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.