Today me and Loa made a plan and logged in to execute it. Unfortunately most thing didn’t go to plan, but it was still an incredibly adventurous night for me!
Loa spawned in back over at the village, where he had logged out last time, so I got on my horse to head over to meet him, and to show off the horse obviously. When I tried to ask for directions he didn’t know where he was, but we did our best to find each other.
Also, you’d be surprised how hard it can be to ride a horse through a forest with sweet berry bushes, the thorny fuckers.. We (me and the horse) kept getting stuck and hurt, but eventually we got there.
Loa made some lowely friends
On the way Loa picked up some friends that we brought back home, one of the reasons we’d headed out in the first place the previous day: Cows! Mostly for milk.
He was trying to bring the cows back with hay in his hands. Fortunately I had some leads on me, which would make it a lot easier to get them home.
Soon after I handed over the leads to Loa, I had to fight off some pillagers and I told him “go! I’ll fight them off and protect you!”, damn I if that didn’t make me feel heroic.
I was already low in health, from stumbling through the bush, so I had to run away from the pillagers to get some distance so I could eat to regain some stamina and health. I managed to quickly defeated them all. And it was all worth it for this cutie: look at this tiny creature, aren’t they just adorable?
I’m in awe of how cute these baby animals are in this game. Doesn’t matter if it’s the cow, the pig, the chicken, the sheep. IT’S SO FLUFFY.
Do you want to go to the Nether?
This was the question Loa had posed to me before our session today, and I went like “sure, but I think we need more obsidian first”. I explained to him how I knew the approximate way to get there: I know we need to make a circle, approximately 6×4; and somehow light it on fire. Either with lava, or something else? Loa quickly told me yeah just put it on fire the other way. What way? Turns out it was flint and steel, which seems to be the only reason to use it (that I’ve noticed since fires rarely go out).
We decided to jump back down the caves to some proper lava lakes to make obsidian, as he’d already showed me how it works. But had only been on one source block, and deeper in the caves we could find more. So we went down the secondary route to the caves (the one I’d recently built after I went a bit overboard with digging upwards).
From here we built a simple stair down the wall, to a much deeper spot where we found a small lava lake, I’m aware that it’s a gigantic one on the mini map. And again, I forgot to take any cool pictures of that particular experience, Loa definitely distracts me too much.
We prepared it the “smart” way to make obsidian. Basically the idea is that you keep water on top, so when you mine it and it opens up, it opens up to the lava but water immediately touches it again so it becomes more obsidian, and most likely the obsidian doesn’t actually go back into the lava and get destroyed. I even managed to position myself in a way so the water flow continuously brought the obsidian blocks straight to me.
When we got about 30 blocks of obsidian from our mining operation, some extra iron and diamonds too, we decided to head back up to the surface. And because we built a nice stair up it was fairly easy to get back.
Due to the heatwave going on in real life (the UK), we took a break to go to the store and buy ice cream.
When we came back from the store, my adventures in the game continued alone for the night.
Trader visit gone bad
Back at the house, another Llama trader came to visit. While I went inside to look if I had anything to trade with them, they moved around to the other side of the house.
Quickly I noticed something was going on around the trader, and turns out that since it was night, a zombie had arrived and was fighting with the llamas, and the trader. Once the zombie was dead something strange started happening.
One of the llamas was running around and jumping around like crazy. The trader himself disappeared, and the health of one of the llamas kept going down. I was really confused, and I asked Loa if he knew what was going on. Then he said the magic words: “It’s attacking the other one, because it probably attacked it by accident when they fought the zombie.” That’s when I noticed the white spit spawning everywhere, but it did disappear quite fast so I hadn’t quite noticed it at first.
The white llama became the victor, if you can call it that, and the trader was just gone. I had seem him drink a potion before he disappeared and after that he just didn’t show back up.
I tied his surviving white llama to the fence, just in case he came back for it. And apparently I could sit on it, but not feed it to make it friendly and useful to me. That said I did not try to put a saddle on it, maybe next time.
Night time fishing and extended fishing trip
I decided to go on a fishing trip while waiting to see if Loa wanted to come back on (spoiler, he didn’t he continued his night with his other mistress, Guild Wars 2, the game we met through over 8 years ago). The last time I just got distracted by the horse, and didn’t really get much fishing in. This time I had a goal in mind.
