I thought I’d share my first day back to Minecraft, as it’s a whole new world compared to my last visit in October – made even newer because I’ve forgotten how to move, how to craft, etc. Before playing I installed Rei’s Minimap (amazing!) and Steelfeather’s Enchanted Texture Pack (beautious!). I’m not big on mods, but without a map the game’s just too frustrating. I also realized I hadn’t needed to restore my previous saves from 1.8, d’oh!
I entered the world wearing my forgotten Hello Kitty character skin; go ahead, laugh! It was a nice surprise. I marked the spawn point, walked around a bit, discovering lily pads (!) and sugar cane within view. This world seems to be a broken crust barely covering a continuous cave system just a block or two below the surface. One misstep and…yep, immediately plunged deep into darkness before I’d even punched a tree. I couldn’t “dig up” to the surface because I was in a hole, still learning the controls and disoriented. That was a fun hour, taunted by the calls of sheep.
When last I played, sheep were rare beasts! We sheared them and killed them in hopes of spawning new ones, rather than keeping them around in their state of perma-shorn. Now the place is lousy with them, regrowing their wool before my eyes. I’m considering making a wool house since it’s so plentiful. However, I haven’t found a single chicken yet. Are chickens the new rares? I saw only one pig.
When I played on a server last October, one guy had managed to find a flock of sheep miles away, and so tipped one at a time into a rail car, then pushed it step-by-step, placing and re-placing only a couple of tracks, back to his home, miles away. He ended up with a nice flock of sheep before there were incentives for sheep following. Of course, no one was allowed to shear them.
Despite the lethal crustiness of this world, I’m keeping it for now because I spawned right near my first npc village! It’s a large one with furnaces, lava disposal unit, at least five gardens, and numerous houses (one quite large), but it’s split by a ravine. Some of the npcs are trapped inside their houses because the front door opens on the ravine side with no step out. Hoping to help I circled some of the houses with cobble, but to my horror, watched a few of them exit their houses at long last, then plummet to their deaths. I’m playing on peaceful for now, so before I build my own house, my first goal is to give them some walkways and fences to keep them safe. They’re so odd, sort of like the Observers in Fringe.
I’m just wondering how rare these villages are, because I’m not a big fan of the lack of contiguous surface area here, but don’t want to give up this world with my npcs if they’re hard to come by.
