Part 41: Bad news bear

Today my morning run from shelter involved a flying leap over a waterfall, a scramble down a hill, and nearly falling in a cave.  But the coast was clear - no bad guys lurking near my door, and no lions out surveying the Pridelands.

I wonder why running water has stripes.

I collected Boxter from shelter, and we started approximately northwards, along an increasingly steep and forested, shark-girt coast.

All hint of a gentle coastal slope disappeared, and the cliffs actually became overhangs.

Up above, lions lurked.

And sharks waited eagerly right by the shore, daring us to dip a single hoof into the water.

As if to mock my complaints about steepness and tree-coveredness, terrible mountains loomed suddenly out of the mist.  I rode glumly onward.

We entered the mountains.

Now pause to take a look at this next screenshot.  Perhaps by examining it, we can work out some premonition about what was about to go terribly wrong.

Here I am riding directly toward a bear.  The bear is looking directly at us.  On either side of the bear are steep non-climbable walls, and the bear stands on the only clear path between them.  A tree appears to block another of the exits.  And I am riding directly toward the bear, brandishing not my sword, nor even my bow (though that would have been better used before I even got this close), but, for some reason, a torch.  A torch.

Let us now proceed to what happened next.

The little square of water does not play into the story.

With an enthusiasm perhaps commendable under other circumstances, I ran directly at the bear.  The bear, likely not believing its good fortune at seeing meat rush into its very jaws, attacked.  In evident confusion ("Attack?"  I seemed to wonder.  "Since when do bears attack?"), I directed Boxter to try to climb one of the sheer cliff faces.  This didn't work, on account of Boxter not being a pegasus.  I finally decided that perhaps I would have to do something about this bear problem after all, and dismounted in a what's-all-this sort of manner.  I eyed the torch in my hand, and thought that perhaps I might have something in my inventory more suitable for whacking bears.  I spun through my inventory, toying with the idea of whacking the bear with 19 cubic meters of gravel (sadly, Minecraft physics don't work that way, and this would be about as effective as coshing the bear with the feather), before I finally managed to select the sword.  I brandished the sword just in time to watch Boxter explode in a puff of smoke.  The bear immediately turned away, seeming to instantly lose interest now that its quarry had suddenly disappeared.

!

Oh, no, bear.  Not so fast.

Vengefully I charged, very aware that I was battling a bear in extremely close quarters, and very determined that if I died, at least I would have registered my complaint with the bear.

Lord Bear, I wish to make a complaint.

I survived - just barely.  I was down to one heart by the time the bear vanished in a cloud of snowflakes or something, leaving me horseless, but with the stunning consolation prize of two fish.

Now it would have been ironic if the fish had landed in that little square of water.

I ate my emergency ration of very filling mushroom stew.  I didn't particularly feel like mushroom stew at the moment, but I had to restore my health very fast.  As it was, a paper cut would about do me in.

And, stew gone and horse sadly gone as well, I began despondently to climb the mountains.  On foot. Alone.

I thought of building a monument to Boxter on the spot, but in the forest it would be nearly invisible.  And what horse would want its monument in such a miserable forest?

And so I climbed higher and higher.  I entered the clouds.  And shuddered, then quickly descended again.  Clouds have always given me the willies, the way they loom up suddenly and then rush at you like a solid wall, suddenly reducing your visibility to a fraction of normal, wreaking havoc with your depth perception.  And up in the steep mountains where the clouds lurk, it's essential to have depth perception.

I can't even tell if I'm in the cloud or about to be in it.

Just below the clouds, I paused to look back the way I had come.  Horrible steep bear-infested mountains.  I had climbed them by building cobblestone stairs because I don't even care anymore about how colossally ugly it makes the landscape.

A terrific view, though, under other circumstances

Night fell, and I dug a little hollow in the side of the cliff, bricked up the opening with glass, and fell to a lonely night of mining.

And you can still kind of see that other bear.

As I dug a spiral down, hoping to descend the mountain a little during the night, I thought about Boxter.  I hoped his mystical horse powers extended to whisking himself out of the clutches of bears in a puff of asterisks.  Or that somewhere he was stepping out of a portal into a wide, treeless, bearless, land, thinking, "That new land is terrifying!  I'm never going back there again."

