More Pictures

I actually got a job - yeah, yeah, whatever - and it's been cutting into my Minecraft time. God! The indignity! Still, I am managing to keep up with the ever growing town of New Arcadia - I have added a new house that I like so much I moved in, a classic boring ranch house, a suspension bridge and, um, what else? Not everything is successful - I did try building a multi colored yurt sort of hippie structure which was an abject failure and had to be torn down. There are limits to ugliness. At any rate, here are some more pictures of newish things and some older things.

Tugboat

I made a tugboat. Whoo, go me! In general the docks are getting pretty cool and I'm rebuilding the lighthouse, although it isn't done yet. For the lighthouse I even made a portal - pain in the ass, that - and went to the Nether - also a pain in the ass - and got permanently burning rock.

Mostly Pictures

I am still building away in New Arcadia. Every so often that means I have to go and have a cave adventure but then I come back and work on the village, which is rapidly becoming a town that's soon to be a city. In the interests of industry, I have added a train, which neatly circles around the whole town and a train station because, you know, if you have a train you must have a station. I have also expanded the docks a bit so that ships can come in and unload onto the train. In the interests of, well, not industry I have added Ghidorah, the flying three headed Japanese monster and a replica of the Tbilisi Ministry of Roads building in Georgia (not the Georgia that's only about three hours away and features Stone Mountain and the Peachtree Plaza, the other one.) And here it all is.

All Cities Need Housing

New Arcadia continues to grow. I have built an apartment house now: the Potemkin Arms, luxury dwellings. Well, some are luxury. I got worried partway through about the lack of affordable housing in New Arcadia and made sure that some of the apartments are cheaper than the others. Not that they’re not all very nice! I actually contemplated moving into the penthouse myself but I’m happy at the Inn, where there is cake on the table.

I am a little concerned about the fact that I not only worry about affordable housing in my completely imaginary village but also about the plight of the shop workers in the commercial district. It’s hard when your village is just so attractive and yet, yet, where is its industry? There is money to be made from interstellar visitors from the flying saucer up on the hill but that’s mostly just tourism. Well, tourism and cattle. No, New Arcadia needs a trade and to that end, it now has a port. Next to the port it has, of course, 19^th century slums. You can take me out of Baltimore but not, apparently, all that far.

Life in New Arcadia is good, though. You can sit at the sidewalk café and watch the chickens go by.

Brought to You by the Greater New Arcadia Valley Tourism Development Board

Visit beautiful New Arcadia! A fast growing regional center with deep historic roots set in a region of unparalleled natural beauty, New Arcadia will thrill you. Plan to stay at the New Arcadia Inn and Lounge, where we offer rooms to fit any budget from the elegant to the austere. Locals congregate downstairs where you’re sure to find friends in the fully cake stocked lounge. Right across the street from the Inn, visit the New Arcadia Art Museum and, just

around the corner, the historic library is waiting. The librarian will be happy to offer you a tour of the tower where unparalleled views of the town await (fully glassed in for your safety.) Take in a show at the Gray Pig Theatre and Music Hall and then explore New Arcadia’s unique downtown shopping district. Gift memberships to the community pool are available for a small fee! And don’t forget to explore the legacy of the 60s in New Arcadia’s bohemian district.

Love New Arcadia? Want to stay? Gracious homes are available now and more are coming every day, all within easy walking distance of the New Arcadia School. All our teachers and city staff are creeper avoidance trained and our safety record is astonishingly high.

Beautiful downtown New Arcadia is waiting for you!

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.