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.
A slave to tradition, I'm headed west by rail. The river just to the west of my base contains my first real project; an underwater glass dome illuminated by lava. It was built somewhere between the time I was huddling in holes at night afraid for my life and the time I was steeped in (virtual) ennui at the lack of new horizons.
This is a tiny portion of the village to the west. When I start heading back east, I'll have some nice pictures of Minecraft villages up. When you've seen one, you've seen them all. The focus here is the elevated rail system done with my best Minecraft approximation of classical arches.
At the end of the railroad is a (barely visible from here) beach. It was here that, after languishing in comfort for weeks (about 7 hours of real time, give or take) I decided to swim west across an ocean to start anew with just a pocket full of three pick axes, four shovels, one hoe, three axes, an iron sword, a back-up iron sword, a map, a chest (just in case), seeds, pumpkin seeds, watermelon seeds, eight trees worth of wood, 128 cubic meters worth of dirt, sixty-four cooked chickens, sixty four cubic meters worth of sand, four cubic meters of glass (just in case), thirty-one torches, a bucket, and an uncooked fish.
In Minecraft, you have big pockets.
This is the same platform I was viewing the beach from, but looking forward, to the west. These platforms are actually part of a new project I'm working on. After collecting scads of useless dirt (pictured in my hand) over the course of about a year of play, I needed something to do with it. Using it to build platforms across an ocean seemed like a pretty good idea.
This one's from the very last platform pictured above. The original journey began at night, but I needed to swim the length of the ocean to see if it was wide enough to be worth documenting. By the time I came back: Daylight.
I'm still facing west, and that thin column by the reticle is the next stop.
During my initial foray into the wilderness of the ocean (which I thought might be a big lake at the time), it occurred to me that navigation might become a problem. I decided that a well-lit column of dirt would be a fine beacon should I ever become lost on the ocean. The rose was simply to distinguish it from any other navigational columns I might make.
As before, the thin line reaching from the ocean floor to the top of the water is the next pylon.
My first trip didn't involve putting down markers within visual distance of one another. I went back and added those to demonstrate the massive, oceaniness of this ocean. Given that each Minecraft block is 1m x 1m x 1m, technically, it's probably only a lake, but given the size of bodies of water in Minecraft, it's an ocean.
Still facing west.
Terry calls these a slide show, but fuck Terry.
So, are you guys gonna see Ted? Terry and I are gonna see Ted.
So, this is the final, standalone pylon. The structure up ahead was where I put my second pylon down during the initial voyage, little knowing it was so close to shore. I've since built it up a bit.
At long last, within viewing distance of The Western Outpost. Yup, that strange structure that's taller than the trees, in all of its abstract, utilitarian glory.
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