When my watch finally told me it was morning, I dug my way out of the side of the mountain.

Perhaps it would be a bad idea to run full tilt out of this particular spot... I'd probably go sailing off the cliff.

Part 24: Why does it have to be trees?

In the morning, I began my wake-up ritual, an exhilarating frenzy of breaking glass, followed by a headlong sword-waving dash for the horizon.  Today, I was brought up short in my dash when I found myself face to face with a bear.  I went into full panic mode before I realized that bears aren't dangerous to me by daylight - I seem to have internalized Boxter's neuroses during our weeks together.

Two bears, a creeper and a lion.  There are entirely too many scary things, and not enough nice things, in this world.  And by nice things I mean pegasus.

 In relief I turned back toward the shelter.

Why do I never see this coming?

Grabbed this screenshot somehow while scrabbling furiously backwards, fighting lag.

My roommate saw this screenshot and commented "It looks like you fell in a snowbank."  I couldn't explain to her why a creeper explosion isn't green and slimy.

Fortunately, in my mad scramble backwards, I had managed to draw the creeper away from the shelter, so the glass wasn't even cracked.

But there was still that bear to deal with.  It probably scented Boxter, but hadn't yet thought to look for him underground.

A brief standoff ensued.

I won.  That round, anyways.

Unfortunately, my morning progress was soon marred by the depressing sight of trees.  Lots of them.

And three more bears.

I climbed a huge mountain (pretty fun on a horse, actually), and took a look at what lay northwards.  It was not encouraging.

Ugh.

Northeast was looking rather dismal as well.

Double-ugh.

It wasn't any better farther along (pretty scenery, though).  I went as far as the sea in both directions.

Trees on mountains: the worst.

Shucks.  And dare I say, horsefeathers.  It was great while it lasted, but it looked like this glorious Horse Heaven territory had finally come to an end.  The sensible thing to do, of course, would be to build a home base here and range out over the territory by day, scanning vast amounts of landscape for pegasus.  With a custom-built base to return to every night, I could stay out longer each day.  I could replenish my supplies.  And, I could justifiably say that I was in the north now, since I had encountered snow.

But of course we have already well established that I am not a rational person.  I took one last farewell tour before turning northwards.

Easier to dodge lions in open territory.  That hill in the background is pretty neat.

Found a massive horse party!  No pegasus, but they did have an impending lion problem.

Two horselets!  No wings, though.  On my way back through here, I found the lion bothering a horselet, so I slew it with my mighty arrows.  The lion, that is.

Oh, the view.  That glorious open land.  Pretty impressive, considering this is the old map generator with the 256 height limit.

 Finally it was time to end the fun, and venture northward into the land of trees and bears.  At least there are no jungles in this version of Minecraft.  Can you imagine?  Trees twice as high and four times as broad, with vines and underbrush.  It would be completely impassable.

A pig banquet, but I couldn't risk dismounting to hunt, with bears so close.

It wasn't as bad as I feared, though.  A pretty cool overhang, and some expanses of open ice to race across.

The red flower is a nice touch.

Eventually I came to an all-too familiar sight: land's end. Water to the north.  Time to stop for the night.

Too wide to splash across, for sure.  If only horses fit in boats.

 I found a hole of a cave that didn't look too bad - there were no predators about, so I dismounted to take a look.

This was brave of me.

 Eventually I had ventured deep enough to convince myself that nothing was going to be coming up the cave at me - that hole looked too small for anything to climb up through.

 Keenly aware of the water over my head, and the need to very much resist taking any of the ceiling out, I chased Boxter down and rode him as far as I could into the cave, which wasn't very far, considering that when I'm on horseback, we are the largest creature in Minecraft.  (In ALL of Minecraft.  Why don't the bears show us more respect?)

I think Boxter's head qualifies as "in the cave", while my own was probably sticking out.

It took some doing, though, for me to get Boxter to stay there.  Every time I dismounted and fumbled for a haystack (which keeps him stuck happily in place until the next time I ride him, on purpose or not), Boxter would immediately spring from the hole as if it were filled with bears.  And every time, I'd have to chase him down, reenter the hole, show him that there were no bears, and then go for the haystack again.

