So I've started a new survival world in Minecraft. This one is fully dog-themed, and I'm streaming it (occasionally) on YouTube instead of Twitch. It's mostly just for a few very close friends, but if you're interested in watching feel free to ask. That's not the point of this journal though; I thought it might be fun to reminisce about my earliest memories of playing Minecraft, my naïve misadventures from over a decade ago.

No seriously, I had no idea what I was doing. I'm still not great at the game, so to say that I've grown in leaps and bounds over 11 years of intermittent play says a lot. Anyone who's played Minecraft for any significant amount of time, you probably have a lot of cringey memories of your first 1-room hut surrounded by flowers, or that featureless elevated cobblestone platform you called your skybase. And I bet you'll still get a laugh out of my anecdotes.

My brother gifted me a download of Java Edition way back at the very end of 2011 and sat with me for guidance as I started my first single-player survival world. He directed me to obtain some wood and build a crafting table to make tools on, then look for shelter. I'd spawned in a swamp, but just to the south there was a rock face separating the swampland from some higher snowier terrain. My brother recommended that I dig into that and then seal the opening shut with dirt for the night. Then he left me to my own devices and... I didn't evolve much beyond that. I carved out my cave laterally and erratically, creating a living space the minimum 2 blocks tall. Any time I needed more stone for something I'd widen out my cave a bit. It had hallways going in odd directions and a staircase (of full blocks, not slabs or stairs) down to a mine. But even sadder than the things I did were the things I didn't do.

For starters, I hardly explored at all. For some reason I'd gotten it in my head that the world was limited to 256 blocks or something (I think at the time the mobile version had that limitation), so I was apprehensive about spreading out from home too fast and running out of land. I didn't know you could craft doors, so once I got tired of removing and rebuilding the dirt wall at the mouth of my cave repeatedly, I concocted an overly elaborate mob-proof entrance. My invention consisted of a circular tower (still made of dirt) with a spiral staircase inside and a ladder down to the ground outside. I built a big cobblestone eyesore of a spire out of the middle of that with some torches stuck around on top and then leapt to my death. The concept was, since I believed that my world was so small, I wanted something big enough to see from anywhere in the kingdom. And by big, I mean about 20 blocks tall on top of the entry tower.

See, I died frequently, and as I didn't know how to make a bed, I would always respawn out in the shallow swamp water. It wasn't too far from my cave home, but if I respawned out there in the middle of the night, I had to think fast in order to get home safe. I had two mitigating solutions to this problem; 1, to increase visibility of the base with a torch-lit spire, and 2, to build a stone bridge from the bank in front of the base out into the swamp. But the bridge was positioned wrong so I'd spawn to the side of it, often making things even more dangerous. I died a lot, as you might imagine. It didn't help that I didn't know how to properly feed myself. The snowy bluff upland from my cave home was quickly exhausted of it's edible livestock so I was pretty much limited to the occasional apple. My brother told me how to grow wheat, so I eagerly made a wooden hoe and planted exactly 3 patches of wheat, no more no less, enough to make one loaf of bread. Then I got impatient. I actually got so frustrated with being starving all the time that I started stowing all my stuff in a chest and finding a high place to jump off of so I'd respawn fully fed.

Speaking of stuff... it's important in Minecraft to accumulate a large amount of key materials. I just accumulated small amounts of a wide breadth of items, more like a collection than a stockpile. When I first saw sugarcane, I thought "Ooh! I bet some of that might come in useful at some point." So I swam out to it, gathered 2 or 3 stalks and added them to my inventory. That was it. When I figured out how to craft a chest, I crafted a single chest, put it in the middle of my cave apartment and thought "Now I can keep ALL of my stuff in this chest instead of trying to carry everything around with me!" Just one single chest. Then when I found out that you could make glass, I went out side and grabbed a single block of sand. I smelted it, dug a side-tunnel to the east-facing hillside and stuck my solitary block of glass in place of some sod, and that was my one window.

I lived in this single-player world for the better part of a month before my multiplayer server superseded it. In that time I actually did some cool stuff, I mined out a deep ravine across the hillside, built a busy-looking little infrastructure of cobblestone bridges and secure ledges with storage and smelting stations every so often. I kept getting stuck in the dark walking home from the mining pits late in the evening, so I built a little wooden cottage close to it, and that finally had a bed. Not much more than a bed, but it was a start. I had an absolute blast that first month, as crappy as it was, I don't regret a thing. But, the game didn't really fully open up to me until my brother started hosting a server for us and a couple of our mutual friends, and that dominated my attention until well into the summer.

