The Truth Behind The Myth

I dutifully went off to gather some clay but didn’t, of course, find enough. Clay is tricky – some worlds are teeming with it, in others, it’s a rare as hell commodity. Still, I found some clay and some naturally occurring sandstone, which was cool – no more denuding entire beaches! – and made my way back to New Arcadia where I promptly grew restless again. A cave, I thought, a cave is where I need to be and so off to a nearby cave I went. It was a good cave, full of great cave stuff and, as well, two unhappy squids who had spawned in a trickle of water deep underground, poor things. I put them out of their misery – I hate killing squids, who yield only ink sacks which are, to me, pretty much useless – and delved on, finding diamonds and iron and gold galore.

Do you know the Minecraft superstition that if you are carrying diamonds you will fall into lava and die? Yeah, well, it’s based in truth. I had five diamonds, damnit! It’s my own fault though, because I had decided I needed to make a stupid portal to the stupid nether so I could get some netherrack to burn forever in my fireplaces. Now that logs actually go out, my fireplaces are no good and I am saddened, so I thought I might make a quick journey to the Nether to pick up some cut rate hellish fire logs. Netherrack handily burns forever, sort of like those fake gas logs only more uncanny. A cheery fire makes a home a home unless of course it is cheerily burning up your wood floors and paintings, which is depressing but also kind of morbidly entertaining. Therefore, I was mining obsidian, always a miserably dangerous task, when thunk, into the lava I went.

Ignominious death and worse, I spawned at night. The run from spawn to Cantilevers through the darkness was terrifying – skeleton archers! Zombies! Creepers! It was like Saturday night in clubland! - but I made it with four whole hearts of life intact. Early the next morning I was back on my way to New Arcadia. I’m not fucking with that stupid cave again, I fumed. Forget that cave. I’ll find another, better cave for my diamonds. Therefore, I left town in a different direction, found a cave in about three minutes and delved right down into it.

It was the same cave. I dug up some coal and some iron and avoided a creeper and then, as I went around a corner, found myself basking in the light of my own previously placed torches. That cave apparently underlies most of the New Arcadia suburbs or, well, what will be the New Arcadia suburbs if the town ever grows to that extent. It occurs to me that materials from hell are traditional construction for any self respecting suburbs so I will, at some point, when I’ve forgotten how much dying in lava sucks, have to mine some more obsidian and make a stupid portal to the stupid Nether. Fortunately, that unhappy day lies in the future and for now I need more clay. When I got out of the cave I built a boat and headed off for adventure. And clay.I always, always need more clay.

Life in New Arcadia

New Arcadia is basically done. I mean, done, when is a town ever done? Towns keep on growing, and I suppose New Arcadia will as well, because, hey, I can. It’s a good thing I don’t have a life, because if I did I probably would not have had the time or possibly even the inclination (thank you, depression!) to build an entire town in Minecraft. No matter! I have built an entire town: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Well, they would despair except nobody will look at my works. My children and friends are kind of horrified, really, and I guess that makes sense.

As it stands, New Arcadia is complete in the civic building way but needs more housing. It has an art museum, a sort of Quaker meeting house slash fortress, an inn, a school, a swimming pool/sauna, a theatre/music hall and six or seven little shops. I kind of lost track of the little shops: they’re so quick and fun to make and they’re all down in the neighborhood I am referring affectionately to as the Souk. It also has a sort of torii welcome gate, lamp posts, signs, trees, flowers, a road of sorts and, off to the side, an incinerator (okay, it’s a lava pool and I’m not done fencing it in yet, but still) and a papyrus farm. It is excellent, in other words, and almost too big to get the whole thing into one screen shot.

