Minecraft Beta

Since Minecraft is the only game that matters, I thought I’d share some of what I’ve been working on this past week.

This is the heart of my operations: the workshop. It’s a small room with a workbench surrounded by chests full of everything I own, sorted by material. There’s a chest for wood, one for tools, one for stone, etc. Everything is neatly organized and clearly labeled. Through the door ahead of me are the furnaces, a chest full of coal and torches, and a waste disposal closet consisting of an iron door and pit of lava.

Beyond the furnaces is the entrance to the mine. I have a minecart shaft that takes me all the way to the bottom of the world, which is where the richest deposits of diamond and redstone are. With some experimentation and the helpful nudging of a YouTube tutorial or two, I was able to build this snazzy automatic minecart station. I just stand on the panel in front of me and a minecart automatically comes through the wall for me to ride down. When I get to the bottom I just hop off and the cart disappears back into the bottom station to await my return.

…unless I call the minecart but don’t hop into it on time. Then I have to trudge my fat ass all the way down the stairs like a chump. One day I’ll build a system which prevents runaway minecarts, but right now it’s not a priority.

Here’s the actual mine, the floor of which is the very top layer of bedrock. I’ve been digging tunnels every two blocks so as to ensure I look at every single part of every single wall. That way I won’t miss out on any ore. Right now my mining expeditions have been very informal… I pretty much just dig straight forward until I hit lava or wear out my pick, then start a new tunnel. Once I’ve used up all my tunnels I’ll start another series three blocks overhead and keep going.

Digging at the very bottom of the world has the side-effect of letting me avoid open caves. Some people like exploring caves, but I don’t, so this style is better for me. I prefer diamonds to monsters, thank you.

The inside of my keep isn’t much to look at yet, though I do have this nice reed garden. I had to travel to faraways lands to find reeds, which are fairly rare and don’t grow in my native biome. You need reeds to make paper, which you use to make books, which you use to make bookshelves… which I need to build my library someday. Fortunately, once you have reeds you can grow them infinitely. This is just a functional garden; once I’ve got all the paper I’ll ever use I’ll probably demolish it and build a nicer-looking Japanese garden.

Here’s a view of my spawn point from the top of one of my towers. I spawn over on that beach, right in front of a small-ish cave which became my first mine. Shortly up the hill from there is a tiny cubby I dug into some soil, which was my first base. It’s not much to look at, just a door in the hillside, really, but I left it there for the sake of sentiment. I think there might still be coal in one of the furnaces.

Due to a bug in the way wood burns, the hill is eternally on fire. This game bug is awesome and I hope it never gets fixed. I don’t often venture out into the ocean, but when I do I can see this hill for miles around even at night. It was a good way to find my bearings back before I learned to build compasses.

Here’s my current project: THE MEGATREE. I basically planted a bunch of trees in a circle, waited for them to grow, then climbed up and planted more trees on top of those ones. I’m going to continue this process until I reach the top of the skybox, at which point I’ll… I don’t know, climb it and jump off, I guess.

Off in the distance is the keep, which is situated on a tiny island I’ve all but demolished. Eventually I’m going to just destroy all the sand and soil still remaining and run the stone walls right down into the water. That’ll have to wait until after I build a monster spawner, which will have to wait until I finish doing the eight or nine other projects I have on my to-do list.

You can also see the stone bridges I’ve built to travel back and forth between the keep and the MEGATREE. I don’t have minecarts up and running on the bridge yet, but I will soon. There are some cool geographical oddities in the surrounding landscape I want to take advantage of over here, including a lava lake and a natural waterslide. That pile of sand to the right is probably going to become my portal to the Nether.

If you’re not already playing this game, you pretty much have to start. I might never need any other game ever.