Category: Gameing

This day in Minecraft took a few weird turns, and instead of explaining it away let’s get started, shall we?

Today Loa and I decided to finally go to the Nether, it was supposed to happen a few episodes ago, but we never actually got around to it, mostly because of the heatwave, and tiredness. So instead, we decided that today was going to be the day. I honestly don’t know WHY I wanted to do this without finishing writing episode 8 first, but here we are, we’re ready to embark on another adventure.

First things first, we need to build our portal, out of Obsidian, close to the house, I wanted it to be within visual distance, so up on the hill felt like a perfect place for it. Loa is standing in the spot we wanted it.

I had learnt from a friend’s recent video that you could sink your portal into the ground, something I probably wouldn’t have thought about on my own. So we decided to do that. Loa explained to me that this also makes it a lot easier to go through it. Which makes sense, and is also kinda cool.

We quickly realized that we were slightly short of blocks, but luckily the missing blocks were in the house, so we didn’t have to go digging for anything, it was just fine to go down the hill and fetch them.

This wasn’t a huge building project or anything, you just need the inside of it needs to be 2 wide and 3 high, which is about 14 blocks in total, if you include the corners. Which you apparently can skip too. Not important, but just tidbits I’ve caught here and there. And this is the minimal size, so apparently you can just make it a lot of different shapes and stuff, which I thought was pretty cool, but nothing we tried today.

Capturing things in still photos isn’t nearly as easy as capturing them in in recorded footage, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying thus far. So I tried to take a photo of the grand opening of the portal, when I used the flint and steel to spark it.

And I missed it, it all happened to fast! I used the steel and flint, saw the spark, got super excited, and then POOF the portal was a portal, and it was too late to capture anything. I kind of wish it was a slightly slower animation, to really relish the moment.

And as I’m editing this I realized that there are no photos from the Nether. There must’ve been a disturbance between the Overworld and Nether world, so no images were saved. Fear not, for I am a wordsmith! And I shall forge a beautiful story of the anxious adventure we went on!

Going in we were both donning at least one piece of golden armor, looking incredibly stylish with pink and purple armor mixed together, as the gold and iron armors were both enchanted. The golden armor’s main purpose was to to let us safely pass any Piglins we’d meet. Damn, it was lucky that we were wearing that as we stepped through, because our portal put us right at an area teeming with zombie piglins and piglins. Actually think it’s worth mentioning that I didn’t look too closely if it was both piglins and zombie piglins or only zombie piglins, but for the sake of this story it was both!

The piglins weren’t the only swine like things in the nether, there were also hoglins… many many hoglins ready to eat us for breakfast. No, but seriously the piglins were fine, the hoglins not so much. They were a real pita. Any time we got too close they’d charge at us and knock us around. Made it really hard to make progress. Occasionally they would corner us and body blocking us so we couldn’t escape them. And then we also had to avoid friendly fire while fighting them which wasn’t the easiest!

And as if that wasn’t enough, this particular area that we spawned in to was also ripe with Ghasts, I don’t know how many showed up in the first 5 minutes… To say the least, it was rough, and we wasted a lot of our arrows on them, because it’d be really hard to gauge how far away they were, and sometimes it felt like the arrows just went straight through them (and not in the piercing sense!) We soon began fretting about the number of arrows we had left, even though we both had piercing arrows on our crossbows, if we shoot it too far away or into the lava being able to pick them up won’t actually help us very much.

I definitely did not expect ghasts to be something we’d run into so quickly, I thought this was more of a “you’ll run into it later” thing. But then I also learned that where you are in the nether has a correlation to where the portal is in the real (over) world, and that was something I found very interesting. So we were probably just very unlucky with where we ended up spawning in the beginning.

While I was trying to take it all in, this new place I had never experienced before, something had already caught Loa’s eye. Something I can only describe as a Bastion, even though couldn’t see it clearly yet, just indications of it on the map. It was high high up, we were not. So we decided to slowly make our way in it’s direction and see if we could find any good paths up there, while still allowing me to explore and chop down random wood, and look for netherquartz and glowstone etc.

Loa was excited about the amounts of glowstone, and I didn’t know where to look, so I was trying to ask him to point it out to me, and I still wasn’t looking in the right direction, so he had to help me by directing my sight up, and it was kind of amazing. Some of it was just hanging over lava beds, did I mention that there’s lava in the nether? Yeah, there’s lava in the nether. A lot of lava, like everywhere. And if it’s not lava it’s fire blossoms, which spoiler alert, will catch you on fire when you step over them. Also, some thorny types of bushes, which… made some of the adventuring even more difficult.

As we were trying to find our way up there, after pathing around some obstacles, working on getting altitude, I was trying really hard to keep the coordinates correctly in my head as I walked around and took new turns, I found myself thinking “the best way to get up there is to dig here”, so I started to dig a stair. In the meanwhile, Loa was digging up more netherquartz and glowstone where he could find it, I informed him that we had a safe space within the stairs if he wanted to close it behind us, as we by this point had struggled a lot with skeletons and hoglins catching us off guard and spawning in behind us. And ofc the ghasts chirping at us, in a cute yet chilling way.

For some reason, and I’m not sure why, it was probably just one of those days, I got really confused. As I just kept digging up and eventually hit bedrock, I was sure there should be an opening somewhere. So I tried backtracking and digging somewhere else, and then I realized, that I had dug in the entirely wrong direction. So we tried to backtrack and see where we’d last seen the path we wanted to take.

