went on for quite a while, had kept me from seeing the flames.

I kept exploring and finally I found a pool of still lava that seemed to mark the starting point of this fire. I don’t think it was there a week ago. What the hell? Did it just erupt? Why was it suddenly out there? What strange Minecraft geological forces were at work? If a creeper explodes in the forest when I’m not around does it make a sound? See, Minecraft is good for your brain, philosophically – the deep questions are all here, right up to and including the Oh Shit I’m Going to Die, Freeze or Flee? question that is so central to our experience as paltry mortal beings.

My best guess is that the lava suddenly appeared – why? I don’t know. – and a hapless farm animal or maybe an evil monster fell into it and then started lurching around, flaming, and caught a tree. The domino effect took over and lo, Flaming Fields was born. I thought about trying to clear it but a half days work with an axe made me realize the futility of that notion. Flaming Fields is here to stay.

The realization that there’s not a damn thing I can do about Flaming Fields has disheartened me. Just like various ecological disasters on Earth, there’s little one person can actually do. I mean, sure, yes, I could conceivably devote the rest of my life to cleaning up a river or part of the Gulf or Flaming Fields, but in actual fact I’m too lame. Or too tired, whichever. Thus, as is so often the case, I give up. I don’t give up right away, because I do go through a cave or two, finding a lot of lapis, whoo hoo, and discovering that I can actually dye sheep on the hoof. That’s pretty cool and I dye a couple of sheep an attractive and vivid blue but then they wander into Flaming Fields and die, which is depressing. Fuck this. I leave World 2 for a while and move on to another world: World 3.

Sandstone House

I had heard rumors that spiders have new and awful powers but I discounted them. Ha ha, I thought, spiders! They are nothing! Well, they can kill you damn quick, particularly when they hunt in packs and I did, one awful evening when I had miscalculated the amount of time it would take me to get home, once see a skeleton riding one, which was alarming, but in full daylight they’re harmless. I usually go up to them and say HEY! We cool? And they scuttle away. Therefore I think I must be imagining things when I hear them right up there on the Castle parapets.

I’m not imagining things. There are three of them; they can climb walls; they’re in my formerly impregnable fortress and they’re looking to kill. Not only is this immediately dangerous, it makes my entire architectural philosophy of green roofs completely useless. I’ve been building wheat farms on my roofs since I started with this ridiculous addiction and not only have I been building wheat farms on my roofs, I have been priding myself on my ecological chops for doing it. I mean, green roof! What could be greener than a farm? Bah. Now I will have to go back and encase every single house in glass and if you think that doesn’t mean releasing lots of toxins into the air what with all that smelting, well, think again. Not to mention digging up all the sand dunes. Minecraft is great for expiating all our environmental guilt: it turns out to not be so hard to completely wreck a world if you’re the only one in it. I kill the spiders.

I have also heard a rumor (yes, when I'm not playing Minecraft I am often lurking on forums that discuss Minecraft, which is pretty scary, I know) that spiders cannot climb sandstone so right then and there I decide to go forth and build another house out of sandstone. I fill up my pockets with wool and sundry other useful stuff – even redstone dust just in case I suddenly develop any musical talent or electrical knowledge – and head out. I stop for the night on top of a lovely floating pasture which I barricade on one side. It’s a peaceful night and the next day I journey onwards, passing what look like several interesting caves until I find a good looking bay. There’s everything I need here: water, sand, small mountains and trees but not too many trees. Too many trees are a pain in the ass, skeletons and zombies tend to hide in their shade and then come lurching out at you on one final suicide mission. Also, they’re hard to get around. But anyhow, I know I have found my site. My new home! A small seaside getaway! A rustic cabin made of sandstone with fabulously colored wool decorative elements! I am excited.

I make a temporary home inside a nearby cliff and start gathering sand. It turns out to be a big pain in the ass to make sandstone – almost as bad as brick, which I also will need for the chimney. Therefore it takes me longer than it should to make my house, which is fine because I am unnaturally pleased by the prospect of colored wool decorations right there in the walls. The house is going along nicely, almost done, when I decide to put in the fireplace.

I know better than that.

I know you have to build the fireplace first but do I listen to the little background voice of my months of Minecraft experience? No, I do not. This fireplace, I tell myself, is located far enough away from anything flammable that it will be fine. I’ll just pop a log – one of the new birch logs, at that, just to be trendy – in there and lo, my fireplace will be a go.

