I don’t have a lot of pictures from the December Minecraft session, because Miranda had some studying to do so she couldn’t build stuff. But Patrick was there, and he did build stuff: he found a bay that reminded him (and us!) of Porco Rosso, and he build a little house there.

The Porco Rosso bay

A closer view of the beach with the house above it

Squids cavorting nearby

I went wandering around a bit after that and took some more pictures:

Some nearby scenery

A winding river

Water high and low

Looking down into the crevasse

These clouds should be in a tetris-like game

And then I came back to take a few more pictures of how Patrick had evolved the bay:

This is just here to remind me of the coordinates

Extending the beach

Planting flowers

We first started this Minecraft world four years ago; lots of good memories.

Pictures from the November Minecraft session:

First, the obligatory “wander around the world” pictures:

A tower at sunset

This isn’t a rendering glitch, there really was a strange square island in the middle of the sea

A small cave entrance surrounded by animals

A mountain with lava at the corner

Cliff caves on the water

Inside one of the caves

Inside another one; yay weird physics

A village at night

For most of this year, Dan’s just been building a straight path; so I went to visit him and then started walking back along the path. (And then stopped, because the path is way too long for me to go along the whole thing.)

Dan’s path continues

A floating mountain with lava off to the side

Weird trees at the base of the mountain

Going back over the desert

Going back over the water

Coming into land

Figuring out just how far away from home I am

A place where the path had to cut through a mountain

A thread of lava at night

Then I went to check on the hall that Miranda had started last time:

Finishing off the ceiling and walls

Adding some trees and flowers

Here’s the top of the tree

A chest

A secret water door

Adding paintings at the entrance

The explanation for the secret water door is this: last time, she’d dug into what turned out to be a pretty cool cave at the back of the hall. So she wanted to leave access to that while maintaining the hall as a hall. She ended up with a really neat solution: she added a pool of water in the hall, with the entrance to the cave at the bottom of the pool, done in such a way that Minecraft‘s water physics allows you to go into the cave from the water without the water flooding the cave. (And it really is secret, even though the pool isn’t too huge, it’s very hard to find the door if you don’t know where to go.)

We’ll be doing Minecraft a week early this month, December 18th instead of December 25th.