Me and Loa borked around for a bit, still very confused about where we were, slightly upset about fiery flowers that kept catching me on fire, and that together with a combination of Skeletons, Hoglins and Ghasts completely messed with us, and in that flurry of a mess Loa died, while I was still alive. I kept running around trying to deal with the hoglin that had killed Loa, and did my best to stay alive while getting his stuff off his corpse, so he could get back into the zone with all his gear.

Luckily, and something I’ve not really been mentioning much in recent episodes, we had our magical backpack. Our backpack wasn’t only a backpack each, it had been accidentally duped on day 3-4 when I was trying to recover my corpse, but couldn’t find it, but used creative game mechanics to recover my items (this was before I discovered the level zero fuckery of the Corpse mod). Basically, we had more than one backpack, that could access the same inventory, as a shared inventory. And thanks to the corpse mod, I could also pick up his stuff, use the backpack to send it back home to him (because we had additional 2 in a chest which were our backup emergency ones), and I was able to send him back all his stuff.

After I sent his stuff through, and while he was taking his time to get organized and prepared to come back into the nether, I ended up dying as well. At this point I was mad and sad because of that. And damn did I blame him for it! I just needed a moment to be mad, and then was like “okay let’s get ready and go back and fetch my stuff this time.” and at least I knew how to get back there, mostly.

So we both went back in, and while adventuring there, finding our way the best we could, I said that I didn’t want to stay after we found my body, I wanted to just get my stuff and get out of there. I didn’t feel like our gear accommodated for our different play-styles at this particular moment in this particular place, so I needed out.

I definitely have thoughts about why I felt like I had had enough, so let me elaborate.

My thoughts about the Nether

After we left the Nether, and decided to not go back, Loa asked me if the Nether scared me. And scared isn’t the word I’d use to describe it, however going into the Nether with Loa at this time was incredibly stressful to me, probably similar to the mineshaft yesterday, because it was entirely new to me, and a lot going on all the time. I’d hear the ghasts make a sound, every few minutes, and I knew they were baddies, and they usually had you in their sight when they chirped. Like, from others playing I’d seen it as that they weren’t that abundant, but maybe it’s just different areas… Or editing…

I also noticed that we weren’t doing anything like we would in the overworld, in tunnels and caves, putting torches down to make areas safe, like I don’t even know if that works in the nether I didn’t get a chance to ask Loa about it (don’t answer this!), and we both only had iron and gold gear. And Iron weapons. Which is like, it’s probably doable, but it wasn’t great. We were wasting a lot of our arrows, and our food on silly things. Neither of us had fire-protection on our gear (this is an afterthought, because I’m not even sure I knew it was a thing at this point in time).

Loa really just wanted to get to the bastion asap because “good loot”, but I was like “this is entirely new to me, and I want to experience it, I want to explore it with that awe of a first time”, and I honestly don’t think it’d be possible with someone who’s a lot more familiar with it and comfortable in that environment. And I think that ended up turning me off of this specific place, on this particular night.

I think adventuring together with someone you love, in a game they love, can be a fantastic experience, and it definitely has been at times, but it can also have very frustrating elements in it, like when your playstyles are completely different, which they were this day and in this case.

I feel like I need to clarify, and I guess this connects a lot with my “let new players be noobs” post I posted recently, that I am not talking about any of this in a hateful manner, I understand his excitement of going into a “cooler” place of the game, to go get “good shit”, but I was still in that exploration and awe phase, just enjoying the overworld a lot. Not looking to progress by going to the Nether. I still wanted to go there, that’s why we did it, but I didn’t have a specific goal in mind other than maybe picking up some glowstone. Unfortunately, us doing it together at this specific time wasn’t the right time.

As it stands right now we’ve set another plan for possibly going to the nether again together, and I’ll tell you more about it when / if that happens. There’s still a lot more adventures as well as chill gaming ahead in the days to come. Speaking of chill gaming:

A chill night ensued

So, I continued the night with some more chill adventures, I asked Loa if he wanted to go on another adventure, because I saw something on the map that looked like it could be another village in a different biome that was still fairly close to us, but I think he didn’t quite hear me. So I’ve saved that adventure for another day.

We both started doing other things, I just headed out to dig up some gravel because we needed more flint. For arrows. So many arrows.

I’m very much in love with my neptunium armor, so I can breath under water. I’m very spoiled by it.

Putting gravel blocks back so we could dig it up again at some other point.

I know it’s weird to put the gravel back, but I keep thinking “I’d fill this up with stone anyways, and this way when someone else comes through they may be like “oh gravel, let me just dig this out” because they too need flint. That’s actually pretty neat, that you can just keep placing the same gravel block to get more flint out of it. Which I think I only learnt by accident, or asked Loa about.

I also went deeper into the mines, just going digging for more ores. I was mainly hunting for diamonds so we could get better gear and prepare for another big adventure and make sure all our tools were diamond and enchanted.

A lot of this day didn’t quite go as intended, but there were still enjoyable moments. And yes, those gold pants did break before I managed to repair them.

I’ll see you again soon.

---

If you’re enjoying reading these little articles or stories, consider throwing some support my way: via ko-fi or alternatives. I’m currently trying to cover my student loan debt payments for this past summer and that will be my goal going forward too.

