Minecraft obsession renewed

Since bringing Lola the Puppy home, I’ve found it tough to find time for gaming. I feel like every time I sit down to relax she’s getting into something or needs to go out or is just being so cute that I have to get down on the floor and play with her.

But Minecraft was scratching my gaming itch. It’s the perfect 5-minute game. It starts up fast, pauses when it loses focus and I always feel like I can get something done no matter how small an amount of time I have available.

Friday night I was doing one of these quickie sessions when a skeleton killed me. Note to self: Don’t try to engage a skeleton when on a narrow ledge with no room to maneuver. It was the first time I’d died in ages and when I respawned… I recognized the area.

I should back up a bit… I’ve been working on the same world since I discovered Minecraft. I had been building myself a lair weeks and weeks ago when I got killed, respawned and became disoriented. I wandered off in the wrong direction and got lost and was forced to build a quickie hideout as night fell. Well one thing led to another and the quickie hideout got expanded upon and grew into something quite elaborate and my original lair was forgotten.

Back to Friday. I respawned and recognized the spot. I knew where my current lair was, but also knew my original lair must be nearby. Low and behold, I found it! Now I had 2 lairs… I started bouncing back and forth between them, but always found myself trapped in the ‘wrong’ one when night fell.

So I decided to connect them via underground tunnels. From that simple decision came an epic run of Minecraft. It took me until Sunday night to link the two lairs. In the process I learned a lot of respect for engineers…if it was this hard to do in a grid-based world, how hard must it be in real life!!?

I actually got the X & Y coordinates pretty accurate but I ‘estimated’ depth and was way off. I tunneled from one lair right underneath the other and came out on the far side of a mountain.

My second attempt linked the two lairs up, and along the way I found some intriguing caverns that will require further exploration. For now I just made glass tunnels through them so I can observe what’s going on in there.

In doing all this Minecrafting I suddenly realized Lola had settled in. I was playing for a couple hours at a time and she was entertaining herself (a good long hike Sunday morning helped…she was knackered all day from that), so I guess I can start “serious” gaming again.

I’m kind of burned out on Minecraft now…I’ll give it a rest until another great idea comes along, then obsess over making it real. In the meantime, I still have some FF XIV time left. Maybe I have time to play again, finally.