reflections on Minecraft

my first ever experience playing Minecraft was quite funny: I booted up a new world, got scared of a skeleton, and shut down the game.

before the server even started, I decided to set out with a sort of “zen” for myself to follow, to make the game more enjoyable and sustainable. the guidelines were:

out of this zen, I had a vision to create a little artist collective from our Minecraft server. I shared it on the Discord in case anyone wanted to join in.

16 people played over the lifetime of the server, and a few smaller groups formed. for a given person, they mostly only played with folks they interact with on a daily basis.

one group of two people emerged pretty much immediately to speedrun the game as much as possible, though they were stopped by The End being closed off.

an interesting thing I realised was that how you play Minecraft reflects your ability to handle projects.

if you recall my zen from earlier in the post, I said I would try to build small rather than large.

a couple of my close friends built something small but dropped out very quickly. this basically seems to reflect how they handle projects, too—at least from an outside perspective.

one thing I decided to do in this playthrough was to Never Wear Armour.

I also decided that I would not upgrade from Iron to Diamond tools until I really needed them, with regards to durability.

the last handicap I applied, was to avoid using any means of transport faster than going somewhere by foot. (boats are allowed because they’re about as fast.)

I gotta say, it was really fun playing like this! without armour, and playing on Hard difficulty, caving becomes somewhat of an actual challenge—you have to strategise how you want to approach the monsters in a cave, lure them out, kill them off one by one, and not die in the process.

going back to the shield for a second, in previous playthroughs I would normally hold torches in my offhand for easy placement. now because I needed to wield a shield, that had to change. so here’s the hotbar I came up with:

here’s the reasoning behind this placement:

Phantoms get a lot of flak for being really annoying, but this playthrough I realised something.

so yeah! opinion changed: Phantoms are actually a good mob that forces you to set your respawn point every so often while traveling, so that you don’t have to travel back thousands of blocks to fetch your items.

meow house (16–19 December)

somewhere far north, I found a lone mountain in a sparse jungle. this felt like a nice place to build a refuge, so I started building a Japanese-style house…

but what would a furry’s house be without any furry elements to it. >:3

graffiti (31 December)

on New Year’s Eve, we built this with ezioleq:

it’s surprising some of these builds are so big, considering my idea of building small.

“this tree [sic] looks like a beetroot”

not even our server could escape popbob’s wrath.

I think after playing the game this way, I understand the broad strokes Mojang has been painting a lot better, and I can confidently say,

Minecraft is fine just the way it is!

and Mojang is doing a good job expanding the game.

Prism Launcher tells me I spent around 92 hours in game, which is quite a bit! though you should consider a bunch of it is AFK, so my real play time is probably more in the 20–40h range.