Before I start, I feel like it’s worth mentioning that what I will refer to as “dungeons” in this post, I’ve since learnt that they are called Mineshafts, do correct me if I’m still wrong (since I’m asking). Anyways, I’ll keep referring to them as dungeons in this specific post, and may adjust my language in future posts. I do not actively try to look for the “proper” language in these posts, because part of the charm for me personally is figuring out what stuff is, and naming things or referring to things in the way that makes sense to me. Okay okay, let’s get started shall we:

I hate this game. Okay, I may be exaggerating, but I did die enough today to utter the words “I HATE THIS GAME” more than once. And I honestly didn’t die that much, but the XP, THE XP! It was all lost… *Cry* Luckily we were, as before, able to get our corpses back so it wasn’t too bad. And yes, I’m saying We, because Loa joined me for an entire full session today and I think that was the first for us, and we had a lot of fun doing a lot of different things both together and separately.

As you remember from yesterday, I had logged out in a very safe spot, because I wanted to pick up where I was and to explore further. I wasn’t entirely sure what this “dungeon” would bring, but I wanted to go down there to have a look. I asked Loa a few times if it was safe, if I would die, and if I should be worried about whatever he’d mentioned yesterday, he said I could go on and that the thing he mentioned shouldn’t be relevant because apparently I need a key (I still have no idea what he was talking about.)

Loa joined the game. But went on his own adventures for now.

So I started to make my way down, but I kept getting distracted by iron, and coal, and anything mineable really. Me, distracted? No, Never! (I legit had to open a stream to distract my involuntary attention so I can keep writing this, why ADHD brain, why?) I kept making all the ores and coal, and redstone and lapis into blocks, to be able to fit more into my backpack, and so I could see how much I had gathered by the end of it all (keep reading and I’ll show you!).

I even ran into a giant slime, and to my dismay it split into more slimes after I killed it. Let me say I had been very surprised at how easily it died just milliseconds before I realized that it split, and that they were all coming for me. I had been hoping that the big slime was friendly but it was walking towards me in a way that scared me, so I had to attack in self-defense (Yes, I hear how bad that sounds.. ew).

So much ore, everywhere, pick pick and gather and never actually going back to where I was planning to go.

I was so confused when I found this, I knew I had blocks of Raw Iron in my backpack, but I didn’t expect to see it in the wild!

Looking back I honestly think I was very nervous and just trying to do ANYTHING but going into the “dungeon”.

But look at all this ore though like some things you just don’t leave behind.

I finally made it to the entrance and looked back up, to show you where I came from.

Dungeon Time

Finally I made it into the maze like tunnels of the “dungeon”, and after exploring a lot of the tunnels in there, and stripping all of the rails that I could, I did find some chests and some nifty loot. The chests were in minecarts which I knew could be useful so I picked them up after looting them

I tried to go through it methodically, but I’m wonder if the mini-map was actually a hindrance to me because I kept seeing things I couldn’t quite get to yet, and I’d obsess about where I was on the map and not figure out where I could actually go.

First spider web, surely it’s nothing to worry about.. Right?

But then I saw one tunnel that was completely filled with spider web, I feared going there, and asked Loa if I should, if it was safe, or if, you know, I should just turn around and never look back? He assured me it was safe.

I cut my way through some of it, and used my shears to cut them down a little bit faster (at least I imagined it was faster).

I seemed to have disturbed something, and small cave spiders (smaller than I was used to) started to attack me.

As you can see there’s an arrow sticking out of the post on the left side of the screen, so I was fighting not only what felt like invisible enemies, but also ones that would actively seek me out.

Quickly more and more small cave spiders came out of it to attack me. And they all did poison damage, something that was completely new to me. Which drained so much more of my health than I realized, so when I thought I was good and safe to kill the skeleton that was behind the webs and next to the spawner, I was not, and I died before I knew it. I think this was the very first time I was incredibly mad about dying in this game, and I was like “how the fuck do I get back there”.

Look at all that xp though, 27 enchanting levels!

Back home

Loa was back at the house by now, after having set out to the village when he logged on. I don’t know what he did at the village other than trade for a bit, and heal some Iron Golems that were suffering from low health. He offered to join me to retrieve my corpse, so we headed back out again.

As I got dressed in golden armor I felt ridiculous. Most of this was looted armor, but I did not realize how pink it was because of the enchantment.

Pet break. Horses I brought home yesterday. Before we head back out on adventure I had forgotten to show these off yesterday (yes I’m still calling it yesterday even though this post is published much much later).

Corpse Recovery

So when making our way back to where I died, I was trying to find my original entrance again, which was under water, but in doing so ended up taking another tunnel under water which led to the surface on the other side of the land… Loa tried to follow me and died in the process… I laughed and cried while I waited for him to come back again.

As we continued and got to above where my corpse would be, Loa was like “we can just dig straight down to get to your stuff, I can do it and put water at the bottom for you so you can jump down”, and I was like “okay, it’s at -31”

After a while of digging, as we were quite high up compared to where my body was supposed to be, Loa was like “don’t they end up at 0?” and yeah, that was true.

He dug down to that level, and he was like “so where is it?” and I had to tell him, just dig in a circle at that level, and OMG! he laughed so much when he finally found my corpse! The same laughter as when I found my first one at one of those “in the middle of the mountain”-points.

It was time for me to follow him down and retrieve my corpse.