Sproinnng!

This time it took two haystacks, because the first block of the shelter I was trying to build was the block directly over Boxter's head - and, predictably, I ended up on his back.

Now PLEASE will you stay put?

But eventually I had him settled, and began laying a luxurious glass roof as night began to fall.  You can see by the fact that there are in-progress screenshots that I was feeling, for once, relatively under control.

I don't care.  Glass makes me happy.  It is all of civilization that I have out here.

The bottom of the cave turned out to be accessible after all, so I was very lucky that it was merely a dead end down there.  I did find a block of iron, though, which I used with the other iron in my pocket to make some metal socks.

Woo!

I was mining in the middle of the night when suddenly I heard a gunshot.  Yes, a gunshot.  In Minecraft.  I have no idea.  My first instinctual move was to check to see if Boxter was all right (and nothing to do with fleeing the dark and scary mine I was in).  He was all right, and nothing was amis, except for a couple of ducks on the glass ceiling.  I still don't know what that gunshot sound was... maybe the game had a bit of lag and saved up a bunch of footstep and watersplash sounds, and played them all at once?  Or had the bears armed themselves?

That scary hulk is actually Boxter facing the wall, and not some tall slavering beast that has replaced him, as heralded by the signal of the gunshot.  Maybe I need to get some sleep.

The coming of dawn revealed the slightly unsettling view of the undersides of three spiders on the roof.  There are disadvantages to glass ceilings.

Skrrrrrrrrr I've never heard a spider make a sound in real life, but they sure do in the game.  Maybe the spider sounds scale in pitch with the size of the spider, and the real-life ones make a terrible menacing racket but all in ultrasound.

Part 22: Shufflin'

Having survived until morning, I broke the glass and took off running as usual, finally stopping what was hopefully a safe distance away, and then turning back to see what I had run from.  In this case, it was a (harmless-in-the-daytime) spider, a couple of pigs, and a not-very-near lion.  It also looks like I've been having distinct hobbitish tendencies lately.  Maybe it has something to do with being on a long journey very, very far from home.  I could do with a powerful wizard companion to ride along beside me on his white super-horse and zap lions.

Nice day.  As usual.  This version of Minecraft only has sunny days with scattered clouds.

I had stopped on the edge of very pleasant country, Horse Heaven-like and extensive, with rolling hills and a comfortable lack of trees.  And there were valleys and mountain ranges all like this.

Room to stretch one's rectangles.

 And there were horses here, too.  I took the long way around back toward the icy lands, so that I could walk with ease across the ice from one large continent to the next.  At the edge of the ice was what I can only describe as a mini-horse.  It bounced.  It emitted resounding neighs.  And it was tiny!  Relentlessly, adorably tiny.  Ridiculously tiny, even for a baby horse.  Here's a picture of the mini-horse next to Boxter for comparison.  I can only imagine what he must have been thinking - perhaps we had indeed stumbled on the horse equivalent of The Shire, complete with hobbit horses.  Or maybe we had both gone slightly batty after spending the last two nights staying in hobbit houses.

Mini-horse!  Eeeee so cute!

We crossed the ice bridge and, like the first people who crossed into the New World, found ourselves in a new icy land.  This one had bears, like the old land, and was swarming with horses.

The new world.  Sadly, still containing bears.

 Here's a picture of a spot we found ourselves in, where there were so many horses that it was actually hard to move, and we were in some danger of getting nudged off a cliff by mobbing, bouncing horses.  These at least were normal size, but there were some minihorses among them.  Notice the size comparison between the minihorses and a chicken that happened to be standing nearby.  I wonder what would happen if you tried to saddle and tame one?  If my saddle hadn't been precious and reserved for the pegasus that I still hoped I would see (despite Boxter's skepticism), I would have tried it.  Maybe I'll find a mini-pegasus.

Horse mosh!  And mini-horses looking ridiculously small next to a chicken.

The Horse Heaven territory stretched wondrously on and on, and we kept encountering groups of horses, for some reason evenly distributed between full size and compact models.  But no pegasus.

"No griffins either," Boxter pointed out.

"Shut up.  They exist."

