Recently, the Junior Strawberries and I have started playing Minecraft.
In a way, it was a natural extension of playing 99 Nights In The Forest on Roblox – we actually purchased Minecraft about half a year ago, but JS1 dug around once in Creative Mode and then dropped it, and I never bothered trying it either. Until the survival game bug bit me.
Looking around for a survival game that wouldn’t take 2++ hours per session and have me starting from scratch every time, Minecraft looked like a good possibility. Eager to give it a go (and justify the money I spent on it last year), I bought a beginner’s guidebook – and then another set of guidebooks at JS1’s insistence (the total cost of which was easily more than twice what the game actually cost me…this was not my smartest financial moment).
Finally, each of us set up a Survival Mode world.
I spawned in a really peculiar location – literally on the side of a mountain, right beside a bamboo jungle. Survival was rough – just getting anywhere was ridiculously difficult. I had to navigate 1-block wide, broken ledges that frequently led either nowhere or to a sheer cliff, much less to where I wanted to go (I couldn’t get up the mountain, I couldn’t get down the mountain). Getting to resources involved playing a high-risk game of stepping stones that tended to end in a horrible plummet to the jungle floor way, way down below (You Died! x100). Jungle vines grew everywhere and blocked out light and enemies approaching.
Desperate, I turned and started punching a small cave out of the mountain stone. I hid happily in my little 3×3 cave for a few days, walling myself in at night to the sounds of zombies growling on the other side, and slowly established the basics – a crafting table, a chest, a furnace, guided by helpful pointers from the Junior Strawberries (yes, they read the guidebooks, and no, I didn’t). Still, living remained lean – I had a good amount of stone, sticks and wood, but I couldn’t even build things like a bed to sleep or respawn in, because sheep (and animals in general) weren’t spawning much on the rocky slopes and the only two I found were different colours (and you need 3 of the same colour for a bed). -.-
Then one day, a creeper came and blew up my door.
This was a turning point, because not only did he blow up my door, he also blew out my back wall. And to my amazement, behind my dinky little cave, there was an enormous, terrifying, stunning cavern, full of massive stalactites and glowing fungi and darkness and death. The mountain, apparently, was hollow.
I immediately patched up my back wall, but in the days after that I strategically removed bits of wall to venture out into the darkness, whacked the heck out of any enemies I found (running screaming back into my cave to barricade myself in when my health got too low), and then built walls around the newly safe zones to defend them. I ran several suicide missions deep into the cavern to slap a torch on the furthest wall I could reach before dying, lighting up the darkness and reducing enemy spawns.
In other words, I started terraforming the entire cavern into my territory.
Outside my cave, I managed to carve full paths up and down the mountain, memorising each rock and step so I was no longer hurtling to my death every other day. I reached the jungle floor, found many more juicy animals, and cleared a path to a nearby river. Even jungle vines, I discovered, could be pretty awesome – against a solid surface, they can function like ladders, which is very, very handy when you’re trying to scale a sheer surface (coming down is a bit tricky though, still trying not to die too often from that one).
The Junior Strawberries peered over my shoulder, and said, “Wow! You have an awesome biome! Our biomes suck. We hate our biomes.”
“Really?” I said. “Let me take a look. Maybe we can figure something out.”
So last night, JS1 logged into her account, and showed me her world.
And what. The. Heck.
Rolling green fields, large but politely spaced-out spruce trees you could build treehouses in, pigs and cows and sheep so ample she managed to build a bed on Day One so she could respawn in a safe location of her choice if she died (instead of, oh, scrabbling around a steep mountainside in the darkness completely naked)…
“How do you hate this??” I asked, baffled. “You can walk in any direction without dying! You can build an instant tree base! You have food!”
“I don’t have stone,” she whined.
“Dig,” I said. “You just need to dig deep enough.”
On Day Two, she dug deep enough to find stone. Actually, she carved out a whole mine on Day Two, so that in addition to a treehouse, she also had an underground bunker to keep her extra super-duper safe. And she found coal, so she could set torches to light up the place too.
On Day Three, she found iron ore.
I nearly spat out my drink. “You found iron? I’ve terraformed almost an entire dripstone cavern and I still haven’t found iron! I can’t even make a bucket. This is not fair. I am officially jealous.”
By the end of the session, she logged off with a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eyes.
I don’t think she hates her biome anymore.
I haven’t seen JS2’s biome, but I bet his is awesome in its own way as well (I heard him muttering something about finding copper ore and an underwater base; how cool is that??).
The point I’m trying to make with this story is this – no matter what biome you find yourself in, you can make a home in it. You just need resilience – to hang in there, and dig deep enough.
I hope the Junior Strawberries remember this.
