My first night in Minecraft was spent by the soft, warm light of cooking sand, squatted in a hand-forged hole in the side of a hill. Over the coming days, this hill was slowly leveled and in its place sprung up a home of most stirdy brick. Already, life was quite comfortable, and I knew the next thing I wanted to do was start a large building project, as was the style at the time.
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| Lollipop Lane |
I chose this subject because, it being a symbol of something I have great passion for, I figured I'd be less likely to become disenchanted and abandon the build. Plus, I could do a bunch of fun quotes and stuff.
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| "That should do it." |
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| A perfectly cromulent quote. |
The first step was to decide on a place to set up and turn it into a large area of flat grassland, and what better construction site than my own front yard? As I set to work steam rolling the neighbourhood, I found I suddenly had a lot of mind-numbingly repetitive time to contemplate the future. I figured I was gonna need a lot of wool down the line to dye pink, so I started making a habit of punching every white sheep I could see, as well as brown and light gray ones for the roof and driveway, respectively.
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| A Car Hole |
Most of the land I wanted to clear out consisted of hills that didn't stray too far from sea level, but there was one mountain, which I sliced down the middle, completely mining away one half, and making a huge natural staircase from the other.
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| "My doctor says I have the wrists of an 80-year-old." |
Soon enough it was time to place blocks. Taking in my hand more stacks of white wool than was probably ever necessary, I set to work, using the screencap included above as a reference image.
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| "Lisa's window is the next one." |
Naturally, a lot of time at this point was spent standing around thinking, plotting and planning, placing blocks and taking them back again, seeing how things looked and staring at empty spaces to try and figure out the best possible design. This was definitely the most fun part of the project, by far the most involving, and is pretty much what makes any Minecraft build worth doing. Hence the Creative mode eventually making it into the full game.
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| "That's okay, the box is empty." |
Once it was all done up in white wool the house looked a lot like one of Doc Brown's unpainted models. The only difference being that I had all the time in the world to paint it. And painting it meant lots of roses. Also bonemeal.
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| Bare Backside |
At first I was going exploring for roses and using bonemeal to make pink dye, but before long, version 1.6 came about and suddenly I could grow my own roses where ever I pleased. And with that, Skeleton hunting by night became a long-term quest, while my days were spend scrounging up some clay, frying up some cactus, and keeping on the lookout for those brown and gray sheep.
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| "Remember, you can always find east by staring directly at the sun." |
Once I got some pink dye going, I started taking out the white wall blocks and pinking them up, but then I realised I could get up to 4 wool from a single piece of dye by colouring and shearing sheep. So most of the white wool I'd already gathered ended up going in the incinerator.
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| The incinerator (on the right). |
Eventually the only thing left to colour was the roof. By this point about 1% of the job had been done using brown sheep, but I was going to need a better method. Unfortunately, there wasn't one around, so I decided to put the build on hold until a more efficient method of gathering brown wool was implemented, whether it be wool regrowth on sheep, animal breeding, or a way of farming cocoa beans.
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| "We need some more vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice-cream!" |
A little while later, 1.9 prerelease 2 became available, and as it turned out, sheep breeding was the way of the future. However, it turned out all sheep were born with white wool, so it was back to waiting, for the moment. It wasn't until the sixth 1.9 prerelease that I was delighted to hear that baby sheep had been updated to inherit the wool colour of one of their parents.
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| The Simpsons' House in Minecraft |
I immediately started trying to round up a pair of brown sheep, which didn't take as long as I was expecting. Miraculously enough, two spawned together around the back of the Simpsons house. Since I was still in 1.8, I couldn't use wheat to lead them around, so I quickly captured them in a ring of fence and then, with some difficulty (those passive mobs are wily buggers), funnelled them into a pen closer to my home.
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| D-I-V-O-R-C-E |
And so MineCon went down in Vegas, and at last the official release of Minecraft was here. I started a wheat farm and set to work breeding up a storm. The end was in sight now, but I soon learned that wheat grows very slowly. And here I thought my days of Skeleton hunting were over.
And that's the end of the story.
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| "Just don't look! Just don't look!" |
