After seeing the crazy lava column which someone had created as a beacon on the horizon, I made a bee line towards it in the hopes of finding someone, or if there is nobody around, at least finding someone's base from which I could steal their stuff. Probably best if they're not around when that happens.
Despite my game stats telling me there's nobody else online, I still feel... I dunno, a bit paranoid? I can't shake the feeling that someone is watching me. But I digress.
The lava column is far greater than I had originally thought, and its spread is massive at the point it touches the floor. Top work, whomever I'm about to annoyingly steal from!
I don't know what it's for as its only purpose seems to be to block access to the player's base? Oh, perhaps it's to block access to the player's base. Top work indeed!
It's pretty dangerous, and I'll have to walk around it. I'm not a fan of danger and keen to reduce it by any means possible, so rather than walk down to the base of the valley and around to the left I circle the lava by climbing the sheer cliff faces to my right. I'm glad I do, otherwise I wouldn't have ever seen this sheep planking:
I also may have never encountered Kenneth again.
That's right... Remember this guy?
I've felt eyes on the back of my head ever since I arrived on this server. I assumed it was purely mind tricks brought on by jumping from my lonesome, single-player world to an unnerving new place where people other than me have left evidence of their activities.
But I was wrong, and I should have known better. Every time I heard a twig break behind me in the forest, every time I caught a glimpse of what I thought was a figure disappearing behind a hill...
... It was Kenneth. He had followed me into this world, and was planning his next move.
But now we've bumped into each other in surprise.
Right, you total bastard. It's ON.
During his breaks from terrorising me, it seems Kenneth has been hiding out in this small cave. It also seems that there is no way for him to retreat - the alcove doesn't lead anywhere - and I'm standing at the entrance. So unless I retreat, one of us is going to die in this cave.
I am not going to retreat.
But I don't have my sword equipped. He could easily rush me and explode in the time it would take for me to scrabble with the scroll wheel and cycle to it. Any common creeper would, but Kenneth does no such thing - we may be mortal enemies, but we're still gentlemen.
Instead, he just does his typical (and, frankly, bizarre) thing of just standing still and regarding me. I calmly go through my inventory and bring out the sword. I'm ready. Following what seems like an imperceptible nod between us, Kenneth lunges.
I only have a stone sword, not iron, and there is another handicap at play; the usual creeper-killing tactic is to backpedal as quickly as possible while carefully landing some glancing blows - it's not unusual to end up forty-odd meters away from where you started fighting - but on this occasion I'm on a cliff wall and a wrong step either way could result in lethal fall damage.
But he also faces a disadvantage. There's a couple of steps up to the cave entrance, and I use the benefit of the high ground to get a solid hit in before he's able to get up to my level. The blow sends him reeling back into the cave, but Kenneth does sound his tell-tale hiss which signifies that I have three seconds to put some distance between us before he explodes violently.
I can't jump backwards because of the cliff issue. I could stay where I am because I think I pushed him back far enough to cancel the explosion timer. But instead, I jump into the cave and dash towards him, slamming him hard once again. He stumbles right back to the far wall. I jump back to the main entrance. Kenneth's hissing dies down.
I estimate that I only need one or two more hits to take him down. He comes at me again, so I duly hit him again. The hissing starts. I swing once more, and miss. I have half a second to land the killing blow before Kenneth blows up.
My next swipe finds it's mark.
Good night, Kenneth. It was a pleasure to...
... oh christ he's still alive.
The explosion calls an end to our fun and games, with Kenneth going off to some kind of creeper Valhalla while I get blown backwards over the edge of the cliff. Luckily, I land on a ledge and don't fall too far.
Well, that's the last we'll see of him. I don't doubt that there'll be more creepers in the adventure to come, but none of them will be as worthy an adversary as Kenneth. I feel almost sad that he's gone. I get over it pretty quickly and eat a chicken to regain my health. After sitting on the cliff ledge for a minute to catch my breath, I march on in my noble and honourable quest (to steal from my friends.)
Now that I'm on the valley floor on the correct side of the lava, I run into yet another problem - how the hell do I get into this place? I can see what I think is the entrance, but there's so much glass, fence, iron railing, lava, water and farm animal in the way, I can't figure out a natural route through it.
