Minecraft has been one of my bigger video game obsessions since The Sims. I have spent many a late night in the land of buying pizza by selling the toilet (for my Sims, just so we're clear). It’s one of those games I keep going back to again and again, no matter how many times it’s made me rage quit or given me motion sickness.
Previously, I hadn’t suffered like that since the Star Wars Dark Forces games.
I first stumbled upon this wonderfully blocky game through a friend recommending it to me, and I jumped head first into buying my own copy on PC. The game was inevitably installed fairly shortly after and I delved into the game excited to explore. Like all Minecraft noobs I was fine during the Minecraft day where I only had nosey chickens to contend with, when the night hit I discovered what really gave Minecraft its survival edge.
Creepers!
Within two minutes of night I was surrounded by the bloody things, hissing before they exploded in my face and sending me to my doom. That wasn’t all, either! When I respawned it was still night and I was met with giant spiders, Skeletons with enchanted bows and arrows, not to mention several types of zombies. I had no weapons at all because I hadn’t been able to reach my dropped inventory before I was killed again.
It was like being repeatedly kicked in the shins while being told to run a marathon, with no cover to run and hide in. This is when my hobby of shouting ‘Fuck!’ rather loudly at the computer screen started, along with other such words that seem to be popular in the gaming community.
Instead of giving up, I did what any modern person would do. I went to the net and visited the wacky world of YouTube in search of answers. I was sure I would find some kind of help in there somewhere. Back then I wasn’t so familiar with the world of Let’s Plays but I was eager to find a solution to my very n00by problem. I discovered a YouTuber that was a Minecraft Let’s Player under the name Paul Soares Jr, he turned out to be one of the number one veteran Minecraft players. I found a few series he had published on his channel called ‘How to Survive Your First Night' and ‘How to survive and thrive’ and went from there.
During the months ahead I spent a lot of hours watching PSJ’s Minecraft videos, taking in the knowledge and trying to recreate what he had done in his tutorials. The thing about PSJ’s videos was that he didn’t just teach you how to play the game, he taught you a way of making your own adventures and stories as you went along.
He also told fantastic stories of his own, like having an older uncle that has travelled the world before settling down to have children of his own. I became a regular viewer of his content on YouTube and continued to learn as I went. A few years had passed since I had first started playing Minecraft and as time went on I discovered The Yogscast (yes, I’m not sure how I missed them before that either) and their song ‘Screw The Nether’ Move Like Jagger Parody that drew me in. I learned about the wonderful world of Minecraft mods and how they could be used to heighten my gaming experience.
Voltz Special - Episode 12 - The Bomb - YouTubeSince Microsoft acquired Minecraft from Mojang it has blossomed into the world in such an incredibly short time. Blake and I now own the game collectively on most consoles and electronic viewing devices.
They released these little handbooks for the younger players that couldn’t always figure out what they had to do, especially on the PC edition where we didn’t get a pattern guide of how to make things. One of the most exciting parts for me in these books is that PSJ himself is in them giving tips and talking about his time playing Minecraft. He had been acknowledged by the community as the top Minecraft player and I’m not going to lie it did indeed make me squee a little on his behalf when I saw it.
These days I can hold my own against most of the Minecraft Mobs except the Cave Spiders but they are beyond a doubt the worst thing to me in the game. Not even the Ender Dragon frustrates me as much as the god damn Cave Spiders do. Not only are they smaller than the large spiders, they're also poisonous, never travel alone and they usually come out of a spawner covered in webbing.
The webbing is extremely hard to move through and if you get stuck in one you are more or less buggered. In this instant you’ve either: moved your bed closer so that you will spawn relatively close, or you die and spawn all the way back in your original spawn point. The latter sucks balls, believe me, especially as all that stuff you have in your inventory is going to go bye-bye unless you can get there in under five minutes.
My favourite part of Minecraft is the creative side. For those unfamiliar, You can play in two modes: Survival and Creative. Survival is a lot more restrictive in what you can do but with Creative you can build whatever you want, fly and are essentially indestructible (Unless you dig through to the void and fall into it - which almost feels fair).
At some point I would love to do a creative build video series much like what Deligracy does with her The Sims 4 speed builds. This is a thing in the distant future so we shall see what happens with that one. Maybe I could get one of the boys from E14 to voice over for me *Coughs*.
Thank you for reading!
She blogs about her passions over at cloudzombie, covering everything from video games, movies and TV all the way to baking.
Editor's Note: For those interested in Minecraft mods, we've been sent a great link by the folks over at LyncConf Tech all about Minecraft mods!
Best Minecraft Mods via LyncConf
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