Back to Minecraft

By Bixyl Shuftan

I haven't mentioned too much about Minecraft lately. That doesn't mean things have been quiet there. Nydia Tungsten has continued to keep a presence there. Besides her original server, she also got a second one. This was of a variant of Minecraft called "Feed The Beast," which has more things to build. And "Angels Village" with the other builds was duplicated on it. Then Alynna Vixen and Skylark Lefarve got their own servers, and with another copy of Nydia's map became part of a group of realms which players could freely move from one to another. These were an upgraded version with slightly better graphics. Nydia's original "Vanilla" server was getting only a little traffic.


Then my partner Jasmine got into the act. After she had a talk with Nydia about Minecraft, she gave it a try and began building on her own. Unlike most of Nydia's friends, she preferred the original of Nydia's worlds, and so began leaving her mark there. Unlike myself, who set up a location not far from Angel's Village, Jasmine wanted to go far off. Earlier, Nydia had dug a tunnel about a couple miles long to encourage exploring. Jasmine went down that, and set up a place. With Nydia's help, a portal was set up and in the Nether (to those who don't know, a hellish-looking paraell world Minecrafters use to get resources and travel through as a shortcut) a tunnel was dug through to the Angels' Village own portal. Jasmine was in business.

 I've been going in time to time to check on Jasmine's progress and help her out. But she's done most of the work. She's expanded her original "safe haven" to quite a complex, with a few structures poking up onto the surface. We have done a little exploring. Going into a dungeon area, we stumbled across an abandoned library. The two of us together made off with well over a hundred books, to be used later for an enchanting room.

Thinking of Nydia's tunnel, she wanted to do one of her own. So we both began digging. Two players with iron pickaxes can dig pretty fast, so we made quite a bit of progress. We did find a village about a third of a mile away from Jasmine's place, which she named Streusel village after Nydia's partner Brandi Streusel. After a couple other stops along the way to get wood and other materials, we finally stopped at a large village most of the way over.

Jasmine plans to finish the tunnel, eventually. For now, she's gone back to improving her place, putting in underground gardens, an underground greenhouse with the sun shining through glass on the surface, animal pens, pastures, and an archery tower, taking down those pesky creepers from a distance. I pop back on occasionally, to help her out, work on the tunnels, and maybe work some on finishing the SL Newser office. The unfinished office was duplicated in all three locations, so it does seem I won't be bored for some time as far as Minecraft's concerned.

What's that hissing noise? Oh, great … *BOOM!!*

Bixyl Shuftan