GregHowley.com

In playing video games, I've always made it a habit to stay away from any video game without an ending. This generally has meant that I don't play MMOs, but my rule would have also required me to stay away from a game like Minecraft.

As of late, that hasn't worked out so well.

Minecraft. I was briefly into the Pocket Edition of the game last year, when I played Minecraft PE on the iPad. But in November, a friend reset his Minecraft server, and I bought the game. Oddly, although I played with a group that night, I've done most of my playing since in single-player. You could attribute that to the fact that I'm a gaming hermit, having always eschewed multiplayer, but the truth is that I wanted to see everything in the game for the first time myself; to discover things rather than having them pop up, premade, in front of me - the product of other players who have seen all there is to see in the game.

So I built a first shack, and dug a mine. Then, I traveled a ways and built a more substantial multi-story fort, then started a second and larger mine. I built a farm, a barn, and filled it with cows and sheep. I planted wheat, sugar cane, pumpkins, and eventually melons.

Then I heard about mob grinders and decided to make one. It was small and crude, but it worked. I had zombies, skeletons, creepers, and even an occasional witch dropping down and being pushed into a lava blade by a flow of water, and I just had to pop by every so often and grab the loot, which dropped into a hopper and was pushed into a chest.

I explored further and found a village. I traded with villagers and got potatoes and carrots to go back and plant. I found a desert temple, and eventually dug into it deep enough to find the treasure area, where I got horse armor and a name tag. I also found a dungeon out in the desert, with a skeleton generator.

I dug up enough obsidian to make a nether gate, and I put it up on the roof of my mob grinder. I decorated it with jack o lanterns to make it kind of creepy, and added some nearby trap doors that drop into the grinder in case any zombie pigmen show up. That part really never worked out how I'd planned.

I discovered that you can make boats and I sailed far away, where I built a second grinder out of sandstone. It was supposed to be a round tower, but it ended up more diamond-shaped. My idea was that the center of the structure would be a chimney down which monsters would drop. Since the building would be my house, I'd often be in the area, so they should spawn a lot. Monsters spawn above, drop down and take fall damage, and then I go down into the basement at my leisure and pick them off for experience and loot. The upper levels were lit by redstone lamps which I rigged to a lever. This way, I could turn on the lights to stop monsters from spawning while I did maintenance. In the end, this grinder had something like five levels, plus a maintenance level that was required by the paths of the redstone circuitry. It got tough, because water washes away redstone, and the grinder required water to channel the mobs. If I had it to do again, I'd do it differently, but this was only my second grinder. Monsters that spawn on the top levels drop too far and die before I can hit them and get experience. The lighting system was probably also more work than it was worth.

Below the sandstone grinder tower, I found a giant chasm. I first discovered it while hollowing out a channel for an underground boat launch, and I nearly fell from sea level down to bedrock-level lava. When I eventually dug a spiral stairway down to the bottom, I found an abandoned mineshaft, and discovered slimes. This would later be the location of my three-level slime farm.

I built a second nether gate below the sandstone tower, and it turned out to be a great fast travel method to get from there back to my main fort, since both overworld gates linked to the same nether gate. Too bad it's one-way. I now have about 15 abandoned boats floating outside the sandstone tower.

Around this time, I read an article that had complained about how the types of mob grinders I'd created were less than great because they relied on monsters to wander into the water and be pushed, and this got me thinking - what's the alternative? This began my first experience with pistons. Create a row of pressure plates, set up a piston to push whomever steps on that pressure plate right off, and set that whole thing up in a dark room. Monsters who spawn are immediately pushed off into water, which channels them down a shaft. They take fall damage, and I finish them off. Bam. This was the idea behind my third grinder, which I put on a small island just off the shore from my main fort. I built it out of stone bricks, built a spirit sand boat launch, and dug an underwater path from the shore to beneath the piston grinder tower, which I'm thinking of naming "Pixel Island". I'm calling it this because I've added stained glass pixel art to the walls. I've only added two of the four walls, but one is Mario, and the other is the Avatar from the old Ultima series. I'm thinking number three should be a Space Invader or Pac-Man.

Despite the cool walls, the grinder still doesn't work. It's either because the light from the redstone torches I'm using to power the pistons is reflecting off the water and creating too much light for monsters to spawn, or else perhaps monsters just won't spawn on pressure plates like I'd thought they would.

It was around this time that I started having issues with mob spawn rates. I'd always had to deal with tons of monsters at nighttime or when mining. But suddenly, I found that I could walk around at night safely. This ordinarily wouldn't be the biggest problem, but I also found that my mob spawners pretty much stopped working, and my slime farm stopped producing completely. This was a problem because my new mob grinder on Pixel Island requires lots and lots of sticky pistons. In the end, the issue turned out to be my render distance in video settings. I'd tweaked it down from 10 to 7 or 8 in order to improve performance, but as it turns out, it also affects mob spawning. When I'd lowered it, my spawn rate went down to nearly nothing. I eventually figured it out after wading through a hundred forum posts by people with the same issue as me wherein others insisted that peaceful mode was the problem.

Next, I built a powered minecart track for the underwater tunnel from my fort to Pixel Island, and started on an automated mushroom farm. this farm has a number of "seed" mushrooms above floor level. The idea is that these mushrooms will spread and multiply on the floor, and then I pull a lever that releases a flood of water. The water washes all the mushrooms down channels into a hopper and a chest, and then I turn off the water. It works just fine, but I found that after I set it up, I nearly never used it.

I tried some nether travel, and built another nether gate inside the nether, bringing me to an overworld spot far far away. There, I found wolves and two new kinds of trees. I also found a giant mushroom island, which was kind of neat.

I found a spider lair inside the abandoned mineshaft, and made it into a hastily-assembled half-assed grinder. The spiders get out a lot, and the only thing killing them is a cactus, but it works.

I spent a lot of time wandering the nether, looking for a nether fortress. I built a giant bridge across a lava sea, tried digging upwards, then downwards, and then determined that it was just easier to find and follow the large caverns. It took forever, but I finally found one. I beat down a couple blazes, built a brewing stand, and got blaze powder for Eyes of Ender.

Back in the overworld, I tamed a horse and used a nametag to name it "Kennest", which is a name Lia gave one of her stuffed animals when she was something like four years old. Saddles and nametags are just about the rarest things around, and can only be found - not crafted - so this felt pretty cool.

I tracked down a stronghold relatively quickly. A silverfish swarm nearly did me in, but I found the End Gate, and realized that I needed quite a few more Ender Eyes to open it, so I decided to hunt Endermen. There was no lack of them on the surface near the entrance to my End Portal dungeon, but I found that aboveground, they're much harder to get - they teleport away before I can finish them off. I needed a better sword. So I crafted a diamond sword and decided to level up to 30 to give it a strong enchantment. I was already 25, so I just went outside at night and started fighting things. This maybe wasn't the best idea because I wasn't watching my hearts and I got killed. And so I was back at level six. Setback.

I decided to embark on another project, and build an underground rail system from my home base all the way to the end gate area. In doing so, I burned through most of the iron I'd mined. I looted stores of iron I'd hoarded in four different homes across my world, and I still fell a bit short. But in digging that new tunnel I found a new abandoned mineshaft, and that helped a lot.

Then, for some insane reason, I decided that it would be a good idea to lay track all the way to that sandstone grinder tower. I probably got about 40% of the way there before I burned out.

Now, I'm playing in a new world. I'll probably go back to that one at some point if only just to finish the End Gate and see the Ender Dragon. I only need two more Ender Eyes.