Minecraft Journal 1: Of Lava, Fountains, Ideas, Creepers, and Lanterns.

Minecraft Journal 1: Of Lava and Creepers.

I’ve been thinking of doing a Minecraft journal for quite a while as well as putting together some video logs of testing various details and inventions in Minecraft. There is just so much to do in that game and its constantly being updated with more things to do and test…And above all, create. For example… there are no traps or cannons… But in theory, you can create them. The cannon, can be created by using multiple TnT and a puddle of water to stop area destruction. The first TnT will explode launching the second TnT into the distance which will explode when it’s timer hits 0. It doesn’t have to be TnT to be launched either, it could be any mobile entity you can put in front of it. (Animals, Players, Carts, TnTs) Thus, making a MacGuyver-ish cannon.

After playing a little more, I’ve added a deeper level to my cave, still no lava at this point. When I was evening out of the walls, I tunneled into another cave that spread out in all directions. No lava in this cave although there were many caches of coal and iron. Yay! My last two cave layers are deep enough that I need to put torches in them to keep enemies from spawning in them. Enemies spawn in the darkness, sometimes they spawn in light as well, but this is rare.

After some walking around, I decided to do some spelunking of nearby caves. I dropped all of my equipment in my storage chests with the exception of some stone pick-axes, stone swords, and torches. You don’t really need anything else. I only use stone because it’s cheap and easy to find… Also if I end up dying in the middle of nowhere, I don’t lose much. I save better materials for when I know ill be digging in a nearby place that I can get back to easily.

Note that infdev/alpha maps are nearly INFINITE… Meaning that if you get lost, good luck getting back without dying(or getting back at all). To avoid problems like these, the first thing I do when I create a “home base” is to create a tower to the sky. It doesn’t have to be insanely tall, but it should be about as tall as a mountain so you can see it from a far off distance. This “sky tower” is going to be exceptionally vital if you’re going to head out exploring and cave spelunking for ores and other fun stuff because that stuff won’t be of much use to you if you can’t get back to your “base.” In case you haven’t figured it out, you drop EVERYTHING upon death.

So, Spelunking. The first two caves I found were both very close and very shallow. Found some good coal caches and a small iron cache. Yay! It wasn’t much, but in Minecraft every little bit counts! Went back to home base for the night and stored all of my winnings. The next cave was pretty deep but yielded nothing but a zombie in a corner. It hit me once and then I killed it. It didn’t even drop anything. :(

I didn’t make it to the next cave before I died from a double spider assault. THEY CAME OUT OF NOWHERE! I SWEAR. Stayed in a nearby cave I blocked off for protection. I mined the night away and came across something I had been looking for since I started the game, LAVA! …

Well… The good news is that I found lava.

The bad news is that the lava found me first.

See… I was digging through these walls of gravel. The fastest way to do that is have a shovel in-front of you and you can just dig away like a happy man and hold forward. Gravel, being affected by gravity falls down at a fast rate and can kill you if you get caught beneath it (Such is the basis for most sand/gravel traps). Lava is also falls down due to gravity, but at a much much much slower rate. So by the time I got 5 or 6 gravel tiles deep, the lava that was on top of the gravel had come down blocking my escape. Needless to say I died and all of the items on me were burned/destroyed by the lava. (Since you drop items on death and Lava pretty much decimates EVERYTHING it touches.)

Luckily I remembered where the lava was since I marked it with a very tall column of sand blocks. Ill use that in a later project… AN OCEAN VOLCANO :3 Bwahahahaha.

The rest of my day was riddled with creeper encounters. They seem to continually spawn in my lower caves, sneak up on me when I’m mining and ssssssssssssSSSSSSPLODE when I least expect it. I do appreciate the extra holes and mining assistance it gives me… But it makes evening out or smoothing out floors/walls in a neat cave a pain.

One night I went out hunting and found only creepers. Pocketed me a lot of gunpower, it was a good night :). Creepers blew a hole in my sky tower and blew up two of my outside storage chests. I raged a bit for a few minutes and moved all the stuff inside the sky tower’s bottom. It takes a little longer to get to them, but they are much safer there anyway…

Creepers also blew holes in my fountains… Three times, sending water in all directions and leaving me with lots of renovating. That got fixed though; I think I’ll be adding some cactus traps there to avoid this happening again. My cactus waterfall trap netted me two cows a pig and two creepers and the items they drop as well :).

Yes. I know you can play without monsters, but the game losses a lot of the “fun” when you turn them off. Caves are no longer scary and the game feels less psychological and more tedious.

Note: There is a Halloween update coming up and its going to make the game much harder. I'm not sure how the community is going to accept torches no longer being infinite and have to be re-lit using flint. Lanterns are the new torches but it looks like it is going to cost a good bit more than torches. There is little to no information on Minecraft Lanterns.