The Hollow Mountain Journals P2

Day Three: Innovation and Exploration

So... I learned a couple of important things last night. Namely, that spiders love crawling on low, flat surfaces. And that more of them can spawn into existence without enough light in the area. And that I'm almost completely incapable of falling asleep when those hissing little shits are within a ten block radius of me.

While designing my abode, I failed to take into account that none of the light from my torches would penetrate to the outer walls. Effectively, this rendered my house indistinguishable from the mobs' habitat, leading to the circumstances described above.

When I "woke up" from my fifteen minutes of light slumber, I grabbed my sword and stumbled limply outside. In retrospect, this was a bit of a poor call. I managed to slay the offending creatures, but not without sustaining dozens of bites and turning a pint of my blood into lawn fertilizer. I remember hearing of a particular variety of spider with venomous bites, but I have no idea whether this species carries any such adverse effects. I still feel relatively fine, all things considered, but who knows? Maybe it's one of those slow-acting venoms, and I'll wake up tomorrow morning with Notch stamping my passport into Aether.

After I killed those damned things, the idea for a potential fix came to me. Fancy buildings back home, like expansive libraries and redstone processing mills, typically had huge skylights in their ceilings to let the sunlight in during the day. With how painstakingly I've lit up my house, fixing up one of those would solve my problems. Of course, you need glass to make a skylight, and you need sand to make glass, so off to my first exploratory destination I went.

The beach was a brisk jog away from my home, so I reached it with plenty of light left in the day. The task of carving through the coastline and stockpiling everything I could carry was a daunting one, but I pulled it off with what I can assure you was incredible finesse. By the end of my trip, at about an hour until sunset, I'd obtained roughly one-hundred-twenty-eight sand blocks, thus assuring my success.

It wouldn't be an outing in unexplored territory without a strange incident, so midway through the collection process, I stumbled onto another village. This one was different in ways I'd never seen, not least of which being that it was completely abandoned. It was carved entirely from smooth sandstone blocks, including the well, which was connected to the ocean via a narrow channel underneath the more solid dirt nearby; I wouldn't pretend to be an archeologist unless I could get something out of the lie, but I'd speculate that this was an attempt to make sure that the drinking water never stagnated. Discounting the obvious scientific problems with that, I wouldn't hold an average villager to that level of rational thought. Could it perhaps be an ancient mining community?

Anywho, I looted most of it.

With my raw materials in tow, I headed back to the house just as the sun was setting. Forging my glass was as simple as tossing some sand into the furnace and waiting. Matter of fact, that's what I'm doing while I write this. Waiting. As it turns out, I'll have a massive surplus of glass once this little project is finished, so, you know, preparations for the future!


Day Four: A Harsh Lesson

My day started fucking fantastically.

The load of sand I'd harvested was completely glassed, so I wasted no time in heading up to my roof for construction. After the first couple of minor accidents that resulted in me plummeting to the ground and quite possibly breaking several toe bones, I decided to construct a temporary barrier using some of the sandstone stair-steps I found yesterday. I actually quite liked the shape of the barrier, but sandstone on cobblestone looked too garish for my tastes; I'll see about expanding on the idea with stone stairs later.

It took me until noon to get the skylight completed, and I'll be damned if it wasn't worth the effort. I split it up into two long panes of glass, split by a cobblestone divider down the middle of the roof. Sunlight streams in when it's light out, and torchlight streams out when it's dark. It's the perfect system, just like I thought it would be. The light even makes for a handy short-range beacon in case I ever need to depart for somewhere shortly before sunset.

Speaking of beacons, I also found the time to mark my home for convenient location in long-distance travels. Using the massive supply of topsoil and spare cobblestone I'd compiled by then, I erected an enormous column in the middle of the burnt village's carrot field. There are few things more dizzying than standing atop a single block and being at eye level with the clouds, but if I'm to complete my grand plans, I figured I would need to accustom myself to great heights. I know it worked, because while clambering around the tower with scraps of ladders and dotting torches wherever they would fit, I barely soiled myself.

After both of those projects were finished, I made the decision to undergo my first dedicated mining session with the time left in the day. This was a mistake.

After loading up on food (mostly carrots and raw pork) and ensuring that my armor and tools were in peak condition, I delved into a nearby cave. My top priorities were base resources, like coal and iron, but I was more than willing to risk life and limb if I stumbled onto a pocket of redstone, gold, or -- sweet Notch -- diamond. I'm going to need a lot of diamond in the future, for reasons that I have only hazily outlined in my head right now.

The cave was, thankfully, fairly uniform. It continued down one linear path, only branching to visible dead ends or underground rivers that I felt no compulsion to explore. I mined coal quite extensively, and managed to snag several chunks of iron ore, but there wasn't really anything interesting about the majority of the trip. I barely remember anything until I hit... that point.

It was a tall chamber with a pool of lava at the bottom. I don't recall seeing anything more than iron, and I certainly didn't collect any more than that. At that point, I heard the sound that every Minecraftian is taught from birth to fear: hissing, directly behind me. I attempted to swivel on my heels and strike the Creeper down before it was too late, but... well, it was too late. The explosion shattered the ground I was standing on and knocked be back several feet.

Several feet behind me, for reference, was the lava pool.

When I was a teenager, I burnt two of my fingers off with a lava bucket that had been brought into class for a lesson. They mostly grew back by the time I set off for this server, but I never forgot the excruciating pain I'd been in. I brought that up because being fully immersed in lava was a hell of a lot worse. My armor protected me from the most lethal damage, but I still stumbled out of the pool enveloped in flames and nursing several third-degree burns across my body.

It was only by pure chance that I didn't die then and there. Respawning is an uncomfortable experience, from what little I know about it, even more so than directly spawning from one server to another. Discomfort aside, I would have lost all of the equipment and resources on my person, since I have yet to sort anything into the chests I've built. When I extinguished the flames and gathered my thoughts, I realized that I was extremely close to death, and there were too many mobs around to rely on the slow regeneration that dining bestows.

So, in the absence of a clear exit within the area, I decided to make my own. I started digging a staircase up to the surface, just barely tall and wide enough to fit me. The darkness pressed in on me, and since I was low on torches and the sticks needed to craft them, I had to pause the digging every ten seconds to beat back hordes of skeletons and zombies. I'd caught glimpses of Endermen flashing around several times before, so it's a wonder that I didn't have to deal with any of them.

I finally broke through the surface at midnight, which I first realized shortly before being swept back down the tunnel by the water from another crop field, which I'd dug directly into in my boundless luck. It took about a minute to fight back up and gain a foothold on the dirt, but since I'd burnt through my food stocks by then, I couldn't afford to waste a moment. By the time I tumbled through my front door with several Creepers on my heels, I was minutes from starving to death.

So, all in all, a pretty eventful day.

In the future, I need to be smarter about traveling. I need to make sure my path is clearly marked or memorized, and I need to ensure that every block within sight is lit up to prevent another ambush. Most of all, I really need to get around to storing some valuables away, just in case I'm violently killed somewhere far away.

I'll probably get around to that tomorrow. Right now, I just need some fucking shut-eye.