I’m wrong about that.

My house burns down. Of course it does. Well, actually, the next day when I come out to look at the remains, it turns out to not be as bad as it could have been. Much of the wool has burned and of course the second story wood floor is gone as is the wood ceiling, but it’s all fixable, although it does leave me with a sudden shortage of wool. I’m getting tired of scalping sheep but hey, someone’s gotta do it. And, fortunately, the rest of the neighborhood is not on fire. I finish my house only to discover that spiders can indeed climb sandstone – it doesn’t faze them one bit and so I lie in bed at night watching spiders spin on my skylight. You know what does slow them down? Cactus on the roof, so I add some of that and thus my house is done. It’s time to make a road back to the beginning so I don’t lose this house too, because, as you can see from these pictures, this house is awesome.

The Castle & Marin

Marin was my second or third house on this world and remains a favorite. I call it Marin because the sun sets over the ocean, as opposed to the Aerie, which is apparently located on the Atlantic. Marin is where I started building huge sculptures, the Idol, a neo primitivist creation being my first, followed shortly by Running Man, who is reminiscent of Jonathan Borofsky’s 80s work and located at the Aerie. At the Aerie I also have the Spatula, an homage to Spiral Jetty and then in Marin is my ne plus ultra of the genre: The Family. On other worlds I have created Flaming Woman and Ballerina (I once saw a confused and unhappy skeleton be born, live and die his whole brief life on the Ballerina’s skirt, a decadent 1890s kind of existence) and then lately I’ve been making water and lava falls. And rollercoasters.

Marin has a lot of stuff stashed away for me so I make a bow and a fishing rod and some armor and tools. I grab a bucket of lava and a bucket of water, too, because I have been planning to make a lava fall that’s completely surrounded by waterfalls – I think this will look cool at night and also the water will minimize unintended animal deaths. Then I head over to the Castle, which is close to Marin. Also close to Marin is Floating Waterfall House, which is situated in an amazing group of islands full of lofty peaks but it’s fully explored and I rarely go there anymore. The Castle is, well, just that. A castle. With a secret tunnel exit and lots of flames and a portal to hell, because no castle is complete without one.

I’ve built quite a few portals to the Nether now but I doubt I’ll ever bother with another one. The Nether is, frankly, boring. Hell is supposed to be boring, I have this on good authority from any number of poets, and the Nether lives up to its reputation. It’s also dangerous: there are these whistling flying things that blow fireballs at you which is a problem, since the rocks in the Nether are highly flammable. I did bring some of these rocks back and build Flaming Woman with them in World 5 but otherwise the Nether is kind of a bust. Supposedly you can use it to travel swiftly from one place to another by building portals in various parts of the Nether but I have tried that as well and never gone particularly far in the top world. Fuck the Nether, I say. There’s no point to it and obsidian is a pain in the ass to mine.

The Castle has even more in the way of material goods than Marin did, so I am fully outfitted once more. Unsure of what to do in the morning, I decide to go for a jaunt along one side of the Castle that I’ve never explored before. The Castle has one major drawback: it’s situated in some kind of ancestral monster home. There are always monsters around the Castle – various fires take care of a lot of them and it’s nice to sit behind the walls and listen to their dying clanks and whistles – but it gets wearing to have to kill two or three creepers every time you want to go down to the store for a gallon of milk. This morning is no exception and I kill a couple of creepers and a swimming skeleton as I’m heading out on my walk. This is why it’s often wise to build your homes on islands: you can light them up enough so no new monsters spawn and the ones who approach by swimming are few and easily found and killed.

My walk takes me to a couple of islands that look vaguely familiar and then to a desert that also looks kind of familiar and then I spot a small house. I should really date these things: I have no idea when I built this house. I keep walking and of course, before I know it, I’m lost. I’m kind of aimlessly wandering around now, with nothing really in mind and my inventory completely full due to my new habit of shearing every single sheep I come across. I want to build a fabulous woolen house eventually but that is going to take a lot of sheep and meanwhile, my pockets being full of wool is hampering my ability to go into caves. There are a lot of caves around and I’d kind of like to explore them but there’s no point when I can’t bring anything back with me. I do go into one cave that turns out to be chock full of creepers who nearly kill me before I manage to escape. At that point I give up and decide to go on back to the Castle and by heading north I eventually manage it.

