Minecraft

I've become quite enamored with Minecraft, the current darling of the PC indie game scene. It's fairly difficult to describe the game, but at a very basic level it's Building Blocks: The Game, or perhaps Legos without the limitations of expensive plastic and gravity. It plugs directly into the part of your brain that planned elaborate snow forts or tree houses well beyond your 12 year-old self's means of construction. Minecraft helped me rediscover that the Quixotic Construction Lobe of my brain is still just as over-sized as when I was a child.

About a week ago, Minecraft had a free weekend as a result of some server authentication issues. Rather than keep paid users from playing his game, creator and good-hearted Swede Notch opened up Minecraft to all comers. So, a couple of friends and I decided to dive in and start a server so we could all build things together. As it turns out, none of us were the knock-the-other-kid's-blocks-over type, so we managed to coexist in beautiful, gravity-defying creativity.

As a caveat, I should state that our creations were achieved through "opping", which basically gave us the ability to spawn whatever building materials we desired. We still assembled everything by hand; we just didn't have to mine it all. Not quite as epic, but a lot more convenient. This entry will cover our first (real-world) night of building. This took many in-game days.

If you're not familiar with Minecraft, here's a bird's-eye view of our world:

You may notice the bridge spanning the valley in the center of the picture, or the speck on top of the tower rising in the distance. The bridge was from Roadkill (the speck) and another friend, while the tower was Roadkill's current construction project.

You may also notice that we're preposterously high in the air. In fact, we're above cloud level.

How did we get started building so high in the air that even Minecraft's retro graphics gave me vertigo? Well, before I started documenting our journeys, we were mostly mucking about in caves, looking for ore and seeing how deep the world went (answer: quite deep). Since it's easy to get lost in Minecraft, we wanted a way to mark certain locations, like the entrances to some more promising tunnels. One of the more effective ways is to build a really tall tower and stick a torch on top of it, so you can see it from a distance. Navigating 101, right?

As you can probably tell from the above picture, our landmark towers took on a life of their own. At present, Minecraft's physics are pretty limited. If you walk off a ledge, you'll fall - but if you build a bridge out into the firmament and then sever its connection to solid ground, it'll just stay there. No need for pylons or cantilevering, either - which is why my Uber-Landmark became the first pillar supporting a skybridge, and eventually of our own personal edifices.

This is our skybridge, after extensive modification. At first there were no railings, it was about three bricks wide, and clouds swept over it constantly. The clouds are still there (that's what the white rectangle is), but now we have a nice, broad, well-lit causeway. All the comforts of a real-world bridge, except for the part where the only things supporting it are a pair of structurally unsound pillars. This was the view from the third story of my house - the crenelated fort on the other end of the bridge is friend Mamu's dwelling. You can't tell from here, but it has a sacrificial altar. You know, for the heathens.

My abode would be just a little less sinister. I wanted a nice retreat with a swank dome on the top, but every house needs a good foundation. For mine, that would be the entire first story.

You see, the problem with Minecraft's clouds is that they aren't stopped by walls. Assuming that my small block-avatar wouldn't want his living room to be subject to constant cloud fly-bys, I constructed a set of sturdy, moss-covered pillars and a stately stairway to the second level.

Success! My abode would stay dry and unmolested by those pesky clouds. The high water vapor content even provides a logical basis for the mossy stone I used on the pillars. In reality I used mossy stone because I just really like moss, but don't tell anyone. I'd sound weird.

Night falls, and I notice that Roadkill's tower now rivals mine. This cannot be!

But he tells me that he's actually built the tower as high as it can physically go. Apparently, there's an invisible ceiling in Minecraft that you can't build above. So, he starts building out a platform similar to the one crafted by Mamu and me. He mumbles about secret plans and a "surprise." I think that building a tower of solid diamond, one of the rarest materials in the game, may have driven him mad. Only time will tell.

Returning to my house, I build a stairway up to the second story.

Stairs are fickle. Most of the time they can auto-detect which direction they should face, but sometimes they don't. But it should be a simple matter to remove it and try again, right?

Wrong! The misaligned Feng Shui or whatever also seems to make wrong-way stairs invincible. You can whack at one with an axe for minutes at a time and not get rid of it. Oh, sure, it'll break into its constituent wood-blocks. But then the stair piece pops back into existence, fully formed and mocking you! Why, stairs? WHY? Must I consign your tainted form to the Burning Fields, whose floating, ever-burning blocks of wood are created by another bug in this game's Alpha code?

Minecraft is still in Alpha, by the way - so hopefully such weirdness will be coded out. Except for the Burning Fields; those are pretty awesome.

At this point in the night, it's getting late. All the curves and high resolution of the real world are starting to look weird, so we prepare to close down for the night. Before we head out, though, Roadkill calls Mamu and me over to his personal Tower of Babel. Constructed of pure diamond and built as tall as physically possible, it resembles a diving board built for titans. We walk over, skirting the Burning Fields as we go.

Roadkill insists there's a surprise, but his tower looks fairly mundane from here. The ladder up is on the inside, so we crowd through the narrow doorway. I look up to find a tunnel to infinity.

We climb up, and I marvel at how effective such low-fi visuals can be. The climb is actually kind of disorienting, flanked as I am by identical walls and torches stretching out to the vanishing point.

Finally, though, we reach the top of the tower. All that's here is a narrow walkway that terminates, mid-air, in the darkness. It looks like we're walking the plank, but Roadkill says that all we need to do is walk off the end and "enjoy the ride." Ok, why not? Avatars in Minecraft multiplayer are invulnerable (in the current version), so what's the worst that could happen? We step off into the abyss.

Oh good. The floor is made of lava.