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.