If you’ve read my blog, or even typed the URL I suppose, you know that the second syllable in my WordPress ID is “craft.” This is for several reasons. First, because I fancy myself a builder, or a creator of things. Most of the things I create are limited to my own personal viewing, but I consider myself a creator none the less. Second, I play Warcraft, Starcraft, and Minecraft (see the theme??). Third, because I want to include some content in my posts concerning my Minecraft game.
The title of this post is “sur/vive” which is the name I have given the auto generated world in which my Minecraft character lives. To understand why I care about blogging about Minecraft, or any game in particular, you have to understand the way I play games. My approach to my character in games is rather different than most people. The way most people play games, they view their character as their personal avatar in the world of the game. My perspective is a little different, presumably because of my mind and the way my imagination works. I (like I do with most games) like to pretend that the character in the game is actually someone I’m collaborating with. The origin of my game play style comes from when I used to play Gauntlet (N64) with some of my friends. We all had our own characters and my friends had named theirs after themselves (LIZARD & TLOWW) and I decided I would deviate from that idea. And so spawned Pickle, my friend, my ally, my Gauntlet character. For those of you interested, or who have played, he was the green dwarf & level 53. Because I chose to name him Pickle, rather than a derivative of my own name, I decided he had his whole own life. For all the time that I wasn’t playing, Pickle was in the game, training, re-beating levels, meditating, living the life of a mystical dwarf in an ancient land. Whenever I played the game, it was Pickle and I collaborating. He did as much work as I did. This adds a whole new dimension to the game. The more I played, the more I learned about Pickle. Ever since then, I’ve put my characters in the same perspective. Now, because Minecraft has multiple worlds that I can create, you’d think I have more than one character I’m collaborating with, but I choose to stick to the same character no matter what world I’m playing in. Well, let me introduce you to him. His name is Nolan.
Nolan and I have created many things over the course of the year or so I’ve had the game. Here is one of our first mansions.
Nolan and I created this during the month of November 2010. I still hadn’t quite learned the game (as it was still new to me, as well as Nolan) and this mansion was lost to an ambush of creepers that blew out the left wall and most of the second floor. Nolan and I haven’t been back to revisit it yet, but maybe that will come later.
Now, onto the actual focus of this post: sur/vive. Sur/vive is the latest survival world that Nolan and I have entered. For the longest time I couldn’t get Minecraft to update so I didn’t have the latest version. Now I got it to update, but I’m still not certain I have the latest version. Nolan has explored around most of the area where we spawned, but still haven’t become familiar with the area. Nolan and I began by constructing a small room underground on the peninsula we spawned on.
The idea of keeping the original room small was so that nothing could spawn in Nolan’s house because we hadn’t found any coal yet. We left a hole in the roof toward the back of the room to let some light in, further measures to prevent in-house spawning. After the creation of the first room, Nolan and I decided to see what was up with this new update (we were both super excited we could get the game to update). We collected some wood for pickaxes, with which we mined some cobblestone. After some crafting, we went to explore, armed with three stone swords. Now, in the last version of Minecraft I had been playing, animals dropped a maximum of two things when killed. I was overjoyed with two particular details. First, cows now drop a maximum of maybe five or six things. Second, cows drop food! I was still used to killing pigs for pork chops until I found that killing cows gave you meat as well. In fact, Nolan and I have yet to see any pigs around our island. Nolan and I were also not used to collecting experience. Nolan leveled once or twice during our exploration before the sun started to go down. Night falls in Minecraft rather quickly, and with the darkness come the mobs…