Death

I had to take my elderly aunt to the doctor in the real world today and I hate that. Therefore I was happy to get back to the Flying Pig House, where I had decided to fence everything off after all. Keep the farm animals safe! Stop this incessant bombing of an innocent landscape with pigs and cows! I was in the middle of this project when I suddenly, abruptly died. This isn’t the first time I’ve died unexpectedly, not a spider or a creeper in sight. It’s the Black Death, I think, only not the kind where you get the weeping buboes and the medieval guys with the cart, the other kind, where an inexplicable block of blackness just kills you, boom, out of the blue. It’s happened to me several times before: when I was trying to put a torch on a mysterious black square that had appeared on my house, when I was trying to dig out a mysterious black square and once when I made the mistake of exiting a boat under a tree. That one, though, made more sense, unlike the others. This time was senseless and strange: I was innocently planting a tree and applying a little bone dust as fertilizer when ZAP, all of a sudden everything went dark and I was grunting in pain. Nothing got me out of it or even made me move and then, death, cold, absolute but not, in Minecraft anyway, final. I respawned.

Instantaneous reincarnation! It’s what it’s all about and if you have the good sense to die close enough to your spawning point, you can even pick up all or nearly all the stuff you were carrying around with you when the Grim Reaper paid his visit. The Egyptian pharaohs, I believe, were early Minecraft devotees: it shows not only in their funeral preparations but also their architecture. Unfortunately, Flying Pig House is nowhere near my spawning point, so I had to say goodbye forever to whatever the hell it was I was carrying around with me on the occasion of my unfortunate demise. Fortunately, I don’t think I was holding too much, for a change: I have this tendency to carry giant piles of stuff everywhere I go. That includes Earth, where my purse is almost as useful as my Minecraft inventory, although somewhat less likely to hold pork chops.

On my other worlds I have built small cottages which I inelegantly refer to as Spawning Huts. They have a cheery message on a signboard outside – usually something like Welcome Back! Sorry You Died! – and a chest inside with all the necessities for daily life: to wit, armor, weapons, iron tools. You know, the things which separate us from the beasts. It unnerves me to walk outside without a full suit of armor these days and I insist on a diamond sword or, as I fondly like to refer to it, a vorpal sword. Really, to be well equipped, the savvy Minecraftian needs iron tools (a pickaxe, a shovel and a hatchet,) iron armor, extra iron for those circumstances when only iron will do, some food, a bow and arrows, feathers and flint for making more arrows, wood blocks and wood sticks, torches, coal, a clock, a compass, glass blocks – for putting windows in shelters so you can see the sunrise - and then whatever other random things might come in handy. Sand. Gravel. Stone. Probably wool.

On World 2, though, I have no spawning hut because my first house, the Aerie, is only a short jog along the coastline. It’s always been simple to find but the road to the Aerie from Spawn is even easier these days because I tried and failed to build a monster water ride between the two. It never worked worth a damn and so I knocked a bunch of blocks out to make a snaking series of waterfalls instead. The Aerie is a hollowed out floating island; when I first moved in there was a monster dungeon directly below it but I soon put a stop to that. It did yield my first ever monster record which I still play occasionally when I am feeling moody and dark. I notice that playing the monster record makes the creepers stand still and cock their heads. I like to think it’s reminding them of happier times when they were tiny creepers listening at home to freaky temple bells.

All roads lead to Spawn and so I can find my way anywhere from there. Instead of going to the Aerie this time I went off to Funland. Funland is my most recent project before Floating Pig and I am rather proud of it as it features a lengthy and exciting roller coaster ride that takes you way up into the clouds and way down into a cave and right around a lava fall on a sheet of ice. It also has a sauna, the words SURRENDER DOROTHY carved into a cliff face and a tone block that I can’t make work. The house at Funland is also essentially carved into a mountain – this is, I feel, the most ecologically friendly way to build, not to mention easiest. The landscape at Funland is startling and extremely cool and this mountain was odd enough where my house has windows on three sides instead of just two as is usually the case with carved out dwellings.

Unfortunately, Funland is lacking in material goods. I apparently looted it when I left for Flying Pig the last time and there’s nothing much there to help me out. I take what I can out of the chest, spend the night and decide to head for Marin in the morning.

