Woodlings draw near!

The last time I actually played Minecraft was just over two years ago, when Zoey was staying with me. I tend to play this game like a spelunking dwarf whose main purpose is to find the nearest BIG HUGE CAVE NETWORK and gradually explore it, adding torches and signposts as I slowly carve secured territory out from the dark unknown expanse where monsters still tread. My bases are usually rather plain and pragmatic, mostly there to fulfill the basic need of having shelter. This world's base has a tree room, a wheat room, and a gigantic spiral staircase going down below the surface (which itself connects to a hallway-like tunnel I drilled into the cave network,) all just so I can get wood and bread and put things down between adventuring outings without having to go outside. There's a supply closet full of ores and minerals and building materials I've gathered that mostly go unused.

Zoey, by contrast, was a builder. She liked to make visually impressive houses and exterior structures. One time, I let her into my world and showed her around my base and set her loose outside before I ventured into the caves, and by the time I came back, she'd transformed my base into a house with a pitched roof and checkered tile pattern floors. An almost Metal Gear Solid 3-sized ladder (which definitely was not there before) led up all the way through the mountain and came through at the peak outside, where she was working on an unfinished tower-like structure. The ladder opened up into another tiled floor, and from there a partial staircase went up along a partially-made wall and terminated abruptly, leading to open air. With completely open space where walls should be, no lighting to fend off monsters, and the sheer drop from the top of the mountain, the construction zone could best be described as "dangerous."

The bottom of my base was beautiful after her transformation, but in its current state, the tower area was a mess. Alas, I never got to see what the Zoey's tower would have become. Her stay with me ended before she got to finish it, and we broke up before she ever came and visited me again.

I dusted this file off again two years later, and since I'm pretty sure she's not coming back to my world anytime soon, I went ahead and finished up that area. I took out the staircase entirely, made the corner pillars more even and symmetrical, finished up the walls, and even added a glass ceiling. I changed one wall to glass and added a door to another (which leads outside to the mountain) in case I'm ever trapped on top of the mountain after dark and need to get back inside without leaping off the cliff. I then knocked a hole in the glass wall I'd just made and expanded it into a long catwalk, with a glass bottom in the middle but a continuation of Zoey's checkerboard pattern on either side. (It took some trial and error to figure out what she had originally made that out of so I could replicate it.)

The catwalk now leads to a bubble-like glass room suspended far above the world. It doesn't really serve much of a purpose aside from giving me a view to enjoy, but then what in Minecraft ever does? It is a nice view, at least.

I was never the builder or decorator. Zoey started my base renovations and I had to finish them up with no guidance or resources other than my best impersonation of her style. I will never know what Zoey intended for this room. Given that she appeared to be building up before I took out her staircase and made a horizontal bridge instead, it probably wasn't this.

But this is nice.

Now that I'm experiencing it firsthand, I believe the reason Minecraft is so addictive is that there's always some inconvenience about the general day-to-day routine in that game that you actually have the power to change if you work at it.

It occurred to me that wood was becoming annoyingly scarce for being a common renewable resource, because the only trees out there were an inconveniently far walk away from my mine. Plus, you know, the whole "can't be out at night, monsters will eat you" thing. Then it occurred to me that, oh, wait, I can have trees wherever I want them. Too far away from the base? I can plant some closer. Or hell, why not make a tree room inside the mine? That way I can farm it whenever I want without having to wait for it to be safe to go outside! I even have an empty room just sitting there after I took all the ore out of it, all I'd have to do is even and level it out (so that, rather than being a weird random natural cavern shape, it's actually a regular cube inside) and lay some dirt on the floor, maybe make a pillar in the middle to hang some torches off of it, and... oh shoot, why is it five in the morning already :(

Last night, I hit across a small underground lake while remodeling one of the rooms in my mine (in the form of "let just clear out this patch of dirt in the wall here WAAAAAGH WHY IS THERE NOW WATER FLOODING MY ROOM" but... I eventually got it under control!) This morning, I realized I could set up a small wheat farm if I just expand the back of the lake room a little and lay some dirt down there. This will be yet another "now I don't have to go outside" deal if I can get a reliable food source from it. And don't get me started on the ridiculous dirt/grass fuse I have from the entrance all the way down to the tree room and how awesome it will be if that actually works and I can get livestock to spawn down there someday.

It's not like I started the game with any of these as my goals! In fact, I still maintain and insist that my eventual goal is to build up in the form of an awesome castle or something rather than live in Moria, and this mine is just because I need to get the materials and such to actually be able to do that. It's just... there's always something to do, whether it's exploring more of a natural cavern I accidentally hit across or just every time I realize "man this danger/walk back and forth/whatever inconvenience every time I want to do X is cumbersome, oh wait, I can fix this."