***

Admittedly when we started the multiplayer server, I didn't actually know what multiplayer Minecraft was actually about. I kinda envisioned building a lot of cool hangout spots and then going to them to just screw around and chat, kinda like Second Life or something. So when I had a weekend to myself to get a head start on developing the new world, I wanted to go all out with a big flashy base for everyone. Let's just say that I did not accomplish that objective.

Again the game spawned me in the water, this time in shallow ocean surf. I climbed onto land and started with a mud hut just for the first night. After that I started improving the mud hut.... not building anything from scratch, just expanding the rudimentary structure. I planted a tree on top of it and scooped out the earth into the hill underneath it to create more chambers. I knew how to craft doors at this point, but I still hadn't figured out how to effectively protect against creeper blasts upon exiting. So what I did was put the entrances and exits at the ends of long earthen tunnels, that way if a door got blown off, you still had most of a long hallway separating inside from outside. I dunno, I thought it was clever. I also had this very 'innovative' feature of having a 'communal chest' that could be accessed from the upper chamber or the lower chamber because it was embedded in the floor.

When my one friend finally logged on and got to take a look at what I'd built so far, his exact words were "Why is your house so broken?" That prompted me to step up my game a bit and actually build with gusto. So as he found himself a mountain top to start building a skybase on... I gathered logs to turn the tree on top of my mud hut into the center pole for a big spiral tower. My goal was to build a 'tree house' with a central trunk for a spiral staircase and the rooms occupying the branches. I should add that I was still building primarily out of dirt blocks at the time. Why not? It held together just fine and was very roughly the same color as wood but easier to accumulate.

I did eventually break ground on an actual decent house modeled after my childhood home, but in the process a massive need for large quantities of wool arose. Instead of starting a farm right away, I first toyed with creating a mob farm to get spider silk from for my fabric needs. I built a total of three different mob farms in different places and not one of them was done properly. They were absolutely laughably misguided, possibly even more so than my colossal mud hovel.

1) I knew that you needed darkness for hostile mobs to spawn, so my first attempt at a mob farm was no more than a large empty room (made of dirt of course) with no lights and a door. I had another 'clever' idea for how to dispatch the mobs and collect their loot: A hallway made of glass stretched from the door into the middle of the room, forcing the monsters to approach you single-file in a narrow passageway that they must enter a manageable distance away from you. It proved to be inadequate space for killing creepers though, and on the first use a huge hole was blown in the front of the building. I now had a big mud shell dumping monsters out into the base area at all hours of the day, so I quickly just patched it up and wrote it off as a loss.

2) Since I primarily needed spiders, I thought maybe I could slice a one-block-tall gap into a mountainside with just a narrow slit at the one face that they could crawl out of, where I could easily dispatch them. It turns out, nothing can spawn in a space with that little head room, so my precisely engineered slit in the rock just sat there and did nothing.

3) Close to my house project I finally built a proper stone tower, semi-industrial looking, wrapped in a black and green wool cladding to make it look like a giant Monster can. It looked great from the outside but it was horribly implemented on the inside; I'd entertained some misguided notions of installing safe observation hallways on each of it's 5 floors and an elevator system so that particular types of mobs could be shuttled to their respective levels and then harvested as needed. This turned out to be unfeasible so I just made the floors inaccessible dark rooms with drop-holes on each one that would passively let mobs drop down towards the killing portal. Somehow though this suffered the same fate as the first attempt as a creeper glitched through the safe pedestal at the output of the facility and created another gaping hole, turning the whole thing into yet another hazard that needed to be cordoned off.

I finally built a sheep farm instead and finished my split-level house. Then my one friend who was a much more avid player decided to do me a kindness and build a nether portal in my side yard. That damn thing made creepy noises that could be heard from my bedroom at all hours of the day until I was finally tempted to enter into it. I went into the nether blind and unprepared and got killed almost immediately. I respawned in my bed and quickly went back to try and salvage my dropped stuff, and died again. Upon respawning I went out and filled the portal in with dirt, as I tended to do with most of the things I'd built thus far. My friend then put a sign on the decommissioned portal that read "THE NETHER IS THE WHORE OF BABYLON!" or something like that. Yeah, thanks.

I've played for over a decade, on and off, ever since. I've been on several servers and have personally started probably a dozen unique worlds, some of which I merely dabbled in, others I put a good amount of work into and became very fond of. A creative-mode megahotel project, a proper giant treehouse on the FA server when it was new, a fascinating attempt at the 'hardcore' seed's water world, and finally to the relatively competent worlds that I've been streaming. I was never a very serious gamer, and I know I probably sound like I'm coming down hard on myself for my ignorance, but it's fun for me, it's hilarious too. Tearing my old creations apart has been almost as fun as it was building them.