Now that we had recovered my corpse, and were ready to continue down into the caves and dungeons, and so we did another dig straight down and another puddle of water for me to jump into.

All in all we went down close to 100 blocks in height. From 67, to -28

We were back in the dungeon, and decided to try and find the new path I knew I hadn’t explored yet. But just kept running in circles before we found a way to go elsewhere, and found a new path and a new adventure. Almost immediately we ran into another monster spawner with the horrible horrible poisonous spiders. And they all aggroed on me, while I was trying to hide behind a corner, and I think in that moment Loa managed to destroy the spawner, while I died. I had to make my way back again, and then we had to find our corpses again, because he died from a creeper.

Loa made a fancy but also very dangeours “elevator” to go back down the same hole we had already dug out, and he said “You can come with” but I plainly refused because it felt way too scary. Basically he used a water source block which he’d pick up before it was too late, and it freaked me out enough to watch.

Another fall all the way down, let me spare you the pictures of that…

Your regular scheduled cave exploring

So we were back out in the “normal” cave. And Loa found some diamond nodes that I had completely missed before. So of course I had to come back and help mine it. We only had one mining pick made of diamond. And I think it may have been enchanted with Fortune I at this time.

After we left the dungeon we eventually went our separate ways within the caves, and I decided to keep moving towards the desert region that had been my initial goal when heading out yesterday (feels like forever ago now). I kept doing it through the caves, but had trouble finding a way out and kept running in circles, still digging up more resources.

During our adventures Loa and I were talking about how satisfying mining is in this game, and that we both just wanna keep doing it even when we’re trying to do other things. So we decided that if we end up with 64 blocks of Iron Ore, we both have to stop mining for a while.

I guess there’s a reason it’s called Minecraft, huh.

I kept looking for caves that would help me get out, while keeping walking in the right cardinal direction. As you can see in the above photo I’m turned the wrong way, but hoping this twisting cave can lead out.

Take aim, get set, row!

Eventually I did manage to get out of the ground and to start my trek North West (I think accidentally wrote North East before/yesterday), and I made it to the ocean, and realized that I had to keep crossing it to get to wherever I was going. Remember, it was almost 3000 bl from home, which is quite a way to go on foot.

Since I knew I had to cross a lot of water to continue, I decided to build a boat.

I already had a crafting table in my backpack to be able to craft things on the fly when needed. It’s very nice for tools that were still iron, or emergency stone tools, or just a new full stack of torches.

I also use the crafting table to compress resources into blocks of the resource, so blocks of raw Iron and Gold ore, and blocks of Redstone and Lapis, and of course coal, which I just kept mining even though we don’t really need it.

I rowed the boat, North/West, I went over a lot of open ocean and places that hadn’t loaded in yet, which got quite laggy to do while both of us were on the server. Took a while for us to realize that was causing Loa trouble though. Whoops.

Treasyre

No adventure would be complete without even MORE distractions.

Could that be, a boat? Wonder if it has treasure!

I don’t know what I expected, but this wasn’t it! Heck, that’s amazing.

We already had some emeralds, but tbh more emeralds never hurt anyone. And iron and gold is always useful.

Just keep rowing

While rowing, I tried my very very very very best to not get MORE distracted, but we do know that any adventure game is just ripe with distractions. I rowed over this gorgeous underwater temple, and I know approximately what’s in side, but I definitely want to go back there when both me and Loa have Neptunium Gear so we can both breathe and see under water. I’m looking forward to that!

Row row row your boat, gently across the entire fucking ocean. Phew. Okay we did it. There’s only so many images you can take while crossing an entire ocean. But we did it, we made it, we found hat looks like sand dunes.

I finally made it to the the desert, it wasn’t desert only it was mixed with something else but I don’t remember. Before I went up on land to look for the cacti, I noticed the beautiful corral in the water, and decided to go in and have a closer look

Underwater I found sea pickles, which kind of worked like glow lichen but in the water, and I picked one up and unlocked the lime dye recipe. Lime dye was why I was out in the desert to begin with, because I needed that green dye, to mix with the white dye. And here I discovered a plant that immediately gave me Lime Dye. I may or may not have facepalmed at this.

The funniest thing right now was that I still had no idea what I needed the lime dye for, but it was something cool, and I knew it was worth the epic adventure to get it. And I was going to show Loa as soon as I got back and built it.

Even the zombies were different here. Considering how far away from home I was I still had to be careful, so I didn’t have to struggle too much to make it all the way back if I died.

Neverending adventure

Of course I found a pyramid (is that what it is? I’m having trouble with words atm), and I knew what was hiding at the very bottom, I just had to be careful to not blow up.

Sandstone castle, gorgeous architecture, I hadn’t seen sandstone yet, nor Terracotta. And here I found both.

Do you know what’s underneath? Do you want to know? If not I’d scroll by now.

This is a very deadly trapped room, but because I already knew about it, I didn’t die horrible to the copious amounts of TNT that was hidden just below the surface here. And instead I just brought home as much loot as I could. Heck yes!

I promptly forgot to take the rest of the screenshots here.. So I’m sorry I can’t show you any more, I promise I’ll do my best to show you next time I run into one of these.

Jungle Hills

I started the trek home, and I found new biomes. And Loa wanted me to sample some to bring home. Because these jungle trees could house cacao beans, and vines!

I tried to row through the area, and get to the other side, but in some places I had to pick up my boat and walk again.