All the lighting in and around the town has kept monsters to a minimum, which is very nice. It also doesn’t seem to be a particularly monster prone area, which is also fortunate. You couldn’t build a whole town in one of those mysteriously monster infested places; you’d die long before the swimming pool was finished. So far all that has happened in New Arcadia have been a few small creeper explosions with no real harm done, although I did have to rebuild the theatre atrium once. I can even run across the green from the inn where I live to the art museum at night quite safely as long as I listen carefully for spiders first. This is novel and exciting. It is, I suppose, a little worrisome that I actually thought about what it would be like to go to elementary school in a town where the penalties for breaking curfew are somewhat worse than getting grounded – and whether the teachers would all be certified in creeper attack procedures – but hey, it is a nifty little town nonetheless. If somewhat underfurnished.

I am all psyched by the success of New Arcadia and am now going to head off for some adventuring. I need coal – it turns out that it takes a lot of fuel to build a house, whoda thunk? – and clay, because there is a distressing lack of brick architecture in my town. This must be rectified.

Et in New Arcadia Ego

As has so far – six months of my life gone on this game, jesus, do I get a medal or a stay in a rehab facility? – been the case, whenever I start to get bored with Minecraft, something comes up that holds my attention. This time, it’s my decision to build a town. Yes. An entire town for one, my very own town, a small urban (well, more sort of urbanesque) wonderland. And just as soon as I’m done building a road from Cantilevers to Spawn, I’m on it. There’s a whole new continent not far by boat from Cantilevers and it strikes me as the perfect spot for a little development.

Just as I’m contemplating the excitement of town building, along comes an update. Whee! Another update! This one has changed the launcher out a bit and it tells me, ominously, that my worlds must be converted. Missionary saints, I think, who were the missionary saints? St. Patrick or maybe St. Brendan the navigator in his coracle would be a better match for Minecraft. No matter, I’m going to leave my old worlds alone for a bit, although this change also lets me rename my worlds. I’ve been wanting to rename things but damned if I can come up with anything appropriate. I consider asking Metafilter but that’s really too geeky even for me. The only world I can name is my current one: New Arcadia. Yes, it’s New Arcadia the world and New Arcadia the town.

The first thing I build in New Arcadia is a cave, naturally. I mean, the small cave was already there and so I make it my temporary headquarters while I start town planning and construction. As I hollow the cave out more and more it begins to look a lot like a bank lobby. Strange, how big granite caves look like banks. Still, I can’t really bear to make a bank my first building, so at night I transform this bank lobby into – a theatre! Or a sort of nightclub theatre! Yeah! Then I build a castle. Well, sort of a half castle, with one tower instead of four. When finished, this building is too daunting for me to even consider living in it. I’m not sure what it’s for – a church? A town hall? An armory? A jail? Anyway, it’s done if not decorated and I move on to something closer to my heart: a tavern. A sort of medieval inn/tavern with bedrooms upstairs and a bar downstairs and a kitchen in the back. I like my tavern and I move in promptly.

There are new beds in Minecraft. I don’t like them. They’re too small and red. I make beds all the time using 6 blocks of wool and they’re much more, well, bedlike looking. They’re queen sized, at any rate, and since I am the defacto queen of New Arcadia, I demand a queen’s bed. My inn has old style beds except for one room, where the weary traveler, which is to say, me, can take a night off from crafting and cooking in a new, red bed. I’m too busy building my town to consider a night off, but it’s good to know it’s there. I’ve started a new building which I think might be either an art museum or possibly a gracious private residence – maybe both, what the hell – and New Arcadia is coming right along. Soon, I will begin on the souk. Whee! Minecraft is suddenly fun again.

New Worlds, Again

I respawned in world 4, restocked at my house there, which was admirably supplied with everything except coal, and headed off into the world to wander. First stop was a cave and a pretty good cave at that. I survived two creeper explosions, three or four zombies, a skeleton and a spider then emerged eventually with some lapis, iron and gold but, sadly, no diamonds. Oh well, onwards – I have decided to keep on going until I find an irresistible landscape to settle in. So I keep on going.

And going.