Flying Pig to Mountain Top Roller Coaster

I replaced the carpet in my striped house – it’s far more muted and tasteful now, although still pretty goddamn wacky - and then I couldn’t really think of anything much else to do. I thought about building fences around my floating island to safeguard the farm animals but, guilty as I feel about the way they keep plunging to their deaths, I do reap the benefits of raw pork chops and chunks of leather every morning when I float downstairs. I was thinking about all this when a friend of my son’s came in and asked about Minecraft. “Yay!” I said excitedly, because if there’s one thing us addicts like, it’s an innocent to corrupt, “Let me show you my roller coaster.” I went off to World 3, which is actually my first world and my first roller coaster. He was suitably impressed and even got to see me first put some squids who had spawned in a puddle out of their misery and then nearly die in a creeper incident. After I had explained about the completely unfair way skeletons will shoot you right through your own front door and he’d gone off to have some lunch I had to fix the creeper damage and now I am contemplating sticking around in World 3 for a bit. I have a rather excellent house there, nestled into a charming little bay, and then there’s my mountain house, hanging in space over a waterfall in the center of a roller coaster.

My first world actually sucked. It was a mineral poor chain of tiny, monster infested islands. It’s amazing that I ever kept on playing, actually, because I never did anything but die slowly in that world. The original World 2 was little better: endless swamps full of reeds and zombies, reminding me uncomfortably of my South Carolina adolescence. Finally I moved on to another world, World 3, which is a world of steep mountains and cavernous valleys where I feel at home. I like World 3 and I wish I could find all the houses I’ve built there, beginning with my first hollowed mountainside behind a waterfall, but alas, they are mostly lost forever. I did come across one on a recent ramble and it was not as good as I had been remembering it, as is so often the problem with nostalgia. I am trying to pretend that it was nothing more than a temporary house but I suspect it may have been a main dwelling for my early, stone tool days. Somewhere on World 3 are a couple of huge, fortified towers and an underwater glass house: I hadn’t yet figured out bulding roads to my spawn point and so when I died – have I mentioned my loathing for creepers yet? – they were gone forever. I haven’t replaced them: underwater glass houses, while pretty, aren’t actually very practical. Who knew?

Minecraft can be a narrative of loss, sometimes. “I had a diamond pickaxe and golden boots and a house with a heated bathtub overhung by a painting of a creeper and then it all went away,” I might say, like a Wall Street banker talking about the last crash. Nobody on Earth is sympathetic to these losses, though. “Jesus,” my daughter says, “You play too much Minecraft.” “MINECRAFT!” my son yells in a faux Germanic accent like a prison guard on Hogan’s Heroes. “MINECRAFT!”

The last house I lost was going to be amazing. I had decided to make a vague replica of an Earth house I loved and lost, a 1920s bungalow that I lived in during the early years of this century. It was going to be an exact replica except it would have two stories, because everything is better in Minecraft than on Earth. In Minecraft, for one thing, it doesn’t matter that charming rented 1920s brick bungalows have no insulation and you freeze the winter through. Therefore I was determined to make a more or less – probably more less than more more, because, in the immortal words of talking Barbie, math is hard – scale model of my old house, despite knowing that this always turns out badly. Back in the 90s I made a scale model of my house and my family in the Sims. That was a big mistake. It creeped us all out so badly, waiting for a fire or drowning or something else awful to happen first to our digital analogues and then, inevitably, to ourselves, that we had to destroy it, offering silent prayers to the forces of order and chaos all the while. Soon after that my relationship ended and I moved 500 miles away, so, you see, it is chancy to fuck with doppelgangers of your life.

Creepers took me out before I could finish the bungalow, which was frighteningly vast. It turns out that while lots of people on Minecraft make enormous bunkers and giant castles and so on, I seem to be most comfortable in tiny cozy houses. If you use scale, most of my Minecraft houses are less than 800 square feet. The bungalow I used to live in was about 1500 square feet, which is not large -although certainly large enough to conceal your car keys, hats and gloves for amazing periods of time – but when I went to build it in Minecraft it seemed gigantic and overpowering. This may have something to do with my lack of math. One never knows. Alas, it is gone like Yorick and will never be finished. I’m back to one room houses that would not be unfamiliar to Laura Ingalls and family.