Let’s not find out if piranhas in this game wants to eat me alive. That’s an adventure for another day.

I couldn’t resist the urge for some last minute roleplaying, by cutting my way through the leafy bushes to get out of the jungle and make my way back home. It’s not easy to catch this well on a screenshot.

Home Sweet Home

Finally I made it back home. and I’m running out of words.

Loa had been making our house look nicer in the meanwhile. Because our chests were just filled with stuff and I just thrive in organized chaos (don’t judge me, you know what ADHD is like).

While I was inside, minding my business, I heard these words form beside me “IS THAT DIAMOND ARMOR?”. Loa was still wearing iron mostly, and I was like “maybe”.

Back in side, he kept crouching to look at me in disapproving manners (see it was disapproving! I’m not projecting, this is what you do Loa!).

Yes, I had made one diamond helmet, but the armor was Neptunium. Because fishing is OP.

And to wrap things up

As promised, the collection of blocks of ore and things. 64 blocks of redstone, 31 blocks of lapis, 54 blocks of Iron Ore, 16 blocks of Gold, 51 blocks of coal. A lot of coal was used while adventuring because torches, but I think all in all this is a pretty good haul.

Additionally, some blog site related things: This post took the longest to write, mostly because this week was a weird week, but also because a long gaming session translates into A LOT of adventures all squeezed into one.

I hope you still enjoyed it, and I’m trying to figure out a nice balance going forward, but I don’t quite know what it’ll be like yet. Loa has had 2 weeks off, and that’s the time we’ve been playing Minecraft together (except for the first few days), and going forward he’ll be back to work (in real time, not blog time, this posts’ adventure was started 10 days ago), on the night shift, so I’ll probably be playing a lot more on my own again, and we’ll see how that all goes. I mean most of the time when we’re playing together we are often playing apart and then showing each other things later. As you’ll see in upcoming posts.

Until next time, try to not explode your house.

---

If you’re enjoying reading these little articles or stories, consider throwing some support my way: via ko-fi or alternatives. I’m currently trying to cover my student loan debt payments for this past summer and that will be my goal going forward too.

This session was quite short, but I did enjoy myself. As promised the enchantment table corner!

I mostly played alone today, I continued exploring the villager, and ran around farming some stuff to trade with the villagers, and came away from it with 35 emeralds in total, 5 of which I spent on slime balls.

I took over one of the houses, and put down two furnaces, a few chests, and a crafting bench, so I could keep doing some stuff.

As you can see my levels went up quite significantly from that.

I also tried to harvest some honey, but I just broke the bee hive, and I have no idea how to avoid that. But I don’t mind, it’s a learning experience throughout this game and will continue to be.

After a few days I decided to start walking back home.

I definitely had too many thing on my mind when I got back, and it was quite hard to focus on one thing at the time. So, I managed to get back to finishing the Tackle Box for fishing (through Aquaculture 2). I was very ready to start fishing, but realized I didn’t know how to get bait.

I figured it out (with some help from the internet), and now I have a lot of the things I wanted for fishing.

I spent 25 levels on enchantments, mostly minor ones, and forging different items together to combine those enchantments. As in repairing my iron pick, and my iron armor. I’ll keep getting XP back, as we keep exploring, so I thought it was good to spend it on something that will improve exploring a little bit.

Anyways, I wanted to go fishing, so I decided to head out.

But as usual I got distracted by shiny…

Shiny Friend

By the ocean there was a horse, so it was in my way to get to where I wanted to go. Okay, okay, I knew it was there, and I had the lead with me, so I was trying to figure out how to get it to join me.

The lead worked, and it followed me home. I was way too nervous to stop to take more photos on the way back. It refused to go inside the garden fence, so it had to stay outside.

I got thrown off the horse the first time, but was not ready at all to take a screenshot of that, and I expected it would happen again, but I fed the horse another apple, and right clicked with free hands in order to get on. And was ready with the F2 button.

These hearts do NOT mean that the horse wants to fuck. I feel like I need to put that out there considering the chicken and sheep issue I had.

I really didn’t expect it to work so soon! Figured it’d be more fickle, that said I’d pretty much been feeding it treats every session, so maybe something of that helped.

Let’s go on an adventure!

Look how pretty they are? Prettiest horse there ever was. Also, I didn’t craft this armor, it dropped in a chest. And damn, that’s nice.

Here fishie fishie

And it was finally time to fish!

The animation for when the fish is about to hook is great, because you see bubbles going closer to the bobber, and I just love it.

I didn’t fish for very long, because I was getting tired and it was getting dark, so I went back home, and had a snooze. More adventures tomorrow.

---

If you’re enjoying reading these little articles or stories, consider throwing some support my way: via ko-fi or alternatives. I’m currently trying to cover my student loan debt payments for this past summer and that will be my goal going forward too.

To pick up where we left off yesterday, more adventures!

While scouring out in the night I ran into a fox for the first time, and let me tell you I was fascinated. These foxes had a tendency to hang out in the water and swim around, which I thought was extremely cute. Unfortunately they are fickle animals and it was difficult to take good pictures of them.

I quickly dove back into the mines, I had one major goal, and that was to get some obsidian, because I wanted to build an enchanting table, and I finally had a diamond pick axe.

I quickly found rich resources, and this diamond node was 8 diamonds worth.

While my main goal was obsidian, as I said, I didn’t pass up any opportunity to get diamonds.