And going. I pass long boring stretches of rolling prairie hills. I pass long boring and dangerous stretches of deep forest. I make boats and sail for a while, only to land on either rolling prairie hills or deep forest, with the occasional small desert to enliven things. It’s dull. It’s deathly dull. There are no mountains, no waterfalls, no floating islands, no cliffs, no lava – this is the most boring Minecraft world I have ever seen. Apparently I spawned in the only interesting looking place on the planet. I am beginning to lose heart for this adventure. I do not love thee, World 4. You pretty much suck, actually. And I think. . . I think. . . that it’s time to return to poverty and start you right over again. Goodbye, diamond pick! Goodbye, blue wool! I’m looking for a world with more – more – I don’t know, but it’s you not me and I’m out of here.

Oh god what have I done? I’m alone! In the cold wasteland of ice, snow and pine trees! And I have nothing, nothing at all!

I find some coal pretty quickly and I chop down a couple of pine trees with my bare hands. There, that’s the necessities of life taken care of for the time being. I head out towards a distant mountain, where I spy a shallow cave. It takes me almost too long to climb up to it but when I do it turns out to be perfect – some dirt quickly walls it into a safe haven and I can settle into making stone tools like any self respecting Paleolithic hunter and, unlike my illustrious forebear, some glass. Glass is key when you don’t have a watch: I need to know when daylight come

. . . SOME WEEKS LATER

Okay, where to pick up? What with the neverending cold (it didn’t actually kill me; I’m still alive and fighting creepers) and some serious family shit to contend with, I haven’t been writing about my adventures in Minecraft. I have, however, been having them, because when you can do nothing else, when you’re an emotional basket case who can barely quiver through a day, you can still, mostly, play Minecraft. Or, failing even that, you can watch Minecraft, as I have been doing here, where two adorable British guys make their highly disorganized way through their freaky little Minecraft world. I mean, I think they’re adorable but that’s pretty much based on their accents. For all I know they could be Jabba the Hutt and a two headed Jabba the Hutt at that. Still, I believe they are adorable because they're funny. I know they’re disorganized due to their inventories (they say the word inventory in a completely strange and therefore cute British way) which are not all lined up neatly like mine. Good lord. I’m turning into my mother on a video game.

Nevertheless! I started out a new and wondrous world. I explored a cave, discovered that I had spawned on an island, traveled around, got all the necessary stuff, took a boat off to another island, built a rather fabulous house called Graystoke (Tarzan ahoy! You can see it at the top, there.), burned it mostly down, rebuilt it and then ignominiously died when I was trying fence off a lava pool in preparation for a great landscaping project that would have ended up with an amphitheatre and some Roman baths and possibly an aqueduct or something. A Forum. That house is lost forever and so I retired, after spawning again, to a promising spot I had noticed the last time around. And there, since I’m on a kick of grandiose house names, I built Cantilevers. Cantilevers! The perfect gentlelady’s abode, if, that is, that gentlelady is completely berserk.

Colds and Minecraft Boredom

I have a cold, a debilitating and miserable cold that is rendering me unfit for all activities, even, possibly, Minecraft. I have been staying for a while at the Tower on Zombie Hill, which has all kinds of nifty stuff to explore. There are many shallow caves in the sheer cliff faces around me and I’ve explored almost all of them. None of them have lapis – none of them are really deep enough for lapis or diamonds, more’s the pity – but they’re cool nonetheless. I made a couple of boats and sailed around all the cliffs in the area, which is how I got the idea to try to make a navigable canal from one sea to the next. It didn’t really work: my watercrafting is not up to par.

I also died: I blame the cold. It is a sad day when one cannot kill a zombie before he kills you but my head is spinny and stuffed up and I am not thinking straight. Therefore, when I respawned and headed back – the Tower is extremely close to spawn, which is handy – I decided I was entitled to Easy mode. Easy mode is exactly the same as Normal mode; I know this but I keep forgetting it which is why I felt so betrayed by the three creepers who attacked my house first thing the next morning, nimbly taking out part of one wall and several paintings.

