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.

Apologies in advance to those of you sick of Minecraft posts….I know there’s a ton of them but I just can’t help but add to the chorus.

It took me a few tries to get into Minecraft but once I did, wow did I get hooked hard! And what’s making the game extremely fun to me is promising myself that I’ll accept all consequences. When something really bad happens to you, it’s so tempting to just shut down the program without saving. I refuse to do that, and it gives the game a bit of Diablo-addictiveness when you respawn with nothing in your inventory and zombies crawling all over the place.

So far I’ve died when a Creeper blew up outside my door, taking it and a chunk of my wall out. I’ve died when a skeletal archer shot me through the window pane of the door, leaving me dead inside my lair (note to self, never get stuck at 1 heart). I’ve fallen down very very deep shafts, losing everything permanently, twice.

Right this moment I’m stuck at the bottom of a deep well. How’d I get there? Well, I died just before dawn. I respawned to find a bunch of undead still around. I ran, and somehow got disoriented and lost. I couldn’t find my lair!

As the day wore on it was tempting just to suicide so I’d respawn and regain my bearings, but that was against my rule. So I punched some trees to get wood and quickly cobbled together wood tools. I saw a tiny vein of coal and climbed up to it. I dug it out and dug myself a temporary shelter. Then I made a crafting table and put together some torches, but promptly forgot doing this (stay with me).

I knew it was going to be a long boring night without more wood to make tools, so with a bit of light left I headed out to find some trees. I traveled further than I should have and darkness started to fall. I turned to run back to my temporary shelter and learned that it’s hard to find your way to a new place in twilight when you can no longer see distant landmarks. I was lost again!

With it getting very dark very quickly I just dug straight into the side of the nearest mountain and blocked myself in. Now I was in the dark. And (doh!) forgetting I already had torches, I started digging out an area to put down my work table. My screen was totally black and I dug and dug but never found a spot to put down the table.

I couldn’t figure out what was happening. Then (/facepalm) I noticed the stack of torches on my tool bar. I equipped one and jammed it into the wall and found that I’d been digging straight down and not realizing it. I couldn’t see the top of the shaft I was now in. 1 block wide and who knows how many blocks deep.

I sighed and began carving a spiral staircase out of the side of my shaft.

When I get out, I’ll still be lose and now out of coal. But I’ll persevere! I know I will!

Loving this game. FF XIV launched today but I’m playing Minecraft!