Hardcore Minecraft: Day 5

Not a terribly eventful day, thanks to lots of people buzzing around our base. Erik and I don't know why on earth so many people come by our outpost. We're a decent distance from the nearest other faction, and we're in by far the least populated quadrant of the map. So, what's bringing people to us? We don't know. Maybe it was me writing in the snow.

Erik added another person to our faction and also purchased another chunk of land, so our little group is expanding. We even have a faction subreddit! Woo. We've expanded a bit underground, adding more farming chambers. I've discovered multiple staircases and mineshafts that enemy players have sunk around the base of our territory. They're digging down to see if we left any holes in our defenses underground - which I'm proud to say, we haven't!

Erik and I had a chance to talk over our plans for the new chunk of land at bowling, but I haven't had a chance to execute on them yet. Multiple groups of annoying people have been lurking around our base, basically making it impossible for us to build on the new chunk. Here's one of them faffing about on our roof:

He can't get in, but he's too much of a threat for us to go out. We know that he has friends lurking nearby, waiting to pounce if we come out. It's pretty standard bait tactics that I learned in my brief stint in EVE Online - they wave a (seemingly) weaker/outnumbered person in front of us, hope we overextend ourselves, and then the rest of their group jumps us when we feel overconfident. We're not going to fall for the bait, so we go about our business inside, waiting for them to get bored and watching the monsters light on fire when the sun comes up.

Everyone! I am on fire!

So to get anything done on the new chunk, I figured the easiest course of action is to just totally enclose it. Try to teleport in now, troublemakers. We're up to our armpits in cobblestone, so I just make a big cube that extends to the edges of our territory. Now, I can work safely inside.

It's not elegant, but it gets the job done. Now I can get to work on Erik's office and his proposed idea of an Angkor Wat-style tower. He also pointed out that no one outside would know what we were building inside - "They could be building anything in there. Even a boat!"

So, that's my next goal. I took a break for a bit to play Borderlands 2 and remind myself what it was like in preparation for the sequel coming out tomorrow. Then I got to a point where I was getting insta-killed by rocket turrets and it stopped being fun. Now I'm going to see if there's abundant sandstone in that desert butte I saw a few days ago - sandstone would look quite schnazzy in a Wat.

Home, from the outside.