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.