At some point I was making my way back to the surface, and started digging another stair up, this is still very close to my other dungeon entrance, but now I got two apparently.

I also had to be incredibly careful to not drain the lake.

Something beautifully strange

I went down for more adventures, because I had totally gotten sidetracked from actually finding the obsidian, and I noticed that I was close to this purple thing on the mini map. So I started digging. And inside was this gorgeous purple stone.

Turns out it was an amethyst, and all the blocks were amethyst, and the protruding shards were amethyst shards, and I said amethyst way too many times. But look how gorgeous it is.

Through this cave, I found a way out, and met a cute little Wolf.

Even stranger, but just what I was looking for.

This was probably the best find this day. It both had obsidian and lava that I was looking for. It was in the middle of the night, so I was trying to be careful and not get eaten by anything.

This meant I could head back home and finish my secret project. The enchantment table!

I headed back home, built the enchantment table, placed the 15 book cases. I was so proud of myself that this tiny piece of information had stuck in my mind from the Minecraft series I’m watching. And I could “complete” this in one go. I had enough paper and leather for all the books and I organized it in the correct way. Unfortunately the only screenshots I have of the area is with the enchant menu open showing off the items I already enchanted.

My focus was putting into practice some of the things I had learnt through osmosis with regard to enchanting, so I forgot to actually screenshot along the way. I had a session with gathering extra XP mainly around the house and the farm, the chickens helped a lot.

And I can combine these two pickaxes to repair and get both enchantments on one! Which is neat.

The crossbow had piercing on it, which means I can in theory use it to more efficiently cull my chickens. And yes, it works like a charm! Piercing also means that I can pick up almost all my arrows again, which is very helpful.

Thank you and good night

---

Bonus session:

Me and Loa managed to squeeze in a session the same day, so here’s how it went. Basically I’d been eagerly awaiting to show him the last two posts of stuff, and he’s finally got some time off. And yey!

He logged back in while back in that cave we’d died. And he had to find his way back. I did go down to help him, and we did some exploring before we went back up again and he got to see the new shiny house. I was like “y u no say anything about the house yet”, but expressed it as: So did you notice something? And he was like “Yes, you put in support beams!” and I was like “AND A WHOLE OTHER FLOOR!”.

I think he takes a bit longer than me to process things and give feedback, so me just eagerly awaiting an immediate response means it feels way too slow.

He was rummaging through the boxes, and well the organization isn’t amazing yet but I helped him find what he needed. He eventually went upstairs and found the enchanting table, and was actually impressed with me having added the correct amount of bookshelves, which I appreciated.

Then he taught me a trick, to cover the bookshelves to get only low level enchantments showing if you just want some minor bumps on say your entire Iron Armor. So we did that, and managed to get two pairs of iron boots with Feather Falling 1 so we can both enjoy easier falling not that we got to put it to the test.

We went to hunt for some kelp, and Loa used the spyglass to see the kelp before we got there. And I was screaming at him that he went and found the kelp before I even left the house, then he waited for me to catch up and showed me that he used the spyglass, and we laughed at it. Then we went to cut it down, and bring it home.

He also showed me how to build an automatic bone meal machine using hoppers, but as usual I got too distracted by him being in the game with me that I took very few screen shots. *sad face*

While we were getting kelp it was getting dark, and he wanted us to go back home and sleep because we were so close. Then he laughed at me going to bed in the game with all my clothes on.

Next day we went to go back to the ruins I’d found. For more obsidian and to show me how to make obsidian with lava and water.

We arrived at the ruins, and I looked through the inventory and I was like “where’s the water bucket, did you take the water bucket?” And I looked up to this:

It was a very silly moment. He let me try putting the water over the lava source block, and voila I had one more block obsidian. I was honestly a little bit upset by it, because I was hoping that there was a way to get more of it. But unfortunately not.

Then Loa asked me, if I’d found any villages yet, and I hadn’t, but I had seen what looked like a village on the map. And we were already halfway there from home, so we started walking.

By the time we saw the village in the distance it was already getting dark.

Loa was worried about the villagers, because they could die from monsters etc, so we hurried over, there were a lot of monsters on the way and we almost got killed by those child-sized zombies again.

In the village, there were guards as part of one of the mods, and they were fighting off most of the monsters.

Once dawn came, and the villagers started to wake up, I learnt how to trade with them, and found that one forester was trading oak saplings for emeralds, and the hunter was trading 5 emeralds for 2 slime balls, we need slime to make something nice. I’ve been keeping an eye out for slime ever since Loa mentioned them the first day he joined me.

And yeah, that’s where this adventure ended, we got our slime, and we logged out in the village to make something to eat.

More adventures ahead tomorrow!

---

If you’re enjoying reading these little articles or stories, consider throwing some support my way: via ko-fi or alternatives. I’m currently trying to cover my student loan debt payments for this past summer and that will be my goal going forward too.

You may remember yesterday that I was flustered about our bodies disappearing, today I discovered what happened to them. But let me set the scene first, something I didn’t manage to grab any screenshots for because I was so distracted.

Apparently when Loa joins the game I focus on showing him things and doing things together with him, so we went cave diving, we were finally deep into the caves and we found the diamonds I’d not been able to get to yesterday because I kept dying and losing my shit so I couldn’t mine it. At the very bottom of one of the chasms, we were exploring around, trying to be fairly careful. At least I was. I do feel like because Loa has a lot more experience with Minecraft he’s a lot more gung ho about the whole thing. I’m gung ho in a different way.

