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!