I wanted to capture how visibly good the fishing is in this game, the bubbles that swim towards your bobber is such a nice visual, and the audio captions does tell you when it sinks, which you can get read out to you too. I keep the captions on because they help me be sure I’m not hearing things that aren’t there, a great way accessibility features can help everyone *she says like she’s not disabled*.
If you’ve ever fished in real life, you know it’s not quite like that, but there’s definitely more bubbles around the bobber (depending on depth) before it pulls, and that’s also very visually represented here and bubbles start popping up before they finally gather to move towards the bobber.
I continued fishing through the night, and I don’t really know how many days I was out for. But definitely long enough to eventually get attacked by phantoms at the worst possible time.
I was legit wondering if more fish or other fish catch when it’s raining. There’s a mod called aquaculture in this modpack, and I don’t know if it’s has any of those type of effects, but I do know that it can matter where you fish to what kind of fish or loot you get.
I soon got distracted from doing the actual fishing, but I had gotten what I came for, a very particular chest, and I started to explore the coast, and cut a lot of trees until my inventory eventually was too full to continue.
Another Ruin
A few days ago a friend read all my chapters of this adventure so far, and they were very excited because they’ve been playing Minecraft since the very beginning, and appreciated seeing it through someone’s very fresh eyes, which is honestly kind of the reason why I’m writing these. Because I know you can only have that fresh experience once and I wanted to share it with you.
They did say something funny, to me, though and that was “You’ll lose your shit when you find out what those ruins are”, which got me thinking. “Do I already know what they are, or don’t I?”
Which leads me onto this: today I ran into another ruin, that actually looks a lot like a netherportal, and it even had flint and steel in the chest this time, which was such a clear giveaway, especially after Loa told me today that that was an alternative way to spark the fire needed.
Turns out, I may not lose my metaphorical shit, until I actually go through and experience it. The previous ruin didn’t actually look much like a portal, but this one definitely did. I am excited for that adventure, but that’s for another day.
Aquatic Friends
One of the first things I saw while on my fishing trip earlier today was a dolphin. And I was in glee over it.
Here you can see it looking at me under the water. I noticed that they’d give you a speed boost occasionally, which was very exiting!
I continued my exploration, and saw something else in the distance.
“Is it a turtle? or a tortoise? gotta be a tortoise, right? because I bet it’ll go into the water” (not me getting turtle and tortoise backwards during this conversation with myself, nope not at all).
It really was a turtle, while I was rummaging through my inventory to find something to feed it, like jellyfish, it had dove into the water and began swimming away.
It was time to make my way back home.
Bounty
All in all the fishing trip was good, and it resulted in me getting the one thing I was looking for.
Neptune’s bounty. I knew this was in the game, and being the dopamine addict I am (hello ADHD), opening chests with secret loot may be one of my favorite things. Especially when I know there’s a chance something really cool is in there.
*I hope I get a piece of gear, I hope I get a piece of gear*
Heck yes! I got Neptunium Chestplate with Neptune’s Lungs which allows me to breathe under the water! Of course I immediately had to try it out in the pond in front of the house and got some mining done.
Then I spent an exorbitant amount of time trying to sort through my inventory and move stuff to the correct chest so I could leave the house again, but every time I thought I’d emptied it, I kept finding things to move out of it, because probably the last time I opened a chest I found something that wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
And then I decided to just dump the rest in the dump chest, so I could go on another adventure because that whole thing had me feeling like I was stuck in an endless loop while trying to get out of it.
The adventure is truly just beginning
“I’m sorry little man, I got an adventure to go on”, me probably to this sheep before I left the house. On the hotbar you can see, if you squint, a compass. It’s aimed straight ahead, which is approximately north-east. I got a new mission, I’m going to go find cacti, because I want green dye. Do I remember what I wanted the green dye for? No, I only remember that I wanted to make lime dye, out of green and white dye, but apparently sea grass and kelp can’t be made into green dye, so I’m just going to bite the bullet and head out towards the closest type of desert biome Nature’s Compass could find me. Which is almost 3000 blocks away. Pray that I don’t get distracted along the way!
What do you think, will I get distracted again?
I hope to come back in one piece to see you when you’re all grown up.