While I was… I don’t know what I was doing tbh it all happened so quickly, Loa ran into an Enderman, and it became hostile. And I was like “Why did you attack it” and he was like “I didn’t, I only looked it in the eyes” and I was like, “WHAT?! You mean I could’ve killed myself yesterday when I was taking those screenshot of the Enderman I knew wouldn’t hurt me?!!”. Loa quickly died, and I was like “let me help you *slash slash*” and then I realized he was dead, and soon I died too.

We made it back to the depths fairly soon, and we couldn’t find our corpses again, just like the problem I’d had yesterday.

Loa logged out, to go get ready for work, and I was like “I’ll get our shit back with creative mode again because this is stupid”. And after I’d done that I noticed something.

The Mystery of the Disappearing Corpses

We had looked for the corpse in the depth, and looked around for it by digging around the spot we died, the spot the game knew we died. Double checked the coordinates and such.

After I’d recovered our items, and stashed it away in the appropriate chests, I noticed that a purple dot on the minimap, closer to the mining base camp than where we died. Basically on the minimap xp and arrows and some other stuff shows up as purple dots, while normal items are red dots, and I knew from before that the corpse does show up as a purple dot. This was when my mind started to connect the dots (pun not intended). From the minor reading I’d done on the corpse mod FAQ I knew that it didn’t handle custom depths very well, something that I didn’t even know if I was running as this modpack was new to me and well Minecraft was new to me.

I walked towards the dot on the map, through the tunnels I’d already been accommodating for easy travel and I started digging. And this was my first screenshot of the evening, me finding my corpse 4 feet under ground (pun intended). And once at the foot of the hole, I noticed the “0” in the coordinates and realized that yes, indeed any corpse that dies below 0 ends up at 0. This explains the floating corpses too. (this isn’t the corpse from me dying this time, but an older corpse).

So I started a new project for the night…. digging tunnels on the 0 level, going in all possible directions to be able to easily go to our corpses.

Why you ask? Well, ehm… I’m weird. and I enjoy seemingly random projects that are just for me for weird reasons.

More cavediving

It wouldn’t be a project of mine if I didn’t get distracted along the way. So here I am building other shelves trying to get more iron (because I’m fairly low on stock as most of my gear has broken). I guess it was part of the plan and goal for the night to get more iron, that’s why I went into the mines to begin with too.

By this point I had made a diamond pickaxe but would only use it for special ores for most of the night.

Another example of my body being in the wrong place. This is the corpse from earlier in the day.

I don’t like building like this because I’m not used to it yet. And this height was incredibly scary… But then I remembered that I did get very confident with doing this kind of building in 7 Days to Die, and that game is pretty much Minecraft with different textures.

House Renovations

After a while I was satisfied with the digging and pathing I’d done under ground and I remembered all the wood I’d cut the night before, I decided it was time to rebuild the house for a little bit.

If you don’t remember what it looked like before, do check back with the previous posts (day 2, and day 3) where I’ve shared some house pictures.

I knew I wanted to change from spruce planks to oak planks, and I quickly noticed that I didn’t want just the plain oak planks, I needed some kind of accents. So I decided to try some combination with oak logs, and build a semi-timber house.

The main plan was to raise the roof by one block, and build a second floor. The second floor would mostly host things we wouldn’t be using as regularly like the bed, and I don’t know what else yet.

I had to learn the mechanics of block placing, and how the blocks that have different rotations rotate depending on where you aim etc, which was an interesting challenge.

Okay it’s taking shape. I decided for aesthetic purposes to make extra log pillars inside as the inside corners wouldn’t show the outside corner block.

I’m focusing on the frame on the top floor before replacing the bottom floor. Also my building is quite haphazardly, because I will build something get distracted and do a different piece. Even when I try to do it very organized. This is ADHD organization, clearly working well.

Very blocky, how would it not be in Minecraft, but I also like it. I enjoy working with the aesthetics and textures to create something out of these blocks.

At one point I did have to go out for more wood, thus the night time photo with a sapling in my head. But again, it was just very nice. I do appreciate the night time in Minecraft, and real life.

Wait, where are all my chickens? I wonder if this was after I culled them, or while a bunch of them were still off in the mountains because the escaped while I was rebuilding things. I’m realizing that it looks like all the chicken are gone. What I think happened here is that I bred them so new babies were formed, and then I killed off the adults, and the baby chicks tend to huddle around any grownups left, so they are all huddled on that one point of the mini-map which only displays one chicken.

I think this is where I’ll end today, even though there were some minor adventures continuing in the night, nothing too fabulous happened, and I can just add it to tomorrows post about the next adventure.

Thank you for being with me on this journey experiencing this game for the first time, and doing my damndest to write image descriptions that are useful on these images.

See you tomorrow.

---

If you’re enjoying reading these little articles or stories, consider throwing some support my way: via ko-fi or alternatives. I’m currently trying to cover my student loan debt payments for this past summer and that will be my goal going forward too.

I didn’t think I’d get around to playing yesterday, especially after taking so long to write yesterday’s post (I’m going through some medication issues, and it’s really screwed with my concentration levels this week). At some point I had decided to not play, I had logged in to take some of the screenshot for yesterday’s post, but decided to call it a night, but I found myself staying up for another reason.

