I've stayed alive for 109 days in Minecraft by doing the following:

• Carry a diamond sword.

• Carry a bow with a full stack plus a working stack of arrows.

• Wear iron armor with never more than three notches gone off it.

• Keep full or nearly full hearts, and always carry at least two pork chops.

• Look where you're going to land when you jump.

• Never fall more than three meters.

• Do not ride waterfalls into unknown territory.

• Never dig straight down or hold forward as you dig out the block in front of you.

• Don't go into unknown territory without a way back out.

• Always carry plenty of torches as well as extra coal and wood.

• Crouch near edges.

• Don't go near open lava more than necessary.

• Shoot creepers, skeletons, and most spiders with your bow.

• Don't work on ledges at dawn or dusk when computer usage spikes due to lighting updates.

• Don't dig straight up, and don't panic when gravel, sand or lava comes at you from above.

• When tunneling to the surface, be prepared to duck back in your hole if it's dark, or if you're under ice.

• Don't wander around outside after dark.

• Eliminate night as much as possible by sleeping.

• Sleep at the earliest possible moment, especially when near forests.

• Sleep with sword in hand, and make sure your bed is secure.

• Make multiple exits from your base, with glass exit rooms so you can see around the door.

• Carry a bucket of water and a stack of cobblestone in belt slots.

• Remap your drop item button.

• To eliminate a heavy monster infestation, travel far away and then come back.

• Create closed off dark areas or a mob tower where most monsters can spawn harmlessly.

• Don't use more than a single TNT block at a time, and get at least fifteen blocks from it.

• Don't go away from your keyboard unless you're 100% secure.

• When digging gravel or sand, avoid standing on gravel or sand that's connected, unless you've already dug in the area.

• Add fences to ledges in heavily traveled areas.

• Don't build with wood anywhere near fire or especially lava.

• When exploring near heights or lava, kill everything in the area first.

• Never hit a zombie pig man.

• Hide from ghasts, and if you must kill them, take a fishing pole.

• Use guerilla tactics to gather glowstone.

• When noob towering after high glowstone, come down when you first hear the ghast shoot.

• Be especially careful when tunneling in the nether.

• Always carry plenty of wood.

• Put glass over deep pits.

• Keep your base and tunnels and any caverns you explore well lit.

• Look around you every once in a while, especially if you hear footsteps.

FLASHBACK

My first peaceful world opened doors to begin to be really creative with Minecraft. I built a huge castle after digging out some pit mines. These became moats later on. I finally discovered rail and used it to build a giant roller coaster. I had no idea at first how to make minecart boosters so I stuck with a gravity mechanism, starting at the very top of the world, and using a series of downhill and uphill runs and lots of twisted and turns through some beautiful scenery, my roller coaster lasted about a minute.

Eventually I did learn about minecart boosters, and that opened up the world at large , since things were no longer quite so far away. I expanded my kingdom, and even invited my kids to play with me in separate zones of the same single player world. When logging off, we'd put our valuable items in a chest and leave the avatar with a minecart so that the next player could travel to his own zone.

It was around this time that I discovered "cheating," at first with MCEdit to put in large mountains of ore, and then later with InvEdit. My old world three as it was, and technically still is, known, got kind of crazy after that. The kilomteres of cart track started racking up, and the kids used a lot of gold and diamond blocks. I started making some pretty cool things by using MCEdit to clone sections of things so that I had large apartment buildings and a whole little town on the coast. There are all kinds of things to see in that world, but they just lack the feeling of legitimacy of accomplishment that came later.

I started over with a new peaceful world promising myself that I'd not use any inventory or world editor. Any block I wanted to place would be gathered by hand. That world has come along quite nicely. I now have a very large city with many impressive buildings, a number of castles and bases, and a transportation network to tie it all together. In fact, things were so well organized that I was angered when Notch decided to end the use of minecart boosters to make rail go faster. I had way too much rail for y gold supply (which was not small, mind you) to supply booster sections for all of it, especially since it traveled on many different levels and went up and down a lot of shafts. I did what I could, and got all the major zones supplied with at least one rail line, but things are still not back to normal. Also the distances involved are pretty great, and the somewhat slower speed of the gold boosters can lead to some monotony.

Around the beginning of March, I got the idea, probably from someone on Reddit, to start playing hardcore. I figured that each world would be a nice distraction for a few minutes or hours until I met my death from some random source. I've had a couple short-lived attempts, but I actually have two that are still going. One was abandoned after establishing a rather boring base which has a bedroom that just won't seem to keep the monsters out. The other however has been by far the most fun world to date. While playing my fourth hardcore world I've actually gotten quite good at not dying. in fact, in my next post I'll give some simple rules and systems for staying alive in Minecraft. It isn't that I haven't had some close calls, and that first shot from a ghast or a skeleton always make me jump, but things have world out pretty well. Today is July 14, after all, so that's 109 days of this world existing. I haven't played in hours , but I can tell you that right now my avatar has 9.5 hearts, 9.5 armor, 20 arrows, and one piece of uncooked pork. These are stats one keeps track of if he doesn't want to die.

I began playing Minecraft in November of 2010. It was just after the Halloween update I suppose. I started after reading a post about Minecraft on Fark.com. I saw a link to X's Let's Play series, and after watching the first twenty episodes or so I bought the game. Getting the thing to work at home where I'm on dial-up was quite a chore, but I finally borrowed some broadband long enough to get the Java update to work and let Minecraft itself update.

I started a new world on Normal (I had no idea that Peaceful mode existed at the time) and was immediately surprised that so many things could go wrong. Skeletons and creepers seemed to overrun me every time I stepped out of my cave door. That being the case, I built an extensive (or so it seemed at the time) structure underground. I finally made an aboveground presence by carefully building a bridge over a valley between the two ends of my underground domain. Mining was rudimentary. I had no idea about block distribution. I did what X did, which was to dig a large pit as far down as I could go. I never used a lot of armor as I stayed away from confrontations with monsters as much as possible.

After a few days my son started playing as well, and he actually mentioned there was an option for a peaceful mode. I abandoned my world in favor of an above ground abode on a brand new world.

I've been playing the crap out of Minecraft lately and rather than just post on Reddit about what I've done or am doing, I thought I'd lay it all out in blog format as well.