I want to carve a pithy saying into my cliff walls but I am having trouble coming up with one. I wish I hadn’t already used Surrender Dorothy which is, after all, sort of the perfect pithy saying. I’ve thought about Stay Loose, Hang Cool, Admit Nothing, which was on a postcard a friend sent me years ago and I’ve thought about everything else, from commercial slogans – Where’s The Beef? would be apropos, since it would be nice if cows dropped steaks as well as leather – to Buddhist homilies to obscure 80s references – Frankie Say . . . what? What the hell does Frankie say, anyway? I don’t remember. That’s why I simply carve a small valentine into one corner after a lot of vodka on Monday night and then I leave World 5 for a while. I’m back to my new world, where lapis is plentiful and everything is, hopefully, fresh and exciting. I think I might be getting bored with Minecraft and this is worrying me.

happy valentines day

from one beloved black sheep to another

The Tower on Zombie Hill

After a couple of days of exploring around Killing Fields, I get restless and decide to go build a house at this nifty little place I had noted the last time I went that way. It has a sheer rectangular cliff (where I naturally put some Potemkin apartments) and a couple of small lavafalls and several waterfalls. I am a sucker for the lava/waterfall combination and therefore, a house is needed. It takes a whole long day of running to get there, so I spend the night in the Potemkin apartments and the next day I start to build.

Space is at a premium here – towering cliff walls will do that – so I build up instead of out. The other thing that’s at a premium are quiet nights: zombies moan all. Night. Long. I mean it’s ridiculous, like living next door to a frat house. These zombies party. They get down. They howl and shriek and groan into the wee hours and it makes me cranky.

It takes some time to complete the Tower on Zombie Hill but finally, after I’ve sailed over and denuded a few small islands of their beaches, it’s done. Now it’s time to do something about the zombies. In the absence of exterminators or friendly police, I must do it myself. Turns out there’s a small cave complex under my house, so I light that up, kill a lot of creepers and a couple of zombies and there, I think, that’s it for the night moaning. I am wrong. There are still zombies. Okay, perhaps the cliff? The cliff has a deeper cave complex complete with an astonishingly beautiful water wall and yes, it is full of zombies. I mean full. I barely escape with my life.

Eventually, I find the dungeon, which is camouflaged well behind a waterfall and some gravel. This is a lame dungeon – not even a chest, not even a pig saddle – and I suppose I understand why the zombies here are so active. Poor poverty stricken zombies from the wrong side of the tracks, with nothing better to do than howl around my tower at night. The contents of monster chests always fascinate me. Why do they hoard such a strange assortment of stuff? And why the pig saddles? Riding pigs is one of the most boring activities Minecraft has to offer – it’s so disappointing, the first couple times I tried it I thought I must have gotten a defective pig but no, it turns out that all any of them ever do is run around in circles in a small area - and not only that, to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever spotted a monster riding a pig. The elimination of the dungeon gets rid of the zombies and now, after a trip back to Killing Fields to pick up some pork chops, I suppose it’s time to restart my quest for lapis.

The Killing Fields are Lapisless

I am frustrated. There is no lapis here. The road to spawn is built and I’ve been through a couple of caves in the area. One of them beat my former diamond record - 12 diamonds! 12! The most I ever got before was 9. – and I even found the green record, which I’ve never had before. The green record, it turns out, is way better to my ear than the gold record. The monsters apparently have a hitherto unsuspected musical side to their nature. But lapis? No. No lapis. This means, I believe, that I am still living in the old world, despite the pine trees and pumpkins. Well, shit.

