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.