Another horselet!

And the landscape was quite scenic.  Lots of caves and cliffs to watch out for, so we did a lot of headlong dashes mixed with sudden swerves - probably hilarious to any casual observer.

Natural arch!

Around noon, I spotted a likely-looking candidate for a night-time shelter - a cave, not too deep, and not too vertical, which could be conveniently walled off.  Like the caves that Boxter had tended to pick out - see, I'm finally learning!

Cave.  Yes!

So I made a mental note of the cave's location, and continued exploring the surroundings.

Nice landscape.

Evening came, and I returned to the location to find that it was now somewhat less-ideal than when I had last left it.  Lions AND bears in the valley.  But other than that...

Lions!  No!

I jumped off and dealt with the nearer of the two lions, and scoped out the cave, while Boxter stood by.

"There's a lion!"

"Yes, thank you, Boxter, I see the lion."

"Do you see the bear?"

"Yes, Boxter, I see the bear."

"What about the other bear?"

"Yes, Boxter, I see the other bear too."

"Lion."

I jumped back on Boxter's back and rode him handily into the cave, taking only slight ceiling damage when I dismounted.  I fumbled for a haystack - no more messing about with fleeing horses... if I ran out of haystacks, I would just have to settle and - ugh - farm, and make more.  And just as Boxter was bunching his blocky legs to spring gleefully out of the cave, I lobbed him a haystack.

There was a munching sound as he devoured the haystack in midleap, landed, and kept sliding forward on the slippery snow until he came to a rest well beyond the edge of the cave.

Eyeing the bears in the background, I pondered the situation.  If I remounted Boxter and rode him back into the cave, I would have wasted the haystack, and there was no guarantee he wouldn't make another slip-and-slide exit.  My alternative, though, was to extend the cave clear out from the mountainside so that Boxter could be safely enclosed.  A Horse Mahal.

"Look, there's a bear!" Boxter helpfully pointed out, with a resounding neigh.  The bear pricked up its little pixellated ears.

Darn it, Boxter.

 Horse Mahal, then.  Fortunately, I had a bit of cobblestone in my pockets.  I didn't make the quickest progress, on account of Boxter's frequent shouts of "Bear!" and the occasional arrivals of actual bears.  They're not aggressive toward humans or whatever-I-ams during daylight, but at night, they turn vicious.

BEAR!

 It was getting to be night.  The bear was beginning to look in my direction.  It's surprisingly difficult to build a cobblestone mansion when one's fingers are stiff with blind fear.

Is that the beginnings of a red glint in its eyes?

But I somehow constructed the roof, and hopped inside.

Scary.

And plugged the last hole, which I had cleverly this time NOT left directly above Boxter's head.

Ahhh.

With the cave extension in the back, the shelter ended up being quite spacious.  In the picture below, I'm standing at the edge of the cave looking out toward Boxter.  You can see how far he'd slid, and why I was so concerned about the size of the shelter I would be building.

Interior shot of the Horse Mahal

Since the shelter was handily floored with sand, and since I had decided to make a policy of adding lavish windows to all my shelters, I took the time to scoop up some sand, build some furnaces, and start smelting.

I'd picked up some feathers during the day (dropped by dead zombies, for some inscrutable reason), and decided to top off my arrow supply.  For that, I needed pointy flints.  I had no pointy flints, but I had five blocks of gravel that I'd picked up somewhere, and I knew that when digging through gravel, there's a small chance of finding pointy flints.  So I placed my five blocks of gravel.  And then shoveled them back up again.  Placed the five blocks again.  Shuffled through them with my shovel again. 

 Blockblockblockblockblock.  Shuffleshuffleshuffleshuffleshuffle.  

Blockblockblockblockblock.  Shuffleshuffleshuffleshuffleshuffle. 

Blockblockblockblock - poink!  I've found a flint that was totally in this gravel all along.  And somehow a block of gravel had disappeared.  I wasn't about to argue, though, since a useless block of gravel had been transformed into a proto-arrow.  Shuffleshuffleshuffleshuffle.

I occupied myself this way for the rest of the night, and by dawn had five pointy flints and no gravels.  

Minecraft is weird.

Poink