Minecraft Tour, Part 01

As you know, I've been pretty busy lately. One of my few breaks from studying and writing has been playing Minecraft. This hasn't left me a lot of time for blogs, but in light of the fact that it's not uncommon for me to blog about the games I'm playing anyway, putting up a short series showing you my Minecraft world isn't that strange.

I'd do a video if I could, but seeing as how I don't know much about any video capture software and I'm not buying some until I have a job anyway, that's not gonna be happening any times soon. :(

This is my main base. The class structure just under the reticle is my main base. To the left is my farm. The spindly structure rising above it was one of my first "great works." It's a tower that reaches up the to the sky (at least the sky when I started playing). When most of the world was wilderness, I wanted a landmark to help me find my way back home.

I actually didn't make ladders until a few months after the spire was complete. When I was done, I just jumped down and died. At the time, I wasn't sure how to get food or eat (and wildlife was nowhere to be found). I was sustained via a process I call "chest eating," wherein I'd put all my gear in a chest, jump off something really high, and respawn with a full hot dog bar.

The bread I hold now is a sign of my progress since those Dark Times.

My central base isn't too fancy; no redstone, or paintings, or murals on the wall crafted from wool, but it's functional. Just in front of that chest on the left is the staircase leading down to my first mine. The hallway is a protected corridor leading to my original spawn point.

Two-thirds of my deaths in The Dark Times were a result of chest eating at night. A walled channel managed to cut that down to one-half.

From my roof, you can see the adjoining staircase I made in the southern desert for it. I left my navigation spire alone for a long time. After a while though, my desire to use my spare cobble met my want to do something more with the now-defunct spire. Because I'm rubbish at navigating stairs, a staircase seemed like a shorter (and safer) way to the top.

Here's the western view from the top of the spire. It includes the southern desert, but it falls just short of the nearest village. Just to the right of the torch, you can see a thread of the railroad that stretches almost the entire length of my kingdom. Well, it will be a kingdom if any villagers ever spawn. The line of cacti to the left form a mostly-effective barrier against monsters wandering in from the desert.

The northern view reveals my "back yard," a region that was once richly forested and at the same time tantalizingly flammable. Monsters still spawn here regularly, something I'm trying to address with works like the aquaduct (far left), the park (just to the right of the aquaduct), and a small pumpkin patch (just under the reticle). On the right, you can see a full-on stairway to heaven, which was built after the spire and its stairs. As you can tell, I've built up a lot of excess cobble over the years.

To the east, you can see my slightly over-engineered base layers for the stairway to heaven and the railroad stretching into the distance. The area between my base and the stairway--well, actually between my base and the village to the far east--is mostly untamed and constantly full of monsters. Spider-catchers and lava pits on my base walls (not pictured) keep them from threatening me on a regular basis.

This is a much better view of the west. You can see my fountain (touching the reticle on the right), the farmyards (left), the keep (just below the farmyards at the bottom of the picture), and a few other structures.

I'll be heading west next week, showing the western village, the shoreline, and the pylons that lead to the Western Archipelago, a wild land of wild wilderness...and chickens.