Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-25931200-20181203220048/@comment-33185350-20181205054134

It took me a lot more than a day. I’ll just tell you about my first few worlds.

I first played Minecraft as Pocket Edition, before pistons, the Nether, the End, or even enchanting were added. I messed around a bit in creative (I didn’t know how to fly, so when I fell out of the world I had to kill myself to get back). Mostly just building a winding pathway up a mountain. It was very weird terrain, a forest with huge cliffs and hills. I played that world for some time as though I was in survival in creative, planting farms etc. The fun ended when I looked up how to use the nether reactor core block that I discovered in the creative inventory. When the instructions said to do it far from your home, I thought that meant maybe 10-20 blocks. Not thousands. It obliterated a significant portion of what I had built and spawned a gargantuan tower of netherrack that completely ruined the aesthetic of the world.

I then created a survival world (peaceful). I had no idea what to do, so I wandered around for a long time. I had seen someone play Minecraft a long time before, so I knew there were diamonds that could be mined deep down.

So, of course, I did the sensible thing. I found a nice looking spot and began digging straight down with my bare fist. Since it was a vertical hole I had just enough light from the sky to see around. After a few days and nights of digging straight down, I actually did strike a vein of diamonds (I still can’t believe it)!

I broke the first diamond ore, and it dropped nothing. I figured maybe there was only a chance of getting diamonds, so I broke all the other ore blocks one by one and got nothing. I mined gravel veins and climbed back out (The hole was two blocks wide and I walked back and forth as I placed the gravel; I did not know that pillaring up was a thing). After I got back out I figured I should probably look up how to play the game. The only crafting recipe I had successfully figured out at that point was sticks.

I also recall trying to figure out why I couldn’t pick up the iron ingots I just smelted. That was when I learned I should make chests. I eventually constructed a pretty sizable but square castle, and then tried to make a nether portal. It did not light.

The first time I actually played for long with peaceful difficulty off was in another world. I built a massive box out of obsidian for my house in peaceful mode, floating above a hill. Then I turned it off, and stood at the door and shot the hostile mobs all night. I didn’t know that beds would set your spawn, so every time I died I had to make a death run through the forest back to the safety of my house. The first few times I did it I had no idea where to go, but a lava pool next to my house soon burned all of the forest for hundreds of blocks around, and navigation became a lot easier. I discovered there was a really handy bug in that version where you would receive two arrows every time you picked up an arrow you had shot, so you could stand against a wall duplicating arrows all day and then shoot the mobs all night, only needing to occasionally craft new bows. The bug went away in the update that added enchantments, but I got an infinity enchantment to do the same thing.

I remember meeting my first baby zombie. I thought it was some kind of freaky glitch until I looked it up and saw it was an actual feature. Baby zombies were faster, and they would randomly zig zag around as they ran towards you so they were very hard to hit (as well as me being bad at combat). This one killed me, then proceeded to camp my items. He killed me every time I came near, so I finally set the difficulty to peaceful to collect my stuff.

Back in those days in Pocket Edition hostile mob spawning was weird. Sand beaches would become overrun at night for some reason. There would also be random caves that would get absolutely filled with enemies. I remember jumping into a small single-room cave filled with zombies, skeletons, endermen, and spiders and dying multiple times before finally conquering it.