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.