I set off, therefore, to find lapis. I found a biome that had birch trees and thought, okay, this has to be it. Driven by despair, I mined. I hate mining but I did it: dug all the way down to bedrock and then tunneled for miles in every possible direction. I found enough redstone dust to power a small city, iron galore, gold and even a few more diamonds, which is good, since I wore out my diamond pick, but no lapis. Therefore, there is no lapis here and I will never have blue wool. I am saddened by this, particularly since there is no cactus anywhere near my Killing Fields house. Therefore everything in it is orange or yellow or red or pink, which grows uneasy on the eye, no matter how appropriate the color scheme to the name.

To add injury to insult, I come extremely close to dying during my trek home to Killing Fields. Only extremely fast cheating – got into Peaceful Mode just in time – saved my life and my new diamond pick, helmet and sword. Cheating bothers me a little but honestly, who would not cheat Death if given half the chance? And he didn’t ask me to play chess, or twister for that matter, so it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of options here. Speaking of death, in the annals of geekery, I have started keeping an Excel spreadsheet of the ways I have managed to die. The spider/creeper combo attack is by far the most deadly, although creepers on their own are a formidable enemy. Only one zombie has taken me out so far and skeletons? Pah! I laugh at skeletons. They look scary but they are not so fearsome as they appear.

Inadvertent Slaughterhouse

I got a bit fed up with Minecraft for a few days. Endless, unceasing intimations of mortality plus headaches from too much screen time, not to mention the carpal tunnel, will do that to you. I couldn’t stay away too long though – I suppose it’s a good thing that I crave Minecraft and not heroin but I’m beginning to think the end effect is essentially the same – and I’ve been back in World 5 for a while now. While I was away I ventured to a bar I hadn’t been before and found myself, while there, in a long Minecraft conversation with two other addicts. My gods, it is just like a drug addiction. All we need are some gang signs and we’ll be set.

Back in Minecraft world, instead of going on home with my tail between my legs to ride the trains for a while, I took advantage of the extremely well stocked spawning hut on World 5 to get myself all armored up and equipped with tools and took off in a sort of southwesterly direction. Mostly, it was snow, snow and more snow. Mountains. Snow. This is, as I have mentioned, a pretty well explored and developed planet that used to be all snow and I was beginning to think that I would have to sail away again to find virgin territory when I happened on an abandoned boat. I love finding abandoned boats. It’s so sort of creepy cool – I mean, I know I built the damn boat and left it there but still, finding random boats gives me that sudden frisson of wondering just who the hell has been sailing around there.

I didn’t get very far in the boat – yet another ice sheet, what you gonna do? – but I got somewhere I was pretty sure I had never been before. There was a massive and amazing lava flow with the requisite burning trees scattered in front of it. I holed up for the evening right there and listened all night to the screams of dying farm animals. It was quite cheery; suited my mood. In the morning I ran around picking up pork chops and leather and I thought, okay, this is the place for me, this inadvertent slaughterhouse. The light from all the fires keeps the monsters away and, just like Scarlett, as pig is my witness, I will never go hungry again. So I set forth to build a wooden house of incredible fabulousity, a thing of beauty and a joy forever with three wooden floors, a deck and a glass pyramid of sorts on top. I like it but the nightly screams of anguish were beginning to get to me, not to mention the problem of where to store all my pork.

Therefore, I built a pond under the burning trees – this rescuing of farm animals seems to be kind of a theme - and now I have not just a lavafall but waterfalls galore. I like it here. Now, of course, it is time to build a trail to spawn, the inevitable marker of a finished home.

Zombie Zoo

I have a music room. This is not as fancy as the music rooms I have seen on other people’s Minecraft videos, where they use redstone dust to make connections and have entire raves and stuff. No, it is not as fancy: it’s three note blocks and me, thump thump. I can almost play Three Blind Mice and I am impressed with my bad self and my mad music skillz. The music room is nice and all but it is Not Enough and so I decide to head out adventuring the next day.

