Minecraft: Let's Play - Day One

A new day in Minecraft. It's been several months and a couple patches since I've played any significant amount,  so I thought I'd start a fresh game and share the experience. If you don't know what Minecraft is, I put together a brief starter guide a while back. Enough chatter, let's get digging!

I'll admit it, I cheated a bit and generated a couple worlds before settling on one that looked interesting. This world has a few interesting features right off the bat. Snowy taiga, a big hill full of caves and tunnels, some coal and iron outcroppings visible, ocean, and across the river, a bit of jungle. I'm easily bored, so a nice mix of stuff is good.

Sunrise over our brave new world

The first order of business is creating a quick shelter for the coming night. To do that we need to make some tools, build a hut or wall in a cave, and make some torches so we're not stumbling around in the dark. After that we can worry about not starving to death. After punching a few trees to death, we can make a workbench and then a few tools, shovel, pick, and ax, the basic stuff needed to prepare a shelter.

Making tools and a furnace using the workbench

Armed with the basics we can start looking for a spot to build our shelter. I don't want to move too far away from the spawn point yet, I haven't seen any sheep so I don't have any wool for a bed and a way to reset my spawn. Should I happen to die, I want a short run back to my base.

Looks like some rich veins of minerals down there

After circling around a while, and spotting some really deep caves, I settle on a cliff-face with a nice natural gap in the side. Even better, there's a vein of coal there too, so I can dig it out, wall it in, and have a secure retreat when night falls -- it's already afternoon!

Home sweet home -- for now

It isn't pretty, but it'll do. Unfortunately the coal vein lead right into another set of caves, so my digging is restricted until I get some better weapons and maybe some armor. There are monsters down there and without  a means of defense I'm so much fodder for the zombies, skeletons, spiders, and creepers.

Sunset outside home base

So ends day one. With shelter and light secured I can spend some time making better tools and a sword using some of the stone I cut out of the hillside. Tomorrow I'll have to figure out what I'm going to eat, assuming something doesn't kill me when I step out the door.

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