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.