World 2: Flying Pig House

After I built the house on the floating island, I went ahead and built a road back to the Aerie, which is what I call my first house on this world. Well. It wasn’t a road so much as a series of bridges and cobblestone blocks, which turn out to be surprisingly easy to follow and one hell of a lot faster to build than roads. I wish I had figured this out before I built roads from the Aerie to the Midlands and then to Marin and then to the Castle and to Funland and that’s not even to mention my roads on the other worlds. It’s a pain in the ass to build roads but if you don’t then you will mourn your lost and sometimes incomplete houses like I mourn the one I was building before the five creepers got me. Finding lost things on these planets is tough but building new things is, fortunately, easy.

Back on Earth it’s raining again: it is January and all it seems to do is either snow or rain. Both of them leave behind seas of weather; the snow is easier to clean up than the mud but neither is desirable and I’m depressed and unemployed. So I travel to these other worlds where, I have finally figured out, a block of anything is about 3 feet on a side. That is pretty big but I am a whole lot stronger in my other worlds than I am here on Earth and it is the work of seconds to chop up blocks and move them around until I have the kind of giant sculptures I wish I could build in my North Carolina backyard. No such luck, though, the mud doesn’t come away neatly in blocks and if I fell from a 60 foot tower here I’d face worse than missing my lost house. Although that would probably happen too.

As I start this narrative I’ve just finished hollowing out an island. I had the bright idea of building a series of wayhouses on the road between Flying Pig House and the Aerie so that I wouldn’t end up making tiny, aesthetically displeasing hidey holes all over the landscape. Flying Pig House – it’s a striped house on top of a floating island and pigs tend to fall off it, even though I built them a handy water stair - is situated far, far away from the Aerie on Pumpkin Continent. I had a fit of pique while I was looking for my vast, gray, lost house and decided to just build a boat and sail away (this is something I should probably do on Earth, come to think of it.) What I do in these situations is keep traveling until I find some amazingly beautiful landscape and then I build a house there. On Earth the beautiful landscapes are already full of houses inhabited by wealthy and annoying people, leading me to the conclusion that this is yet another way in which my other worlds are far preferable.

Anyway, when I got to the Pumpkin Continent I discovered a very excellent floating island and thus ended up building Flying Pig House and a water elevator of which I am rather proud. Flying Pig House is remarkably ugly. It turns out that the muted Swedish design aesthetic of stone and blond wood I had previously had in my houses was dictated more by materials than by taste, because as soon as I could make dye I promptly started making everything out of virulently hued chunks of wool. I get wool by hitting sheep with an axe. They squawk but they don’t really care and then they trot off naked, looking reproachfully back at me. If you hit them with a Vorpal sword, though, they’ll die and that makes me feel guilty, so I am careful to use the axe.

My wayhouse plan has already been sidetracked a bit, because I found a cave I thought I would explore half way between the first wayhouse, which is, if I do say so myself, rather a charming little country cottage, conveniently situated on a point by the sea that does not seem to be too overrun by monsters and the planned next wayhouse. Caves always take longer than you think they will: you just go in to grab a little silver and maybe some gold, because gold boots and a gold hat make your dreary silver outfit so much more sort of Andy Warhol 70s disco looking, and then you end up stuck in there for days. I was looking for diamonds, too, because diamonds are incredibly useful and for lapis, because lapis is new and will enable me to expand my vocabulary of hideously bright dyed wool blocks. The cave was vast, as they usually are, and featured lots of underground waterfalls and lava pits – all the usual cave stuff – and a fucking spider who pushed me into a lava pit. I survived but barely and had to sit still and quiver for some time afterwards, drinking mushroom soup and cursing spiders.

I dug my way up out of that cave as I usually do when I realize that I can’t stand being underground a minute longer and finally abandon the pretext that I have even the slightest chance of finding my way out the way I came in. I do try, for a while, when I go into caves: I put torches on the left hand side mostly and jack o’lanterns at important intersections and cobbled blocks here and there but inevitably I give up this stuff and just start heading, willy nilly, into every dark corridor. There’s a metaphor for my life here but I’d rather not look at it too closely. Anyway, I almost always manage to dig my way out even if, like today, I come out under the ocean and have to swim up, desperately hoping I don’t run out of air. Once I did that under a frozen ocean – it was a long time ago, when I was still pretty young and naïve – and nearly died but somehow managed to chip my way out of the ice. That was exciting. I think it was September, then, on Earth.