Minecraft I

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Minecraft: Addiction Redefined!

 

The iconic Creeper.
He'll be seeing you around...
...the crater he just put in your house.



Minecraft is a computer game in which one places and destroys blocks. It has absolutely no other appeal besides being a sandbox game. There are no zombies, skeletons, spides, or exploding green things called Creepers. It's all an elaborate hoax. In the commercial Minecraft, the goal is survival and creation. (There's also a free creative mode.) Enemy creatures like Creepers and zombies come out at night, which means you need a shelter for your first night. Minecraft day/night cycles are twenty minutes long, which gives you twelve minutes to build a basic shelter for eight minutes of night. To a newcomer, the whole deal is confusing and bewildering. However, to old players, building a basic house in twelve minutes is as easy as walking - but new or old, every player must have a house done by the first night: that's when the nasties come out to play. In the Beta version of Minecraft, there were four basic mobs one would encounter in the real world. The Creepers,

walking green kamikaze bombs which do their best to remove you and your creations from existence; the skeletons, archers who prefer to deal with the pesky Player from a distance; the spiders, who charge in fast and furious but don't do much damage. The fourth mob is the Zombie, which blunders around stupidly and generally gets in the way of the other three.



"I did not think that through."



In Beta 1.8, a new mob was added - the Enderman. Possibly the most terrifying mob in the whole game barring the Creeper itself; the Enderman teleports, picks up certain blocks, stands looming over the player at three meters tall, and does NOT like being observed. If you place the crosshair directly over it, it turns to stare at you with its mouth gaping open. If you take the crosshair off of it for even a tenth of a second, it charges you

even faster than the spider. It also has the potential to be effectively more destructive than any of the other mobs. It can pick up Redstone, effectively destroying circuits, while leaving the rest of the area untouched. Meanwhile, the Creeper would leave an extremely visible crater in the middle of your Redstone circuitry.



However, nothing can ever, I say again, ever stand up to the Creeper when it comes to the screamer factor. I've jumped in my seat and befouled the air with impolite language many a-time when a Creeper fell onto my head. Creepers have a detonation time of a second and a half, which seems like a very short time.

                It is.





Creepers are merciless: whether it's your hard-built house, your newly-found diamond, or just generally your continued life, there's always a creeper around the corner. Creepers are the only mob which both stays aggresive and alive during the daylight, so it poses threat to the Player wherever they are and whenever it is. However, there's two threats even more dangerous than the eternally infamous creeper.



Threat one is the environment. Steep falls, sudden water floods, mining into lava, digging down, digging up, or just plain digging can kill the player quickly or even instantly. The environment is what it is, so a player who assumes it's something else will soon fall into lava or a pit of creepers.

However, the surer and more dangerous threat to the Player is the Player. The first time anyone sets of a block of TNT will also be one of the many self-induced deaths the player can encounter. Other examples can be running into a long-forgotten trap in one's own world, building incredibly tall structures, creating a lava moat, or trying to pass the night by pretending your floor is made of lava.

I have hundreds of deaths, but they can't all make the list of the top five deaths I've ever had. Here's the list based on how hard I laughed at my own stupidity afterwards, from the bottom up.

    5. New world. I walk forward one block, fall down a really steep cave, and slap my face into the ground. I respawned, and did it again.

    4. I had at one point created a massive trap based around a chest with diamond in it. I didn't remember what world it was on, so when I came across it I opened the chest and was subjected to an incredibly horrifying sensation of remembering the trap just seconds before the sand landed on me.

    3. Before the Beta 1.8 update, I had a fairly epic seed: "Luck" without the quotes. Before I had become familiarized with it, I wasn't quite aware that the two overhangs were large enough for mobs to spawn during the day. As a result, I got blown up by a creeper while building my shelter.

    2. This is really my only really epic death on a multiplayer server - all the other ones happened too laggily for me to really rate them. I had stopped for the night in a house I had built on the server before; unaware that the hoster had turned mobs on, making my previously safe open patio now a perfect creeper entrance. I walked downstairs and into a skeleton.

    1. A creeper somehow got itself into my mine, and snuck up behind me. It exploded, flinging me off a short ledge onto a skeleton and a creeper. The skeleton started shooting at me while the second creeper got ready to blow. BOOM. That's not actually what killed me, I fell thirty feet straight into lava, and suffered a slow, horrible, grisly end.

    In short, Minecraft is a sandvivalbox game with the ability to create some truly incredible things. (Some things people have made include: a model Earth, a 125-meter Stargate, an Enterprise-D, and a WORKING 16-bit CPU and ALU.) However, most people don't have the patience or planning skills to make working computer parts, which is okay! Minecraft offers something for them too: Minecraft is all about bending the world to your will. The start of every world is hiding in a quickly-made shelter to avoid the night, but the end of the world is yours to shape. Do you want the world to be scarred for miles and miles from your mining? Will there be vast craters from planned TNT explosions? Will you only build with wood so as not to ruin the underground caves? Will you live underground? On the ground? Above it? Minecraft is your world to shape as you see fit.