Ahhh... FINALLY!
After leaving the cave which seemed to have no sign of diamond whatsoever - just some pointless lapis lazuli - I spend yet another hour plodding around the deepest recesses of this underground yawn-fest. A bit of excitement ensues when I come across a skellington spawner (which I defeat without any of the problems from last time) but other than that, nothing happens...
... Until, at long last, I come across a bunch of diamonds exposed in an otherwise unremarkable cave wall.
Not lapis lazuli. Not some graffiti sprayed by our arch-nemesis Kenneth in an attempt to trick me. Actual, bona fide diamond.
Heh, you want to hear something funny? I nearly don't notice it as I'm walking past. Oh boy, that would have been embarrassing if I'd carried on walking and only noticed it hours later when I watched the screen recording back.
But I do notice it, I do harvest it and I do wake my sleeping partner (it's 2am) to tell her the excellent news. I'm pretty sure she's as pumped as I am! The job doesn't stop there, though, as I'll need to Pimp my Pickaxe™ to a diamond one which will allow me to break up some obsidian.
Obsidian only forms when lava meets water. I quickly come across some lava - well, I can't move for the damn stuff down here - but the lava/water mix is harder to find. But in what be the only intelligent move I've made during the blog so far, I had the foresight earlier of filling up the bucket I found back in that spider spawner room so I've already got some water.
Sploosh. I pour it on a shallow puddle of lava, and gain exactly 10 blocks of obsidian (which is the bare minimum needed).
A Nether Portal is constructed.
It looks like this.
Now, a bit of an explanation is needed for readers who aren't familiar with Minecraft, or if you're only just joining the adventure (by the way, I was going to refer to the site's collective readership as the Iron Men but that's pretty sexist, so I'm going to call you folk Iron Persons.)
Right then, this portal thingamajig. If I was to actually travel through it, I would be taken to 'The Nether', which appears thusly:
Let me state categorically that I do not want to travel to the Nether. Imagine the above, but with flying monsters which shoot fireballs, more fire, large gangs of pig soldiers, and a bit more fire. Does that sound like the kind of place I'd be brave enough to wander around? Yeah, exactly.
But earlier on in the game I decided to set the 'building a Nether portal' goal as a self-imposed milestone, which I internally referred to Operation: Something to Do. I wanted to cross over into our IT guy's multiplayer server but since there's no natural way to do that in game, I figured I'd allow myself to move over there only once I'd build a portal.
Hence the last 11,000 words of flailing around.
But we're all good now.
I will dive into this portal, and join the multiplayer server.
I've never been on this server before, and do not know what awaits me on the other side.
It could be night time when I spawn there. It could be day when I spawn. I could spawn on top of a mountain, or in the middle of an ocean, or on top of a tree...
Right, okay. On top of a tree it is.
It's also night time, and because I'm technically in a new game, all the stuff I had is gone. I have no armour or weapons, I don't know where I am, and it's night. On paper, the situation is probably the most dangerous I have been in so far during the blog, but I feel strangely calm and collected in the knowledge that my friends are kicking around here somewhere.
Oh. Nobody else is on the server.
Nuts.
I assume the mass of torches over yonder signifies safety. I haven't got a better option other than to check it out, so I jump down from the tree canopy, trip into that lake, decide it's safer than walking around the outside anyway, and swim the short distance.
Aha! Shelter!
In we go. I'm immediately confronted with some rather cramped living spaces, a thousand sign posts and some high-brow gaming humour.
Of the four or five people who are active on the server, I don't find any clues as to who built this place. One thing I can be sure of is that I'm going to rob some of their stuff.
I find a chicken farm inside the outpost and start by grabbing a few bits of food. I then craft myself some iron armour because 'not dying' is still near the top of my priority list, and a stone sword because I don't want to use more of this dude's iron than necessary (what I deem to be 'necessary' theft, anyway.)
Lastly, I take some wood and cobblestone for general use before taking a peek into a room marked 'DEATH AND DESTRUCTION'.
I'm sure no ill can come of entering that room.
Okay, forget that. I'm suddenly not interested in seeing where this leads.
I back out and find a bedroom as well as a floating book on a stand which I assume is the enchanting desk which was added in the last major update. It lets you power-up weapons and armour with various added benefits, but man, it's all Greek to me. You can keep your wizardry nonsense; I plan on relying solely on my brawn which is supplemented by my powers of running away like a little girl.
Onwards. I peek outside the base and see that it's light outside. Also, is that a village on the other side of the lake?
Well, yes. Of course it's a village. It's not going to be a multi-story car park or a modern art exhibition, is it? I'll keep my rhetorical questions to myself, walk over there and and have a look at what is quite clearly a village.
I quickly find out that the village is as dull as dishwater. There are no villagers - friendly NPCs which wander around and whom I'm yet to meet in a game of Minecraft - and it starts raining the second I get here. Some of the empty buildings don't even have doors, so I question the architect's portfolio, and any random goodies have seemingly been pilfered by one of my predecessors...
... and the predecessor in question appears to be Sp1z.
I head down Sp1z' little hidey-hole and come across a small storage area which has chests full of really neat stuff - gold, brewing equipment, glass, iron axes, you name it - but I decide it's morally incorrect to help myself (let's just ignore what I did back at the starting base.)
I consider setting up shop in one of the other abandoned village buildings so that I can shamelessly use Sp1z for protection when he finally shows up online. But I'm not even sure that this is his base; there's no bed or any substantial evidence of mining or crafting (two of the biggest aspects of Minecraft, I hear.) It probably is just a storage outpost and nothing more.
I figure that since the guys have been playing on this new server for a few weeks now, there must be a more impressive base of operations somewhere around here that I'm missing.
I take a stroll in the rain back to the first outpost. And that's when I notice the series of torches leading through the forest I first spawned in.
With night drawing in, I stop at the first base and sleep until the morning arrives (fun fact: this is similar to what I do in real life!) before setting out into the forest.
I follow the trail of torches. They're tightly spaced, and start extremely near to the original spawn point, so it's clear that whoever placed them wanted to lead people in a very definite direction. After only a minute or so of walking I see a virtually unmissable, super-tall stone column on the horizon which pierces the sky. Torches adorn the top of it and form the universally understood Minecraft symbol of 'OH HEY THERE'S SOMETHING WHICH IS PRETTY OKAY RIGHT HERE'.
But it's almost as if whoever built that beacon decided it wasn't quite as attention-grabbing as they'd wanted it to be, because nearby I also see this batshit insane column of lava magically pouring out of the sky:
I'm assuming someone is trying to catch my attention...
