Minecraft

I’ve been playing Minecraft single player for a while now and it’s great.  Everything you’ve heard about the game is true.  The whole mechanic hinges around the simple rules that govern the physics of the world and the unique experiences that emerge from them (apparently this is called emergent gameplay).  The adventures you can have battling monsters, exploring caves and going off on hikes and sea voyages can be exhilarating, scary and challenging.  The simple graphics are charming and sometimes quite awe inspiring once you reach a mountain peak and get a good view of the impressive terrains that get generated.  There’s nothing like building your own world to really get you invested in what goes on in it and that’s exactly what you do as you stack tons of cobblestones into towering battlements around your castle keep, dig endlessly downwards into your labyrinth mines and caves and carefully landscape grassy forests and deserts into the perfect back garden.

Singleplayer was great but what has been even more fun is setting up a server and convincing Caragh to join me in a multiplayer world.  Here are some screenshots of the action we’ve encountered so far.

This is the spawn location in our world, every time you die you’re yanked back here and all your stuff stays where you were so you have to run back and collect it before it disappears.

Caragh’s cutting down logs while I head off to find coal.  It’s important to gather coal and wood on your first day so you can craft torches to get through that long first night.

The sun’s going down which means the monsters will be coming out.  Time to start to build a shelter so we can hide away.

We’ve got a little hole to hide away in now, with a door, a furnace, crafting bench, a chest and most importantly, torch light.

At first the only thing to do at night is to start digging a mineshaft so you can mine out some raw materials like coal, iron and maybe even diamond.

Whilst mining you’ll often breakthrough into huge natural caverns or tight twisting passages with zombies and skeletons hiding around every corner.  It’s up to you whether to hastily brick them up or to grab a torch and a sword and venture in.

Caragh standing in a creeper crater.  Creepers will sneak up on you soundlessly before making a hissing noise and exploding.  Creeper death was our number two cause of death starting out, after falling down our mineshaft.

Eventually we get a nice set of castle walls up outside our shelter so we can come out at night in relative safety.  The plants down there are the start of a wheat farm and a sugar cane crop.

We built a porch out the front because we kept opening our front door to find a creeper or a spider waiting for us.  The elevated porch is harder for the creepers to get as near to and the glass allows us to look out and see where they are.

We expanded the inside around our mine a little bit and made cake.  The cake replenishes health and is made from the crops we farmed outside (and some eggs and milk).  We found the pumpkin outside and put a torch inside to make a Jack-O-Lantern.

I climbed a tall tree on the hillside to get a better view of our castle/shelter.  You can see the skylight that lights our mineshaft from here.

Venturing even further from home.

In the other direction is a huge island.  I can’t wait to take a boat over there and explore.