After being up and it was 1-2 AM, and yesterday’s adventure was published, I eventually felt like I could play, and that I could allow myself to stay up all night (make a conscious decision to do so). I had the goal to stay up until a possible delivery, but that delivery never happened and I had a glorious sleep on the sofa instead. But, enough about my real life, let’s talk about my Minecraft night.

Into the night

I logged in with one goal, and that was to gather materials to be able to rebuild the house if I had energy. I felt like we needed an expansion to be able to add more organized storage and such. And I also wanted to replace the dirt built bridges.

However, I quickly found myself just gathering wood, for hours, and just letting myself walk around mindlessly, stay out in the rainy night, the rain sounds in the game were so soothing, and I just kind of got lost in it.

I feared no foe, and just got my shit done. I couldn’t really stop chopping down trees. I started by clearing the area around my vegetable garden.

I really should be more patient with taking my screenshots, so it doesn’t still say “saved screenshot” in the next screenshot. Practice, patience. We’ll get there.

As you can see I have a mini-map, and I would only turn it on occasionally, but I found it incredibly helpful during the nights when I’d otherwise be worried about monsters killing me. I found myself incredibly brave just being out here doing my thing, and dealing with them as they came up. I’m slowly learning how different monsters behave in the night, but also meeting new ones and learning things from those encounters. Not that I fully understand them all yet.

Viewing my work was very fascinating, especially after a little bit of time passed, and suddenly trees had sporadically grown, as below.

While climbing the mountains I also made new friends, namely another chicken, and even though I have a pasture filled with chickens, I just can’t resist bringing more home from far away.

While I was climbing one of the mountains I cleared my inventory by throwing out the eggs, and chickens appeared. I threw some of them in some weird places, so they ended up outside of the pasture and I had to collect them back in. They are so smol and cute tho.

Dangers in the night

I went to chop down the sugarcane close to the dungeon house, and two tiny zombies ran up to me and attack me. I was so perplexed because I’d not seen tiny zombies before. Before I knew it I was dead.

However, it was kind of entertaining, because seeing my corpse was neat, which has a new skin, even though it’s covered in armor. And I can show you how it works (this will be relevant later).

I think the scariest part of them was that it felt like they came out of nowhere, and just ran at me. The zombies do tend to walk towards you from a lot further range, so yeah that was definitely part of the nights experience, figuring out how the different monsters act towards me, and what range is safe for me.

I knew that you wouldn’t hurt me, Mr Enderman, unless I hurt you first. So I allowed myself to walk up fairly close to have a look at you.

Something I didn’t manage to get screenshots of was the Pillagers that kept coming up to me, but you can see the “debuff” at the upper left corner of the screenshots. And lucky me they dropped a crossbow that I could use in my adventures.

Cave Diving

Oh boy, I decided to go back into the caves, because I had completely forgot why I was cutting so much wood. And realized I was starting to run low on Iron.

I feel like it’s worth mentioning, I was incredibly tired during this session, and spending the night awake while I needed sleep, because my brain was being silly, so I did die a lot more than I’d say I usually do.

I don’t remember why this skeleton killed me, but ack, here we are. And well I did get my stuff back from this because it was fairly easy, more interesting issues arose later in the morning.

Gorgeous view of the big cave I found. I wanted to take my time to go explore it, but maybe not quite yet, I still needed more iron. And I was carrying a fair amount at this point.

Unfortunately one wrong step, can mean falling to your death. I didn’t do anything in particular, I just managed to find the one block that would let me fall all the way down. form -18 to -50. Suffice to say, I died.

I did laugh at myself after falling down, and continued listening to the zombie groaning next to me. And I was like, well I’m sure I can find a way back down here and retrieve my corpse.

Which took me on a new adventure.

Corpse Hunting

Diving back in, with some spare iron tools, and blocks no armor but some food, I was confident I could get back my corpses.

I encountered another set of skeletons, this time it was a monster spawner in an inconvenient place, and I was already down on my luck, so I had to go fetch that corpse too (sorry no death screen). And I did find my corpse, I guess I’d been running and jumping around while getting killed. Because my corpse was not where I expected it to be.

This wasn’t the corpse from the fall. But one in between. I managed to build my way up to it and fetch my items from it.

Unfortunately, I was so stuck in trying to figure out hwo to find my corpse, I didn’t actually take many more screenshots this night, because there was a struggle to find it. And in actuality I couldn’t find the corpse, and didn’t take a screenshot of me being in the correct location.

But I did solve the problem creatively after a while of searching. And by the help of some useful tips and tricks I figured out how to go into creative mode, because the mod allows to retrieve your items in creative mode, if you can’t find the corpse (or whatever reason you want to use).

And I felt like because I’d been able to get to the position where it should be, I was okay with getting my stuff back, even if the mod broke for the purpose at that point and I had to find another solution. I did also research the mods FAQ and site etc, to figure out if there was something I was missing, and there was no helpful solutions other than this to be honest.

As I finished off my cave adventures in the early morning, I decided it was time to go to sleep instead of trying to do more stuff in the game when I was too tired to play. And take a bit of a break.

See you in the next post/episode! (I finally remembered what I wanted all the wood for, so probably doing that next time!)

---

If you’re enjoying reading these little articles or stories, consider throwing some support my way: via ko-fi or alternatives. I’m currently trying to cover my student loan debt payments for this past summer and that will be my goal going forward too.