It was truly a beautiful day to head out on another adventure, I had also made sure to get a nights sleep, because I be damned if I were to be chased by phantoms again first thing as I was leaving home.
I don’t remember why I went into the water, but this time I ran into two dolphins that boosted my speed incredibly while I swam.
They gave me an incredible push, and I found a deep hole under water, which quickly led me to a cave, and that led me on the last and possibly most epic adventure of the night.
Once in the cave (forgot pictures because I was so flustered), I managed to fall down a lava fall, and land at the very bottom. Because of the lava I didn’t die from falling from a great height, but I did die from the fire, while trying really hard to eat my sushi to get my health back before I was even off the lava. I was so flustered trying to quickly get my health up, that I didn’t really realize I was still on the lava I think, I just needed to survive. But I didn’t.
I ran back without anything, not even a simple pickaxe, to get back there I had to get through the deep water into the cave without drowning. I knew how to swim fast, it should be doable. I paddled along the surface collecting my courage before I made the dive, I figured that with full lungs and a swift swim I could make it, and worst case I’d just have another corpse to get to.
I got back to where the lava fall started Loa was like “don’t jump, I think the lava will just kill you again”, and I was like mining the stone blocks with my hands. “I can’t do this to get all the way down”, and then I looked around flustered. Looking around helped me find a path down to my corpse, still with sushi in hand next to the lava. (The mods make it so corpses float, and will float off of lava if it’s moving.)
I picked up all my stuff again, and continued my cave adventure. I decided that I may as well go in the direction of the compass, but through the caves, and try to get to wherever I was going (the desert probably). Totally not distracted, still aimed at my goal, just taking the scenic route.
I kept following natural caves where I could, keeping an approximate North-east direction, and mining where I needed to keep going when there were no natural paths left.
After delving much deeper, I noticed an interesting looking structure on the minimap. Let me zoom in so you can see it:
I tried to dig straight to it, but I wasn’t able to quite get there. I couldn’t find the right level. So I decided to try to walk around, maybe access it from another side.
I found a path that led towards the other side of it, so I figured that I may as well continue down it, especially since it’s in the direction I need to go anyways.
I kept digging, and no matter if I dug up or down, I couldn’t find an opening through to the structure I could so clearly see on the map.
After much exploring of the world around, I eventually found where it was, I had honestly given up and decided to go elsewhere, so I swam up through a water fall, swimming up brought me to this huge pool, the water spilling over the edge as waterfall going straight down to the depth, and over the edge I saw this:
No no, not that, look down:
You can clearly see that there’s an entrance here. Loa did spoil it for me a little bit, what this structure. But I will let you know when the game lets me know.
After regaining my bearings, I decided to look around the pool for a bit, I didn’t really want to go further into this new place tonight, it was already getting very very late.
I found so much fun stuff under the water! The cave was just full with axolotls and I didn’t know what to feed them, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to bring them home so I just watched them.
It was so magnificent to swim around and explore this cave, and a ripe opportunity to get some extra mining done, I even found some diamonds!
Through this adventure from leaving home after saying good bye to the sheep, I mined so much and just kept making it into blocks of ore, to be able to store more in my inventory, because I knew this path was going to be a long winding road ahead, especially considering how easily I get distracted.
Preparing to stop for the night, I tried to capture a picture of the the illusive Enderman in front of this entrance. But as soon as I hit capture he was gone. I have a rough feeling we’ll run into plenty of them when we go further down here.
This was when I decided to call it a night, and I prepared myself a safe spot. A trick I’d learnt by Loa some years ago when he was playing next to me. Make yourself a 1×2 block hole, and close everything around you. I added a torch for good measure, I don’t remember if that was actually needed.
Good night sweet prince or princess, thank you for joining me on this journey. This week has been fantastic, and I’ve really appreciate you all being with me on this very new exciting adventure.
I have yet to decide if I will keep doing “daily” posts, especially as this one took me two days to finish. Let me know if you appreciate them and want to continue on this journey with me.
That said, if you want to, and can afford to, make it a little easier to keep writing these without worrying too much about how much time I spend on it, you can support my writing. Monthly donations can be made via Ko-fi (prefered) or Patreon. One off donations can also be sent via Ko-fi (paypal or stripe), Liberapay or directly via PayPal. Thank you in advance for your consideration.
See you in the next one.