It’s my first day in this mysterious new world – and so far all I have to show for it is two hands covered in blood. 

After punching down trees for the past two hours, my hands ached and I felt like I could eat an entire cow. I hoped that my hands would become conditioned to this after a while, or that I could find some way to make some tools. I mean sure, I felt like Rocky in his prime … but at what cost?

   I decided that it was time to try and set up shop for the night, so I proceeded to use the “water to wine” method for my wood. I turned it into planks and began to build myself what I presumed would be temporary shelter for the night. Little did I know what lay ahead…

That night I heard ghoulish moans outside in the woods, sometimes even near my doors. At one point during the night, the moaning got so loud it seemed like something was right outside my door. Having had no means to make glass for a window, I looked down at my hands and sighed. It was time to get punching… again. 

I proceeded to punch a small hole in the wall to get a glance at what I thought I heard outside. To my horror I saw three what I presumed to be zombie-like figures, a skeleton with a bow and arrow (?), and some creepy hissing green thing. I threw the wood back into place as fast as I could and proceeded to promptly piss myself. What in the hell was that? No one told me about this when I signed up! At least I was safe in my house and they couldn’t touch me in here. I proceeded to huddle in the farthest corner in the room and just wait it out until daylight came.

Having awoken from an unrealized slumber, I heard guttural screams coming from outside. In between these cries, what seemed to be bones clanking together rang throughout the valley. I removed the wood from my makeshift window again, and couldn’t believe what I saw before me. What I had thought to be zombies turned out to actually BE zombies… and they were burning alive! The bone clanking? That just happened to be that skeleton I saw last night… also burning alive. What even is this world? Punching trees, burning zombies and skeletons, what next??? I couldn’t chance to find out what was next for me in this cursed area, so I had to get out. 

I turned around and booked it – no end in sight. I bobbed and weaved through the trees as best I could, but there were a million leaves in the way. Eventually, the forest opened up into a beautiful boundless meadow. While the scenery was to die for, I was going to die myself if I didn’t get in before sunrise. I did NOT want to find out what being without shelter amongst the monsters was like. I could see an array of light some hundred yards ahead, so I decided to go explore it. To my surprise I found quite an expansive cave leading down as far as the eye could see once I approached.

Having left behind and having used most of my wood for building my initial shelter, I had no choice but to seek shelter in the cave. 

It was moist and slippery – I lost my footing about every three steps.  Nevertheless, I pushed on, seeing a perch suitable for curling up and staying the night on only a few feet in front of me. Before I even had the chance to try and grab my balance, my right foot slipped and I went careening backward flat onto my back. I managed a quick, stifled yell, but all of my breath left my body once I was flung backward and hit the ground. I looked where I was heading and may as well have passed out then and there. All I saw in front of me was… nothing. The only thing that could be presumed the bottom was so dimly lit that it seemed hundreds of feet away. Wait… no, that couldn’t be. It really WAS that far away! I’m not proud of it – but I just closed my eyes and cried. I knew that whatever was going to meet me once I hit that ground was not going to be pretty. I sobbed – but the wind took the tears as they came.

Having fallen for what felt like an eternity, I opened my eyes- just to see the ground approaching right before me.

I hit.

Everything went black.

….and then I awoke right where it all began. 

This assignment was really fun for me – between having played Minecraft for a little over a decade (yes, I know…), and for someone that generally enjoys writing about survival themes, you can’t ask for much more. Honestly, I didn’t have any specific creative process(es) in mind other than the fact that I wanted to make a story about the OLD starting survival process of Minecraft. There was just something so raw and terrifying about the game back then. It may all just be thrown up to the fact that there was nothing really filling the role that Minecraft filled at the time… or that it just scared the piss out of us cause we were little kids.

As far as needing equipment, there’s nothing fancy to this. Just a keyboard and a mouse, or pen and paper if you’d like (functioning brain is optional).

The biggest thing I wanted to get across as I said before was just how stressful and engaging Minecraft is as a whole, but especially the old starting experience. Everyone who has played Minecraft remembers that first night when you had to build a “survival hut” (we all know what this means) and sit there and pray that you lived through the night. Even when you knew you had built something that would keep you all warm and cozy- the sounds of the night would make you question the integrity of EVERYTHING. You knew you were safe… but were you really?

I highly recommend that someone else give this a try, or remix it for yourself at the least. This was the first assignment in a while that I actually felt was more fun than work.