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

Part 20: Things that go quack in the night

When morning dawned, things picked up approximately where they had left off: surrounded by an unknown number of enemies, plus one spider.

Scenic country, though.  Cautiously I broke the shelter's glass.

Looks all right...

... Yeah, it wasn't all right.

Fortunately, I had been moving at a fairly fast panicked dash, so the creeper merely winged me.

As the second inevitable creeper made its charge, I filled it full of entirely too many arrows, since I was too nervous to take the time to pull the bow back properly, and the amount of damage per arrow was approximately the same as if I had lobbed them overhand.

Our descent from our hillside shelter was something less than elegant.

Ouch.  Red means ouch.

And we began our journey, through scenic though lion-infested desert.

...And more lions.  And this one had spotted us.  Over a period of a few seconds, I careened madly off the hillsides in an effort to get away from a series of two lions, and in the process inflicted so much damage on myself that I actually had to stop, with one heart of health left.  For whatever reason, I can't do anything on horseback, including eating (health regulations don't allow a meal service?  horsebacksickness?), so I actually had to get off, while Boxter did his level best to wander towards peril.

Fortunately, there was nothing too much more perilous than an unconcerned chicken.

Guess what's just over the crest of that hill!  Could it be a lion?

Next on the list was bears.

And another bear.

And a shadowy lump that was either a bear or a relatively-harmless boar, but which I'm going to go ahead and assume was a bear.

And a lion.  And, unfortunately, thicker trees, impeding our skittish and vaguely-northward flight.

In fact, the country was becoming distinctly and disappointingly forested once more.

As the sun was getting low in the sky, we reached the land's end once again.  We would be nuts - well, more nuts than usual - to go any farther today.

For the second day in a row, there was no ready shelter-cave, so instead I set about digging another hillside hollow.  Rather than staying in the hollow I was digging, Boxter immediately took off.  But it seemed he only wanted to go swimming, and he watched me work while he bobbed serenely in (happily shark-free) waters.

A duck checked my work.

But unfortunately, it seemed that was all Boxter wanted to do that night: go swimming.  And no amount of my firmly returning him to the nice shelter I'd built would convince him to stay in it long enough for me to build the last wall to enclose us.  He hankered, evidently, for the sea.

It's getting dark... this is not funny anymore...

He's out there somewhere again.

....annnd he's left for a fourth time.

It was time to bring out the haystack offering.

By that time, it was full night, and our shelter had one wall and a roof completely open to the night and the creepers.  And I could hear something coming, as it scraped loudly, shuffling footsteps coming closer.   I could barely move my fingers on the keyboard and mouse, as they stiffened with dread.  It was coming closer... closer... and suddenly it was THERE!

...it appeared to be a duck.  Which wandered around not doing much of anything, but all the while making a loud, heavy, shuffling, scraping sound.  Apparently there's only one "footstep" sound in Minecraft, so the footsteps of a duck make the same noise as those of a zombie.

I had nearly finished putting in the windows when I began to hear a new noise, the WwwwwooooOOOOooo creepy mooing sound of the Spooky Cow.

I'll spare you the many screenshots of an empty window, which I took each time convinced that THIS time I finally had a shot of the Spooky Cow.

But this screenshot was interesting - a shot of the duck launching itself from the roof above my head, only to die in a puff of asterisks in midair.

Eventually I saw the likely culprit: a fox that somehow must be possessed of a ninja ranged attack.

And then another shape darted in front of the now-very-scary window!

It appears to have been a boar.  Such was my distraction that I took the time to build a furnace to smelt more sand into glass, only to finally remember that I didn't actually have any sand with me, or anything worth smelting, really, unless I wanted to make more rock to add to the mountain of solid rock that already surrounded me.  Or to replace some of that unsightly cobblestone with elegant grey rock, thus making my habitat into an elegant.... yeah, right.

Here's yet another screenshot of a blank window, during which I must have been convinced that something else was out there.

Morning dawned, and our entrance hallway did have a certain elegance to it.

And yet another creature lurked at the door.  Someone must have been projecting movies on the other side of the glass or something.

I appear to have drawn my bow against the terrifying sheep.

Oh, well, at least we'd, most improbably, survived another day and another night.  Next: more trees!