I find a cave fairly quickly – where were all these caves hiding when I was looking a few days ago? – and it turns out to be a giant whopper of a cave that just goes on and on and on ad nauseam. I find not just one but two dungeons and at the second one I had an idea. Zombie Zoo! Glass is a wonderful thing

It was a great cave. I left with enough diamonds, lapis and iron to outfit an entire town and so, I thought, okay, it is time to travel, to explore, to see what this new world of mine has to offer. And I set off again into the wilds.

Where a creeper killed me on my second evening out, in the middle of nowhere so that I will never be able to recover my diamond pick or all my lovely brick blocks. Bah. I’m going back to World 5.

Okay There Are Caves After All

I found a cave! Well, what I found first was a dungeon – a dungeon, like Ozymandias, buried in the sand. I am a heartless sadist who really enjoys exposing dungeons to the bright and merciless rays of the square sun, so I dug out all the sand just to watch skeletons be born and die screaming. Then I dug out the inevitable dungeon chest, hoping, as I always hope, for a record. No record, but given my current poverty this chest was maybe even better. A bucket! Some redstone dust! Three entire loaves of bread! (Why don’t monsters ever hoard diamonds?) Wow! I’m rich! And, and, over there, wealth beyond imagining, is some iron ore. I made a compass, walled myself into a corner and settled back to gloat for the night.

Then it was time to explore the cave proper. Given the paucity of my armor – there wasn’t that much iron - it’s not surprising that I died at the first zombie. It turns out that my house is really near spawn, which I had kind of thought. I figured this out by emerging from the sandy decline of my birth and immediately finding a sign that said That Way with an arrow. Yeah, less than 3 blocks, or, more precisely, an island and a half away. Not only that – is it possible I’m actually getting better at finding my way around? - I knew how to find the cave again. Just turn right at the house, through the woods, around the inlet, past the lava pool and there it was. Moments like these are why Notch, all hail, invented Peaceful mode and so into the cave to retrieve my death stolen objects and onwards.

Not a bad cave, all in all. Not the best I’ve ever been in, but I came out with nearly 60 iron, 4 diamonds, 50 or so redstone and 16 lapis. I wish there had been some gold and more diamonds and lapis, but I should not complain. Now I have a diamond sword and a really heinous purple bedroom carpet. What more can one ask of life?

Properly equipped at last, I turned to enlarging my house. It is quite fabulous now – I wish I lived there, actually – and it’s getting more fabulous by the minute as I cheerfully scalp every sheep in a three mile or so radius. This takes me over the prairie, where I find, yes, another cave. There are caves here after all. Phew. And on the way back, I find another ginormous clay deposit. Well, we all know what that means – soon it will be time for another house.

Brand New World

I spawned in a pretty place. This is a new world in more ways than one. There have been a lot of updates since I last started and here they all are: gray and black sheep, different kinds of trees and a ginormous pumpkin patch. Cool! I dutifully punch a couple of trees, make myself a wood pick, harvest some pumpkins and take off, looking for coal before it gets dark.

I don’t take enough pictures but trust me, this is an attractive, if not particularly dramatic, world. There are some floating islands that look enticing but they’re waaay up there and I don’t feel like dealing with it. What there isn’t much of, is coal. At last I find some – near a lava pit – and dig in for the evening. It’s weird to have stone tools again and be constantly looking for coal. I am spoiled.

I wander for a couple of days. I think I am probably going in circles – not having a compass or a watch is tough – but it’s okay. I pick up a variety of useful objects and then I come across one of the biggest clay beds I’ve ever seen. Well, that’s that then: I am fated to build a brick, or mostly brick, house right here. I choose a likely island, nicely situated on a sort of boundary between three biomes and begin construction.

One thing I’d forgotten about starting over again is that you have to kill a lot of cows. I’ve gotten used to leaving cows the hell alone unless they are seriously annoying – trying to push me off a cliff or refusing to get out of the kitchen, that sort of thing – so having to actively hunt them again is sort of a blow. They scream and make me feel guilty. Still, you do what you have to do to get armor and I kill cows. A lot of cows, because leather armor, while it looks cool, actually sucks. Don’t tell the road warrior. A skeleton nearly kills me in the water. A creeper nearly kills me outside the house. A spider nearly kills me – you get the idea. I need iron and I need it bad. Well, hmmm. Where do you find iron? In caves.

