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.