Minecraft Multiplayer Misadventures – Part 1

Pictured: The two girls who introduced me to Minecraft

No doubt you’ve all heard about Minecraft in one way or another be it various name-drops on gaming sites or even right here on T3.

There’s also little doubt that you’ve heard that it’s finally moving out of the Alpha and into the Beta on the 20th of this month bringing nice little updates to things and a slight price increase. All of this Minecraft news (and bits-and-bobs of drama) tempted me to try playing it again and, to my surprise, it actually worked without me reverting my graphics card drivers to the stone age. I was even more surprised to hear that a bunch of my buddies play on a Survival Multiplayer server.

Thus my journey began…

I spawned in the middle of the ocean on a small island of sand. There were a couple of small land masses around me but the most prominent things were a giant pyramid and a small stone fortress; both were nicely lit with torches to guide me on my midnight swim. Arriving at the fortress, I was greeted by the server owner who gave me a quick overview of the world from his roof. To the North was the Great Awesomatron Pyramid, standing strong for over three days; To the South was Shadow Moses Island and New Wales, connected to the main island by a very well built bridge; To the East was Castle Femalia, so named because the owner happens to be idle in Mumble, and to the West was the island I was to inhabit. It was pretty hard to spot at first. Not because it was miles away from everyone else but more due to the fact that it was crawling with Zombies, Skeletons and Creepers. I dubbed that land ‘Rape Island’ and planned a settling mission for the morning.

As dawn broke and the hideous beasties were set gloriously on fire, I headed out to my new home. Some tree punching and Creeper deaths later, I had set up a small hut to use as a shelter and my first mine shaft. The basic plan at this point was to gather resources from outside during the day and mine during the night. Easy. There was one slight problem, however. Due to how I built my shelter, I would always have two enemies outside my door in the morning. This wouldn’t be so bad if it were Skeletons or Zombies, they burn to death after a while, but Spiders and Creepers would spell death. Add that to Rape Island living up to its name and spawning no fewer that five Creepers per night and I was venturing into a death trap every morning. Shit. It became quite clear that this game wasn’t fucking around and I could either take it like a bitch or make it my bitch and slap it with my ring hand. With clunky bling equipped, I ran outside and promptly went about blasting holes in the island with the stream of Creepers following me. With them out of the way, it was time to get serious.

Using stone from my (mine)shaft, I crafted some axes and started to cut down trees for resources. Due to a bug in multiplayer, this left all the leaves hanging in the air so I did what any reasonable person would do; set them on fire. As I did this, I attracted the attention of a passing sheep which, in turn, began to burn. In its flamy panic, it set fire to a pig which ran into a forest of trees which… Set fire to the entire island. Cries of “Bin, what the fuck have you done?!” filled the chat as they flocked from miles around to see that more than half the world was on fire. On the one hand I was proud, but at the same time my deep-seated hatred of Sheep and their flammable bodies began to set in. This was going to be a long, long day.