There are no caves.

This is unheard of. There are always caves. Minecraft is all about the caves. I run around my island, looking. No cave. I run through the woods to the north. Cave free. I check out the prairie to the west. Nope, no caves here. I head east into the desert. I find two caves. Two small, empty caves, not offering so much as a block of coal. I’m getting desperate so I go home and dig through my floor. Sure enough, there’s a cave full of zombies! Yay! Except. . except. .. there’s nothing in it but the two zombies and it dead ends after one smallish, dishearteningly empty cavern.

Well, this sucks and I’m not sure what to do about it. I can keep on looking but then I run the risk of losing my new house forever. I can’t build a road from this house to spawn without a compass and for a compass I need iron and redstone dust which I can find. . . in a cave. I could mine, yes, I could dig a giant hole and then I would eventually find some stuff but that is so, so boring I can’t stand it. I am at a loss.

Different Worlds, Same Grim Reaper

I ride back and forth on the railroad a couple of times – practice makes my minecart catching technique better – and then decide that it’s time for adventure. Time to seek out new worlds! New lands! New creepers! I’m going to leave by boat in the morning and see what I can find. I dither around a while trying to figure out what to take with me – all this brick, obviously, so I can build, and glass and a diamond pickaxe and, um, the fishing rod or some reeds? Netherrack or gravel? Redstone dust or a sign? Pumpkins or buckets? Tough choices but at last my pockets are full.

And then, I travel. I take the boat as far as I can and then head eastward, ever eastward. I cross a small snowy zone and then a pretty area that I like but it’s too close and I want to go far. I cross a bay that’s full of squids, more than I’ve ever seen before. I run across prairies. I make another boat and sail until I hit a huge ice sheet. I run over that and across an area of tundra that’s criss crossed with tunnels and caves and chasms. I dig myself shelters and keep right on moving, stopping only to scalp the occasional sheep. And then I stop at an imposing box canyon – like, literally a box, descending to a square lagoon and think, it would be kind of cool to build a house across this. Nah, I think, too unwieldy and there’s nothing else much here. But maybe I’ll just spend the night, dig down and make some windows into the center.

I do that and in the morning, when I hear all the monsters, I’m glad I decided not to live here. I dig out and up to the accompaniment of clinking skeleton and zombie death – and right into the hands of some five creepers and a couple of spiders.

Yeah, I die again. You know, before I started this blog I used to go weeks without dying. Months, even. Of course, I was playing on Easy then instead of Normal – I feel that it behooves me to play on Normal now, since I’ve been around so long – but I never thought that the two modes were frankly all that different. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I'm more adventurous now that I'm writing about Minecraft as well as just letting it impact my real life in not so healthy, addictive ways. Who can tell? The upshot is that I’m completely stone dead in two of my principal worlds. Fuck. What to do now?

No choice, really – I delete a world I barely remember and start from scratch. Stone tools, no coal, find shelter before nightfall - the whole thing. Here I go!

On To World 5

Ah World 5. It was my first snow world and my favorite for a long time. It is notable, now, for the extremely long railroad I have built between two of my houses - the pictures along the right, below, are from the route. Both those houses now are going to need updates and spiderproofing, stat, and I fully expect to be in one of them when I emerge into the world.

Nope. I’m in a rough shelter. Oh wait, I recognize this, it’s along the railroad tracks. There must have been a pig on the tracks again the last time I was here, when, I remember, I was courting death by riding the trains at night in the dark. This is totally fun, if fraught with peril, since not only do monsters occasionally jump right in the cart with you, but any farm animal on the track will stop you dead and leave you there in the open to die by monster. Adventure: you take it where you find it.

