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.