Bah, I’m falling behind again… Perhaps I’ve been a bit too obsessed with one ‘game’ in particular, one that’s been getting a lot of attention lately: Minecraft.

It’s almost quite literally a sandbox as it drops you into a blocky world where you dig up sand and dirt and stone and ore and craft implements to help you survive and build structures, and try to avoid getting killed by the enemies that spawn in the dark. Quite often this involved diving underground, using a pickaxe to hollow out tunnels, and occasionally you’ll hit ore veins, caves, lava and water flows, and dungeons with monsters.

I’ve already talked about my experiences a bit on some forums, so I’ll just repost what I did soon after starting:

I watched Guildboss’s first-night tutorial (thanks!) and got myself well-established with a nice, safe little cave. I figured that I’d explore a bit while waiting out the night, so I started digging tunnels downwards. Despite hearing some nearby monsters, all I found were a couple of safe little cavities with some more coal and my first gold.

I spent several days just digging out my little network of tunnels, but I was starting to run low on wood for torches and picks, so I figured it was time to venture back out on the surface. I could hear *something* nearby, so just to be safe I made a chest and put everything valuable in it, heading back out with only a pick, a sword, and some extra cobblestone. Immediately, I was jumped by a spider and dead before I knew what the hell.

Fortunately, all of my stuff is safe in the chest. Unfortunately, I don’t remember where the entrance to my cave is, and in hindsight I should have built some kind of landmark on the outside. Now I’m wandering around desperately trying to find it again and, as I post this, hiding in fear at nights in puny little gravel caves…

I did eventually rediscover my old tunnels, but not after reestablishing myself with an entirely new cave system.

Ah well, I gave up looking for my old cave and started a new one within line-of-sight of my spawn point, and it’s been going pretty well. I had to dig down pretty far through a whole lotta nothing, having to run around outside just to scrounge for coal, but I eventually hit a decent cave system and started finding iron and redstone, and a bit more digging linked up with a few other caves. A couple of them include large waterfalls, where I learned how the fluid physics work and how easily you can flood the pathway up around it that you were carving out…

Getting back and forth from the entrance is a bit of a pain so I moved all of my crafting stuff down into a central cavern and have been working almost entirely underground so far. I’ve managed to slap down enough torches that there’s only the occasional monster, and no serious threats so far. I’ve even got my own pet slime trapped by water currents in a corner of my main crafting room. I’ve got enough stone saved up that I should start thinking about some actual structures now.