When the sun comes up I run quickly along to Ballerina House – yes, that’s the Ballerina of yore, on whose skirt that one skeleton was born, lived and died - and begin spider proofing. This house was originally only ever going to be a wayhouse but the setting proved irresistible and I spend a lot of time here. There are tons of caves, lots of islands, sand, green hills, trees, not too many monsters but enough to keep life interesting – everything one wants, really, in a neighborhood. I even have Potemkin neighbors in a small brown house across the bay so that I can look out at their cheery, if false, lit windows at night and not feel so alone. And now there are spiders on my roof. Lots of them, judging by the sound. Yay. I guess.

I finish fixing up Ballerina House, which doesn’t take too long – it’s a one story, one room number and can stay that way - and decide to head on over to Island House to fix it up too. Travel between the two is perfectly simple since I put the minecarts and the perpetual motion minecart boosters in! Right? Yes, well, nothing is simple. I miss the minecart. I miss the minecarts, actually – three of them. I put them down on the track next to the booster and go to push them along and hop in but zoom! They’re away out from underneath me like something out of a 1920s slapstick silent film routine. Curse you, Buster Keaton, I say and then I try again with the same results. Three times, three misses, three trains left the station empty and I am no longer in a pleasant mood. I run to Island House, nearly getting run over by the stupid minecarts that I didn’t manage to catch before. It is calming to whack at them with a pickaxe.

Island House is quite lovely if I do say so myself. It’s built around three or four trees and made almost completely of brick. There is, though, the strange black lump of death by the front door – I hate it when my houses have strange black lumps of death, don’t you? This time, I think to myself, I’m going to do something about that, by god. Therefore I divest myself of all my valuables, stand way back and whack the corner of my house down, block by slow block. At the second whack something emerges from the blackness.

It’s a boat. A boat has somehow gotten stuck in my house and created a deadly space time vortex or something like that. One of the hazards of island living, I guess, those pesky death boats. A few blows with an axe reduce the boat to splinters and at last I have a shadow free home. Not only that, but this house is well stocked with good stuff. There’s over 80 brick blocks and tons of netherrack and light dust and all manner of awesome accoutrements for minecraft living in the double chest in the kitchen. Now all I have to figure out is what to do with this largesse.

Four Horsemen

I’m dead again. This is getting old. I go months and months without dying and then I just start dying all over the place, kaboom, pow, you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. I am so cranky about the constant cycle of mortality that I even closed up Minecraft and the computer and went off to coddle my carpal tunnel.

How did I go this time? Hit by a bus, a meteor, famine, plague, death, war? Well. I left the desert and wandered for a while, lost as always. I found a really fabulously cool landscape but didn’t linger long, which I know I will regret. I scalped a lot of sheep, found the occasional block of iron, stayed in several small, hasty shelters and then headed north with vague plans of finding Mountain House and trying to work my way back to FourFalls from there. And, with more stays here and there and more naked sheep, I did end up at Mountain House. I built an ice fishing hut out of wool – it’s very cozy and I want to bounce around in it – and realized that I no longer had a fishing rod. I was all about the fishing for a while there, never without my rod, stopping by every likely bay and inlet, but the attraction eventually palled. There are easier ways to get food and fishing rods take up vital inventory space.

Well, when you have no fishing rod and no string to make one, because Mountain House is blessedly extremely low on the monster population, you must go caving. In caves, there are usually spiders. There will be spiders (as opposed to blood, although there will be some of that too) and they will donate their string to the cause. I needed more diamonds anyway because Ozymandias had just about worn out my diamond pick and my diamond shovel. There is a big, deep, scary cave right around the waterfall from Mountain House so off I went, intrepid spelunker, to find what I could find.

I found in rapid succession a spider, a zombie and then a creeper who dealt the death blow to my already weakened self. Damn, damn and damn again. I think I’ll go to World 5 for a bit and leave my World 3 self in limbo.