GregHowley.com

I've never been a Minecraft player. Years ago, the game became a phenomenon when I was in Colorado. Even though the game was free at that point, I didn't play. For the same reason that I never play MMOs, I wasn't interested. One of my gaming tenets has always been that I don't play games that have no ending.

After I moved back to Connecticut, a friend came over, installed Minecraft on my wife's laptop, and proceeded to show us the world that people had created on the Minecraft server that he'd set up. He was as excited about it then as I've recently become. But I still had no intention of jumping on the Minecraft bandwagon.

It took my 5-year-old daughter Lia to get me interested in Minecraft. After a visit from a 4-year-old friend who played Minecraft PE on his parents' iPad often, she expressed interest, and we dropped the $7 so that she could play Minecraft Pocket Edition on our iPad. When she showed sustained interest, I tried the game out as well. Remembering Penny Arcade's comic about hiding from zombies in a hole in the ground when night came, I had to try survival mode. I too ended up hiding in a hole in the ground the first night, playing with a crafting table I'd created. But soon, I had a seaside cabin with an adjoining tunnel leading into a mine. I tunnelled up and built a second, somewhat more sophisticated cabin, and this one ended up with a pillar protruding from the roof atop which I placed a fenced-off platform. I encased the ladder in glass to protect from the spiders who would sometimes attack from the roof while I was climbing the ladder, and I ended up with a pretty good platform from which to hunt monsters at night with my bow. You can see my hunting platform in the first picture above.

I'd titled this world "DaddyWorld", just as my daughter's world was "LiaWorld". After having reached a certain point in Daddyworld, I was ready to start over and try something new. I started a new world and in an attempt to amuse my daughter, I named it "ArugalaWorld". As a seed, I used a certain 4-letter S word, since I found from some random kid on YouTube that this seed would create a world that contained snow, lava, and a waterfall. I suppose it's the kind of seed word I'd have tried when I was 13 too.

I built my first wood cabin near the lava, just across from a massive cave full of monsters. I later tried to dig a trench to create a type of lava moat between my cabin and all those monsters, but the lava didn't cooperate and I ended up focusing my attention elsewhere.

The mountain just above me looked like a great place to build a massive castle, so I climbed up and spent some time leveling out an area, built a stone floor there, and dug a stairway downward from the top of the mountain, emerging right next to my cabin. You can see the stone stairway in this photo.

It took a while to level out the ground on top of the mountain, and a while to dig out the basement I'd planned. But soon I had a big courtyard and was ready to begin building the wall. This required a lot of stone. Very early on, I'd established that cabin I'd originally built as my "mining cabin". Within it, I'd built a ladder down and a series of stairways. I'd never followed Minecraft news, forums, and FAQs, so I discovered myself what bedrock was, and that you couldn't mine redstone in the current version of minecraft PE. I figured out how to create torches, smelt steel, and made the stupid decision of using the first gold I'd found to forge a golden sword, thinking that there wasn't much else I could actually use the gold for.

After I'd started the walls for my castle, I realized that when viewing it from below, it needed something more. There was a ledge beneath, and I needed to build something there. So on that overhang, I built what I termed "The Observatory". Lia just calls it The Big Window. From there, you can look down on my original cabin, the lava, and the giant monster cave.

The castle was soon coming along quite well, and the walls grew tall enough that I began to consider a catwalk along the top of the wall. I built a stairway up, and a wooden catwalk reaching along the top of the wall. By now, I'd realized (the hard way) that monsters would spawn anywhere there was darkness, so I placed torches along the catwalk's length.

It was shortly after I'd built the observatory that I realized that you could plant and grow trees. The observatory's big stone roof was a bit of an eyesore when looking down from my catwalk, and so I covered it in dirt and planted a few trees, using bonemeal created from the bones of skeletons I'd killed to grow them instantly.

For a while at this point, I'd known that there was a waterfall immediately behind my castle. I had a backyard area out there from which I could look down at the waterfall, and had fenced it in so that there would be no accidental falls from the massive cliff. Strangely, that area seems to be a favorite for creepers - they've come at me there from behind more than once, like Garrett from the Thief series.

The idea occurred to me that I could extend out the waterfall so that instead of falling straight down, it would flow along a stone pathway I'd build. You can see in the pictures here that I built a narrow, 3-block-wide pathway, which I covered so that it was really more like a tube. It was tricky making sure there were no holes, and getting the slope correct was a pain, but in the end it worked. I imagine that this is the kind of thing that most people would only ever build in creative mode. I built a small stone house at the end of mine, and my house has a waterfall coming from beneath it. I may go back at some point and build in a bathtub with flowing water. I'll just have to make sure that it's not possible to fall out the bottom of the house when taking a bath.

This entire time, I was continuing to mine beneath my little wooden cabin to get more stone. I was finding a good bit of coal and iron, and a small bit of diamond as well, which was good given the rate at which I was burning through iron pickaxes. But my mine was getting all mined out. I was tired of walking for a week every time I needed more ore, and the other passages I was digging kept running into each other, and I kept breaking through to areas I'd sealed off because they contained some unknown dark spot that was spawning monsters. I needed a new mine.

So at the very top of my mine tunnel, I sealed off the East corridor and dug a second one a good ways West before beginning my down ladder. This turned out to be a good thing. Right around this time, I was on Thanksgiving vacation in Maine, and I learned that the Minecraft v0.50 update was out. After updating, I suddenly had access to paintings, mushroom farming (which I still haven't figured out) and something called a Nether Reactor.

I didn't go online and research the Nether Reactor until after building a Nether Reactor core and realizing that it did nothing other than spawn random creatures nearby. Strange story - it spawned a sheep that lived in my courtyard for quite a while. I'd shear the thing whenever I needed more wool, and it became my pet. If the sheep had stayed around much longer, I'd probably have named it. Sadly, it surprised me one day as I came around a corner with my sword and I killed it before I realized that it wasn't a monster.

As it turns out, you need to build a very specific structure in order to create a nether reactor. It includes stone, diamond, and a lot of gold. My world is very very short on gold, and you need four gold blocks. A gold block can only be created from nine gold ingots, and at this point I only had about four. I needed thirty-six. So my goldmining started in earnest.

By now, I'd extended my walls upward quite a ways, and created three torch/lamps for my courtyard from lapis lazuli blocks. I also created a nice second-story home inside the courtyard with windows looking down. The bed inside served nicely during the times when there was a monster too close to the basement bedroom I'd built.

I kept building my walls higher and higher until it wouldn't let me place another block on top. Apparently, I'd hit Minecraft's glass ceiling. So I built a nice little stone platform up there and called it done.

At this point, I don't think I have too much more to do in ArugalaWorld. My only real goal is to collect enough gold to create that Nether Reactor. I've got just over half what I need now, so it's back down into the mines for me.

I've considered trying out the PC version of Minecraft, if only so that I could get Lia on another PC and we could play together (we've had zero luck connecting for multiplayer using Pocket Edition) but the truth is that if I'm on my PC, I'd rather be playing Dishonored, Mark of the Ninja, Prototype 2, Darksiders, or another of my Humble THQ Bundle games.

Maybe after I see what there is to see with the Nether Machine, I'll start a new world. Maybe I'll get one that has some clay or some sugarcane, both of which are lacking in ArugalaWorld. Or maybe I'll call it quits on Minecraft. At least until they release another update.