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Saying goodbye to my cool stuff. |
Scott asked me what I was thinking yesterday and I launched into about 30 minutes of minecraft, lol.
I started StarrStrukk for survival, wimped out after a few weeks' frustration and ran away to Mo Creatures multiplayer, came back to StarrStrukk and remodeled into survival realm with cheats and creative building, and have happily been waiting for the new Mo Creatures server to come back on.
It hit me over Turkey Day that I have NEVER successfully made it through survival on my own. I'm a seasoned pro now. Let's do it! So I dumped all my stuff, typed in a random teleport coordinate out in the great wilds beyond my thousand block origin, and braced for impact.
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Awesome, a real challenge. Yes, I allowed myself one starter torch. |
Rule of thumb is very first stuff you do when you land (unless it's night, then you just hole up and wait out the mobs for daylight) is pummel a couple of trees, run around mowing grass for a few seeds, and punch out enough dirt to hang out in a rudimentary cavelet, but keep it really small if you don't have light so aggressive mobs can't spawn on top of you in the dark and kill you while you can't even see what's going on. Wikis suggest keeping underground work down to 2 squares wide.
If you have enough daylight left to do some of this before you have to hole up for the night, great, but it's crucial you do this as immediately as possible. Make a crafting table out of the wood you got, turn some of the wood into sticks, make hoe, and plant some seeds so they can start growing. I can usually last about 3 days on my realm without food, and as you can see in the tundra pic, there was absolutely no other food.
While you're making tools, also make a pickaxe and a sword. Don't waste your wood on
anything else until you have made these. Until you can get stone and start working up, you will be grateful to have these.
Try to get some dirt blocked around you and your crafting table before sunset so you'll be in a tiny cavelet where aggressive mobs can't get to you and kill you. If you haven't had time to find coal to make a torch, keep your safe zone really small, no more than 2 blocks wide so that nothing hostile can spawn inside with you and kill you without you even being able to see it. If you have any wood left, you can make a piece of fence to use in place of glass as a window so you can see when daylight comes without having to break a dirt block and risk a zombie falling in or a skeleton shooting you in the face or even a creeper standing
right there on the other side of your dirt suddenly blowing up.
Those are the basic first landing survival steps. Everything from there is using your brain to outwit the game, almost like being a lost soldier surviving a war by learning to live off the land. But one thing you do need to hold frustration down and not quit is a bed...
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3 block of wood planks & 3 blocks of wool gets you a bed. |
It took me a long time to get a bed made in the tundra because I needed 3 blocks of wool and all I could do was collect spider string because there were no sheep around. Fortunately, I ran right into a mineshaft below my tunneling, but that is a dangerous way to get string for wool and I was getting desperate for food and didn't have enough torches to keep looking for loot chests hoping for a crust of bread or an apple or some kind of seeds. I decided to just stash my stuff and took off running one day, and after about 10 minutes of running in one direction, finally ran into sheep. That was the first actual food besides one loaf of bread I had eaten the whole time (wheat grows very slowly in the tundra), and I finally had enough material to make a couple of beds, one for the original landing point, and one for the scout bunker. And then I went out and got killed before I set respawn on the scout bunker bed...
The dying and losing all your loot scenario is
heavily discussed all over the webs. If you get killed for any reason whatsoever, until you get that bed made and change your respawn point, you will respawn at world spawn or the last place you had a respawn point set. If you play without cheating, you have to get that bed made or you wind up guessing where you were and trying to tp back to the general area, then have to run around looking for it, only to see all your stuff vanish before your eyes, because there's a 5 minute countdown after drops before they go *poof*, and it's even sadder if you manage to get there just in the nick of time and then get killed again immediately because the hostiles are still there.
I was in this really super cool sorta cave way up on the side of the mountain, and right at the opening were lava and water and tunnels branching both ways, and without warning a zombie and 2 witches spawned right on top of me, and between being poisoned, bitten, reeling into the lava, and blindly climbing out trying to find the water, coming back to my death scene looked like I exploded, because my stuff was so scattered from dying on the run and being washed around in the water. When you're in survival and all the stuff you're carrying amounts to nearly all you own and you've worked really hard for it, it super sucks losing it.
SO GET THAT BED CONSTRUCTED!!!!! And then make sure you jump on it before you take off again doing stuff. I was stupid and epic failed that part.
The learning curve is pretty steep in single player or realm, but I learned loads of tricks on multiplayer that help me outwit the hostile mobs way faster now. I mostly just needed to know I could make it hitting the ground running without anyone helping me. After that particular death scene I did another start-over, this time without even a single torch, and wound up doing really well. I'm tightening up and tweaking my thought process and response timing more than anything. Sometimes the funniest thing in multiplayer is that announcement scrolling by that some noob is dying over and over, and I really don't want to start the new MoC like that.
And after a couple high intensity days, I switched back to creative and did a little recon mapping. This is the first ice city I've found on StarrStrukk, so I'll be going back to it to play.
Some really creative players I've seen turn ice cities into North Pole type worlds, or use only one other color to create a beautiful sort of 3D cross stitch pattern type of town, but I have no idea yet what I'll do. (Totally -->
click this<-- for super cool neato ice city builds.)
I think ice cities look kind of like futuristic spaceport cities like I used to see in comics as a kid, so maybe I'll go with something like that, make it look like I landed on a high tech alien world or something. I wrote the coordinates down to come back to.