Are You Afraid of the Dark?

I paid to download Minecraft about a week ago, after watching several videos about just how nifty it is.  The indy sandbox game is very much like a "Lego" videogame made for adults:  you mine blocks, then craft things with them.  The game is still in beta, but has already had two million people pay to download it.

While there are no specific goals for the player to accomplish (other than achievements that were recently added to give the player a kind of guide to get started), the single- and multiplayer modes have a "survival" theme built in.  When the sun goes down, monsters spawn in dark places and try to kill you.  There are some monsters that can survive in the sunlight, but most burn into a crisp once the molten cube rises in the east, leaving behind stuff you can loot.

I played quite a lot my first week, and decided to start a new character in a new world just to see what I'd learned.  And since I'm a roleplaying geek, I'll play as if he were some explorer stranded on a rustic new world and trying to get by.

Welcome to Serenity, Captain Reynolds.

Starting a new game is like waking up in the middle of the woods (or on a beach, or in the mountains...) and realizing you have to find a way to survive the night.  Survival in Minecraft really boils down to three points:

1)  Mine blocks of material

2)  Use those blocks to build a structure

3)  Hide inside until it's daylight

That's it.  You don't have to have a massive castle with a wall and a moat, or some complicated set of schematics, you just have to have four walls, a roof and a floor.  In a pinch, you could even dig a hole for yourself and then throw some dirt blocks on top, burying yourself until the safety of the next morning.

Of course, that's hardly fitting for Mal Reynolds, aka Capt. Tightpants.  Having watched several videos of people playing Minecraft before, I had a rough idea of how I could make my first few days easier and more brown-coatish.

Wood is a perfect resource to start with, because it's easy to get with your bare hands and can be used for pretty much anything.  Luckily, I have tons of trees around my to chop down with my bare hands.  That's right:  my daddy was a lumberjack, his daddy was a lumberjack, and I'm jacking this lumber straight to the GROUND.

Once you have wood, you can turn it into planks.  Wood's unique like that, so you can get a ton of wooden blocks faster than you can anything else.  That'll help us later when we need to build a place to sleep, but we need something else first:  we need tools.

The Captain turns four wood planks into a crafting table, which lets him carve some hand-made wooden tools to do his thing.  In short order I have a wooden pickaxe and a wooden axe, and I'm ready to get domestic.

This crevice provides natural defense and protection:  something a survivor of Serenity Valley would value.  It also has some coal, that black-flecked block in the middle.  Coal can be turned into torches, and used for... other purposes later.

Using the pickaxe Mal quickly excavates a room-sized portion of the cliff.  I move the crafting table (I'm thinking of calling it Kaleigh...) inside, then take some of the stone I carved out to wall the front in.

One problem I ran into playing the first time was completely blocking myself off from the outside world:  I need to know when it's daylight so I don't go digging my way out and straight into a zombie ambush.  That's what Jayne would do, right after he stabbed everyone inside the hole in the back because he thought the zombies would pay him more.  Jayne never was very bright...

Anyway, I need a way to keep monsters out, but still see if the sun's come up.  So after putting the lumber to Kaleigh right quick...

BAM.  A mahogany door as strong as a bulkhead.  I throw a few torches inside and out to make things cozy-like, then settle in the for night.  I'll use the stone to make some better tools, and maybe considering digging the hole deeper into the mountainside.  I wonder if there are any caves running through this area...