I could build a way over the top using cobblestone, but as I'm a benevolent player and respect the homesteads of others I don't particularly want to make the place (more) cluttered. I'm going to have to find the proper way into the base in order to loot it.
In the end I follow a series of torches which leads underground. I figure the main entrance must be just under the surface, but instead I find this:
Awesome! Despite how utterly lethal it looks, I decide to head down to the floor of the ravine by riding down a water column, narrowly avoiding falling out of the vertical stream and falling to my death. There are more spiders down here than there are in the basement office I'm playing the game in, too. All in all this is a dreadful move, but I'm willing to carry on with the 'hey let's dick around in a ravine!' idea because it looks like a prime place for finding the diamonds I so desperately need.
I pass through a few large caverns and battle with some skelet... no hang on, why the hell am I down here? I don't need diamonds anymore. That whole mission objective was sorted out ages ago. I can see it now - Official Cause of Death: outrageously short memory span.
But now that I'm down here I might as well have a little poke around, especially since I've just found my first abandoned mine (a randomly generated, and incredibly spooky, mine system which is often massive and contains a lot of goodies.) So long as I don't do anything stupid or dangerous while I'm down here, I should be okay to have a quick 10-minute exploration.
The first stupid and dangerous thing I do is to follow the source of all these spiders which are attacking me. Where could these spiders be spawning from? Oh yeah.
Given my nightmarish experiences with spider spawners, I should really steer clear but I can't resist opening the hurt locker and having a good ol' rummage around. I always underestimate spider spawners - spiders are the most pansy of creatures in Minecraft so it's hard to get unnerved by them, but their spawners tend to kick them out at such a rate that it becomes overwhelming and the little buggers are hard to deal with en masse. I barely make it out alive, and my usual fighting style of 'flailing around like a lunatic' only gets me so far; I clear out the spiders trying to fang me to death but don't even get close to destroying the spider spawner.
Man, screw spider spawners. I'm calling shenanigans on those things and getting the hell out of here.
I head back to the entrance point and swim up the water column, again nearly falling out of it and breaking my neck. When I get up to the top, I realise that there's an off-shoot I hadn't previously noticed and our unknown base-owner had already been down there. I did not place these torches:
A-HA! I've found it! The entrance to this dude's base! Well, an entrance at least. Seems a bit weird that he'd have it in such a perplexing place, but whatever. I'm in and it's time to take refuse, get myself prepared for my next mission, rest up, and probably decide what my next mission actually is. I enter what I assume to be the main hall - this guy has been busy:
Because he clearly doesn't believe in logic or having things like entrances and farms and stuff on the surface, I'm surprised to see a wheat farm down here. Oh, and a sugarcane plantation. And a chicken factory... and an entire oak tree. Madness.
Now I'm down here and in awe of his industriousness I'd feel bad helping myself anything valuable to aid my own efforts, so I only take a bit of cobblestone and a handful of wood. That alone makes me feel guilty, so in return I leave a load of string, some mushrooms and five spider eyes because my mother taught me that it's only kind to leave a disgusting glob of spider oculars in someone's house. I may walk through the wheat and put a horse's head under his pillow just for good measure.
The base is sprawling and gigantic, but it doesn't take long to find his mining area which begins in one of the biggest caverns I've ever seen. With nothing better to do I carry out some mining myself for half an hour and during that time nothing particularly interesting occurs, though at one point I hear a noise which can unfortunately only be described as a man slowly masturbating. On further investigation, it seems I've encountered my first Slime fapping around in the darkness!
Slimes are incredibly rare so it's always a joy to see one. They're also friendly and don't hurt players, and this one is particularly passive, seeming content to just watching me go about my business in between the occasional bouncing spree, so it's a bit of a surprise when IT ATTACKS ME FROM BEHIND OH GOD IT'S HORRIBLE KILL IT.
I collect a bunch of slime balls from the encounter (maybe I'll leave these under the base-owner's pillow too?) and make my way back up to the surface.
Nothing particularly interesting is happening down here and it looks pretty mined out. I can see that it's morning outside - just as I'm wondering what to make of the day ahead, four words appear on the screen which fill me with utter and unadulterated glee:
sp1z joined the game
In closing today's post, I'll end with:
