Hard to believe that I haven’t worked on my Minecraft world for almost a month; I guess I’ve been too busy in my weekends, and Rock Band 3 takes priority. But I did find time today to play for an hour or two.

I’d been doing a lot of mining recently; that’s strangely soothing, but I’ve built up a fair supply of materials now, so I figured it was time to stretch my legs a bit. I’d headed north and south before, but I had very little idea of what was to the east and west; so I packed my bags and headed west. (Actually, I didn’t pack my bags very well: next time, I should bring a bed, to avoid the tedium of waiting out the nights.)

Looking west from my front door

Sand and hills past the tree farm

There’s a tree farm immediately to the west of my front door; I knew there was a bit of sand beyond that, but I wasn’t sure what was past the sand. And water north of that area; it wouldn’t have surprised me if the water curved south and turned the western voyage into a very short trip indeed! That turned out not to be the case: the scenery to the west was, honestly, a little boring, and I ended up going north a bit to hug the coastline.

Water to the north

Hills, sand, and a bit of water to the west

Still more water to the north after I've headed west

Eventually, the terrain got a bit more varied, and I saw some mountains. There was a cave inside the mountains, but it didn’t end up being particularly large.

Mountains in the distance

A mountain cave

Inside the mountain cave

Continuing on from that, my next surprise was when I looked down at the grass below me and saw a hole! I dropped down, and it turned out to be another not particularly large cave, with a more normal exit on the other side.

A cave hidden under the grass

Inside the hidden cave

I kept on going until nightfall; not too much in the way of further excitement.

Another mountain

The sun is going down

Sunset over water

Moon past island with tree

Eventually, the sun rose, and I trudged on.

Morning at the beach

Meadow with pigs

A bit of snow

After a bit of hiking, I ran into a truly amazing cliff with a waterfall pouring down from it.

Tall cliffs with waterfall

The base of the waterfall

I swam up the waterfall; that cliff was really tall, bringing me up to cloud level! I’d never seen the clouds moving right past me before.

The view after swimming up the waterfall

Hullo clouds, hullo sky

Looking across the clouds over the valley

That really is a long way down

Somehow, I made it down without breaking my neck and kept going. The next bit that caught my eye was a canyon with water in the middle; for some reason, I felt like I should be flying a ship in a Star Wars game through it.

Water surrounded by steep walls

The canyon continues

At this point, the sun was setting; I was in a winter region, with very tall trees.

Sunset past snow and tall trees

I was almost ready to go home, but one last cave caught my eye, so I decided to take a closer look. And, when I went down there, it seemed quite deep, and there was iron visible, so I had to hop down and explore/mine.

Cave under the snow and sand

Iron and darkness below

And, unlike the previous caves I’d seen on this expedition, it kept going and going! Here’s an underground river, and another view down a steep drop, with what looks like water below. (And a light source, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see the water…)

An underground river

I think I see water below; but where's the light coming from?

As always when you have unexpected light in a cave, there was lava. (Like I said, this cave was very deep: I went all the way down from the surface to the lava layer.) And there were good mining opportunities to be found: I ended up with 25 iron and some redstone and gold as well.

I see lava way down there

Hello, lava layer!

Lava and water

At which point I was at the bottom of an enormous cave, with no clear idea of how to get up. (The vast majority of my descent had had a generous assist from gravity.) I didn’t even have a mental picture of which way I wanted to go; fortunately, at various points I could look up and see torches that I’d placed. So I took out my pickaxe and started climbing, finding a few more caves along the way.

I guess I'm supposed to head up there somehow?

Wow, I've got a big climb ahead of me

At some point in the ascent, I ran out of torches; I wasn’t worried about coal, but I’ve never been so relieved to open my inventory and see that yes, I do have wood on me. (My pickaxe was running low, too, but I had a spare of that as well, and wood is all I need to construct more of them.) After quite a while, I eventually made it up to the top; and, as I reached the top, I broke through the ice and accidentally flooded the cave! I’m curious what effect the water had on the cave, but not curious enough to have actually gone down and checked…

Looking down into the newly flooded cave

A truly glorious cave; a pity that it’s so far away from home, and that I have very little idea how to get back there! At any rate, I turned around and started trudging home after that. Which didn’t take so long, I made it home the same day, because I knew which direction to go and didn’t stop to take pictures and explore caves.

My house is visible in the mist

I'd never noticed this pool near home before

As I got close (quite close, you can see a sapling from my tree farm), I noticed a cute little pool under the sand; funny how such pleasant surprises can be lurking under your feet!

Once I got home, I smelted the ore that I’d gotten in the cave, and, to prevent subsequent animal incursions into my house, followed Steven’s suggestion and replaced the dirt floors with cobblestone. Though I was sad to see that my chicken had disappeared; I guess the game doesn’t track mobs when you’re far away? A pity, I kind of liked having a pet…

My loot from the cave

Cobblestone patch on the floor

Looking west from my balcony

I didn’t work on Pro Guitar last weekend, because I was too busy. Though part of the reason why I was too busy involved Rock Band: I spent Saturday evening hanging out with Kirk Hamilton, Dan Apczynski, Jorge Albor, and Scott Juster, eating and playing Rock Band. Which was a lot of fun! Kirk is rather good on (Pro) Drums, as it turns out; and I’m much less good on Pro Keys on other people’s TVs than I am on my own. (Though part of that was because the game wasn’t calibrated at all to the TV we were using all at the start; I got to an acceptable but not great level once we fixed that.)

I did get back to Pro Guitar today, though, working on my journey through the Medium songs. And they’re super interesting, even the easiest ones. Well, maybe not the very easiest ones, but today was a lot of fun even when I was going through the later Warmup songs.

In the easiest Medium songs, you play a lot of two-note chords: as far as I can tell, these would be barre chords on a real guitar, but the game didn’t want to make us deal with that on Medium. So that’s a little boring; but even the two-note chords were interesting when I was playing Rehab, because it had me picking out the two notes of the chord instead of strumming them together. So I got to translate the individual notes that the game showed me into (a stripped down version of) the underlying chords, which was fun to think about.

And then I hit Yoshimi, and all of a sudden the game got hugely more interesting: I had to play full G, D, and C chords! Which I failed at miserably the first time: but that’s what training mode is for, and I eventually got it. (After that, I decided to just start with training mode on new songs by default, though it wouldn’t surprise me if eventually my sight reading catches up and I don’t have to do that any more.) That was a real change of pace: for the first time, I came out of a piece feeling like I could play it on a real guitar and it would actually sound like the real song.

I saw those same chords in some later songs, too. Which is kind of interesting, actually: full E and A chords aren’t any harder to play than those chords, but the game doesn’t seem to throw those at me in Medium. Not sure if they wanted to restrict themselves to only three different chords to learn in Medium or if they wanted to reserve E and A for when we had to grapple with barre chords; I’m not complaining either way, it will certainly give me something to look forward to when I get to Hard.

The other interesting song for today was Good Vibrations. Most of the song is pretty straightforward, but at the start of the song (and in one or two places in the middle), there are sequences of individual notes, going between a couple of the strings in different ways. They were complex enough that I decided to spend a little bit of time thinking about how best to finger them, in order to minimize the amount of shifting that I’d have to do with my hand, and I really enjoyed that process. In a weird way (maybe I’ve been reading Steven O’Dell too much), it felt kind of like playing a technical racer: it’s analogous to the process of analyzing a turn on a race track, experimenting with different lines to see which one is most efficient, and then practicing over and over until you can hit it reliably.

I didn’t do a lot of songs today: I finished the Warmup songs and did two of the Apprentice songs. But my hand is feeling it a bit (and I was getting remarkably sloppy on my D chords as the session went on), and I want to play some Minecraft, too! So that’s enough for this weekend; I hope I’ll be able to finish the Apprentice songs next weekend.

Liesl’s dad gave Miranda a Lego Taj Mahal kit for Christmas. And it was a lot of work! (Liesl, Miranda, and I did it together: I think we probably spent 15-20 hours on it, so 50 or more person-hours.) But also lots of fun. Here are some pictures.

First, we assembled the base of the building. We had to make six parts (front, back, plus four corner/side assemblies), which we then stuck together.

Miranda working on the base

The front of the base. (I thought the stairs were a nice touch.)

An unfinished corner of the base

The fully assembled base

Next, we put towers on the corners.

A closeup of one of the towers

The base with the towers in place

The kit had us assemble the large onion dome next, though we didn’t actually put it on until the very end. I’ve never seen that sort of curved layering done in Lego before.

A side view of the halfway done onion dome

A top view of the halfway done onion dome

A side view of the completed onion dome

A top view of the completed onion dome

Next, we created another building, to go on top of the base. Lots of fancy archways here.

A decorated archway

A corner of the top building

The fully assembled (except for its roof) top building

Finally, we put the base and top together, and added a roof and a few more onion domes.

A front view of the completed building

An angled view of the completed building

A top view of the completed building

Lots of fun.

After finishing the songs on Easy last week, I started Medium this week. And I can attest to the fact that Medium is harder than Easy: I felt a lot more at sea on the easiest Medium songs than I did on the hardest Easy songs. Also, I’m super glad that I’d started training myself to not look at my left hand, otherwise Medium would have been even worse. (And I’m also glad to have built up calluses, they’re definitely helping a lot.)

Fortunately, Medium is also significantly more interesting than Easy! Even with the easiest songs (I’ve only done six songs so far, though I have gone through all of the Medium lessons), I’m having to go through them several times, but it’s worth it: I’m enjoying the process of understanding the chord progressions and getting to where I can play them with some small, I hesitate to say competence, but perhaps a small lack of total incompetence?

In fact, saying that “I’m having to go through them several times” is not accurate: I’m generally not failing out, and I’m (barely) managing three stars on the songs during my first try; it’s just that I don’t feel at all satisfied with the way I play a new song the first time. (At the very least, I don’t feel satisfied with the way I play the first half of it: sometimes I learn the chord progressions well enough to do okay in the second half.) So I dive right back into it, playing it another time or two until I don’t feel actively embarrassed. I’m getting the same sort of pleasure as I was from working out bits in my Pro Keys playthrough, though I’m not applying nearly the same standards: my goals now are not to do a great job, they’re to do well enough that I’ll be able to make it through all the songs on Medium and be prepared for Hard when the time comes for that.

Though I am toying with the idea of trying to do Medium and Hard in parallel to some extent: playing two note chords feels a little odd, and is probably building up some bad habits. I don’t have to actually play barre chords, for example; sometimes I try (and generally fail to hold down all the strings), but sometimes I don’t, even when that’s clearly what’s going on. So maybe I should try harder to make my fingering more realistic; but maybe that would be an easier habit to maintain if I had to play more than two strings? (Probably not, I’d probably just end up even more at sea.)

Coming from a piano background, it’s also a little weird that a given interval doesn’t correspond to a fixed distance between fingers of my left hand. I had to deal with that a little bit on Easy, but it’s much more of an issue when I’m sliding up and down with chords.

The Medium lessons had some bits where you were playing bass lines, and those were quite fun in a different way. So I’ll probably want to give Pro Bass a try at some point, either after Pro Guitar or as a break from it, if some of the difficulty jumps end up a bit daunting.

It’ll definitely be slower going on Medium than it was on Easy. The half a tier this week was an aberration caused by going through training, and if I’d had a bit more free time, finishing it would have been fine, so hopefully next week I’ll be able to finish a tier and a half. Maybe not, though, and in general one tier a week seems more realistic than anything more strenuous; if the difficulty curve is steep enough on Medium, and in particular if they throw enough more hand positions at me during the harder songs, then even that could be optimistic. Maybe not, though: maybe there’s only a small fixed set of hand positions that I’ll see during Medium. If that’s the case, I hope I’ll be able to make steady, if not particularly rapid, progress through it.

We’re planning to do VGHVI Minecraft sessions on the last Thursday of every month, which means that we had one on March 31st.

I spent most of my time experimenting with minecart boosts: I removed the circular boosts we’d had earlier (since they can apparently cause lag in multiplayer), and put in some boosts that looked like this:

One of the new boosters I added

They worked great: two of them provided enough power for a cart to traverse all of the existing track, including going up some hills. So I decided to keep going; rather than extend in the same direction, though, I thought I’d start looping back, maybe ending up at the temple from a different direction? I made a left turn, which led me into a mountain: it was a lot longer than I expected, but I tunneled through all of that, and fortunately no boosts were necessary in the middle.

The tunnel through the mountain

After that, I added another boost and then turned left, hoping I was close to the temple. That took me through some treetops:

Tracks across snowy treetops

Eventually, after adding another boost, I stopped; I’ll probably continue eventually, but as is the tracks are more than long enough for an entertaining ride. Here’s me giving Roger a push to make it to the first booster:

Giving Roger a push

Looking around, there are some familiar bits near the end of the tracks: here’s a view of the super tree at night, and of one of the new towers that I’ll talk about more in a sec.

The super tree at night

One of the new towers

A postscript on the train tracks: later in the evening, Jonathan helpfully popped out of nowhere, offering to give me a push. And, as one might expect from previous months, this offer turned out to not come without strings: the other end of the tracks had received a slight alteration.

A bend in the tracks, leading down to lava

Pretty awesome.

Leo built a nether portal, placing it right next to the statue that Nelson had created a few months ago.

A nether portal

Unfortunately, it didn’t do anything! (A pity, I’ve never been to the nether in person.) Talking it over, I remembered that I hadn’t turned on the nether in the server options; fortunately, somebody said that he’d heard that it didn’t work well and suggested I should make a backup, because when I turned it on and restarted, it was a complete failure: there was no world at all (not even the non-nether world from before), just us standing on bedrock. Oops. So I reverted to the snapshot I’d made, and we continued.

Back to those columns: several people decided to build some columns going all the way up to the top of the sky, with glass bridges between them. There was one tower picture earlier, here are a few more.

Looking up at a tower and skybridges

The entrance at the base of one of the towers

Up on one of the skybridges

Looking down at the temple complex from a skybridge

The plan was to have four pillars, surrounding the temple from a distance. I’m not sure whether we completed all of it this week, but you can see much of the scope of what was planned in that last picture. Here’s a picture of Pat working on one of them, and a view from the ground next to the temple.

Tower construction in progress

A view of some of the towers from the temple

Miranda built a house next to the temple: here’s an outside view and a view of the crops that she planted on its roof.

House next to the temple

Crops on top of the temple house

And Garenas built a bathhouse over closer to the spawn point: here are some pictures of that.

One of the bathhouse rooms

Columns (lockers?) inside the bathouse

One of the baths

The builder of the bathhouse

The entrance to the bathhouse

Lots of fun, and I continue to be amazed at the different projects we come up with (and carry out!) each month. If we follow our schedule, the next VGHVI Minecraft session will be on April 28th; subscribe to the VGHVI blog if you want to know for sure.

This weekend, I finished the last three tiers on Easy Pro Guitar. It felt pretty similar to last week: I stuck with my discipline of not looking at my hands, and I fumbled a fair amount, but not as much as I’d feared. Even the hardest tier wasn’t all that hard—not that I came anywhere close to perfect or anything, but getting four stars wasn’t surprising. I’m not sure how much of that is me improving (it’d be interesting to try the tiers in reverse difficulty order!) and how much of that is that, if the game spreads out the notes enough, you’ll be able to hit a decent percentage of them no matter what.

36 songs was enough that my left hand is feeling it; here’s what it looked like after today’s practice.

My hand after playing pro guitar

Most of the darkness is smudging rather than bruises, but I think there’s a little bit of bruising as well. Still, I haven’t yet come particularly close since the first week to having to stop because of my hands: they’re toughening up a bit, and I’m not playing for that long at a stretch.

I’m really glad to be done with Easy: it’s been interesting, but I’m very much looking forward to playing actual chords. And I hope the developers push out a patch soon for the problem with your scores not registering: it’s a little ridiculous that the game thinks that I’ve only completed two of the twelve songs on the hardest tier.

After last week, I only had one song left to play on Expert Pro Keys, namely Roundabout; today, I finished it.

I finished Roundabout!

It was one of two songs that I hadn’t successfully played on Expert at all before I started this project; and there’s definitely a reason why it’s the last song in the track listing. When I first gave it a try today, I failed out somewhere around the 20% mark, when I hit some fast arpeggios; I then went into training mode and found that, the last time I’d trained on that piece, I’d successfully completed a grand total of one of the fifteen sections. I did better in training mode this time, but still: there’s a lot of hard stuff in that piece.

Still, I do seem to be getting better: after playing them a few times, I could actually manage the arpeggios in question reliably enough that my health bar increased when I was done with them rather than decreased, and I frequently hit a 4x multiplier at some point in the middle of them. I haven’t gone back and checked, but I’m pretty sure that those arpeggios are noticeably slower than the ones in Antibodies; still, they’re plenty fast, and I also get the feeling that my hand is getting better at maintaining an even rhythm in sections like that, meaning that I’m less scared of fast arpeggios than I used to be.

So I was feeling pretty happy with myself: I made it through the first 40% of the piece, and then a nice easy bit hits, where I can build up overdrive. And then, at around 53% into the piece, I hit another section of arpeggios: these ones were a lot harder than the previous ones, and, adding insult to injury, they hadn’t showed up at all in training mode! I’m not sure why they were omitted from training mode: while it is admittedly the case that you could include almost every measure of this piece in training mode, and at 15 sections, training mode was already long enough, it still seems a bit odd to leave out the hardest section of the entire piece.

I was almost ready to give up when that happened: I’d done well so far, but I was hitting my limit. Still, I figured I’d go through the piece a few times on no fail mode, just to see what it was like. And, with a bit of practice, I could make it to the hard spot with full health and full overdrive quite reliably; unfortunately, even full overdrive wasn’t long enough to make it through the hard section. But, when I turned off no-fail mode and then continued when I failed out, I was tantalizingly close to making it through that section!

And, after giving it a few more tries, it was pretty clear how to proceed. That section in question was difficult, but not evenly so: the early parts were merely super hard (as hard or harder than anything else on the disc!) while the latter parts were almost impossible without quite a bit more detailed study (and I’d have to master them without the help of training mode). So my best strategy was to survive as long as possible without overdrive: if I could make it a third of the way into the section in question before turning on overdrive, I’d have a fighting chance of making it through the whole thing with overdrive. The part after the crazy arpeggios ended was no picnic, either, but it was clearly within my capabilities, and I could use training mode to help me there.

So I went with that; after another couple of playthroughs, I could feel myself getting a bit better, and a few more attempts after that, I made it through the hard section. I was nervous / hyped up enough that I didn’t make it all the way through the piece—like I said, it’s no walk in the park even after that section—but at that point it was clear to me that I could make it through, with the appropriate strategic overdrive usage. (This is the only piece that I have to pick my overdrive spots based on survival rather than points!) And, a lunch break and several more attempts later, I finally succeeded.

At which point I declared victory, rather than trying to refine my score further. I like the piece, and I’m actually really hoping that more Yes appears as DLC, but I’d been playing it over and over again for the last several hours: enough is enough.

So now my tour through the on-disc content is done. I’ve actually slipped a few spots since last time: my score only went up a bit (from 10,620,581 points to 10,654,949 points), but other people have improved more than I have. So I guess 30th place was my high-water mark; I’m happy with that.

I'm at rank 33 with 10,654,959 points

I still plan to spend a little more time with Pro Keys: I haven’t put serious effort into the Billy Joel DLC yet, and apparently we’ll be getting more of his songs next week! There’s probably other keyboard DLC worth playing as well, I’ll give it a spin. But clearly I want to focus on Pro Guitar now: getting done with the Pro Keys on-disc content now is very good timing.

An update on the bug I mentioned last week: according to this forum thread, it looks like songs that have different note charts on the Squier and the Mustang aren’t registering your high scores when played with the Squier. (So far I’ve run into the problem with Outer Space and Sister Christian.) Hopefully it will be patched soon, now that Squiers are out in the wild and people are running into it.

I didn’t play at all from Monday through Thursday. I was worried that that might impede my progress in toughening up my fingers, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case: probably if I were playing more, I would be building up calluses more, but I had noticeably calluses and tenderness on Monday, and I still had both on Friday. (Don’t get me wrong, the tenderness wasn’t painful or anything, I was just aware when I pressed on my fingers that I’d been doing something unusual with them.) And the playing that I did this weekend didn’t hurt, so my guess is that the calluses are helping at least a little bit.

Though it’s not like I played much this weekend: I only went through two tiers of songs, Solid and Moderate. (Both still on Easy, I’m sticking for now with my plan of going through them all on Easy before starting any on Medium.) But the Moderate songs in particular were fascinating to play. I’d been consciously avoiding looking at my right hand since I started; and, when I got to The Con, basically the whole song had me shifting on a single string between the fifth, seventh, and twelfth frets. So I thought: this is a perfect opportunity for me to start building up muscle memory by avoiding looking at my left hand.

And it worked great! Yes, I fumbled, but not as much as I feared. The visual feedback that the game provided was super useful: once I got used to looking at the screen, I could tell immediately if I was on the correct fret or not, and I could adjust my hand almost as quickly while looking at the screen as I could while looking at my left hand. This honestly looks to me like a way in which playing the game might actually help you learn certain aspects of playing guitar faster than learning normally would: it’s a great combination of focusing on muscle memory while getting feedback that doesn’t interfere with that learning.

Also, the selection of frets that that particular piece requires was very useful. Moving between the seventh and twelfth fret required a jump, so I had to get used to letting my hand move; while moving between the fifth and seventh fret was best done by putting my first finger on the fifth fret and my third on the seventh, meaning that I had to think about hand positions that would let different fingers work well together.

Also, from a musical point of view, they’re very useful frets to know: the fifth fret is a fourth up from the open string, the seventh is a fifth up, and the twelfth is an octave up. So, once I finished that song, I decided to try to play the remaining songs without looking at my left hand, and of course those same frets came over and over again. I certainly stumbled during the remaining pieces, but not nearly as much as I’d feared; and actually I stumbled almost as much with finding the correct string (both with my left hand and my right hand) as I did searching for the correct fret.

I’m really looking forward to playing through the remaining three tiers of music: there’s so much to think about here, in terms of training both my hands and figuring out how to select my hand positions. And I’m looking forward even more to moving on to Medium: I feel like I’m playing blind by not knowing what the underlying chords are. In fact, as much as I’m enjoying thinking about hand positions while playing a note at a time, that work may be almost counterproductive, in that I’m going to have to completely rework it when shifting between chords instead of using multiple fingers on a single string.

I hope I’ll be able to make it through the Easy songs next week, so I’ll be able to move on to Medium the week after that. Who knows how hard the Impossible songs will be, though, even on Easy; if they’re particularly difficult, I may end up overlapping those with the early Medium songs.

I hadn’t played Minecraft for a few weeks, what with GDC and family members being sick and wanting to finish off the Pro Keys songs, but I found some time to play some yesterday. I’m still not quite sure what I want to do next: do I want to embark on another construction project, and, if so, what? So I fell back to my current default activity, namely mining. Which I find strangely soothing…

Two diamond blocks

Diamond and iron

Looking back and noticing gold

This loot was almost all from a single lode

I’ll spare you too many pictures of yet another ore block. Though I did find one lode that was pretty amazing: diamond, iron, gold, and redstone all right there in one place.

Another encounter with the waterfall from last time

Water, water everywhere

Trying (and failing) to dig around the water

I accidentally flooded an old corridor in the process

I’m trying to maintain my regular pattern of mine corridors; and I wasn’t quite far enough over to be safe from the water I encountered last time. I ended up mostly just going back into an old corridor to bypass it before continuing to dig.

Looking up into hole left by gravel

Periodically, you run into gravel that falls down as you dig it out, which means that you end up having a much higher ceiling in that part of the corridor than elsewhere. Which looks rather nice, actually.

My second mine corridor

At some point, I got bothered by the fact that I didn’t have a standard length to dig my branch corridors off of. So I decided to just pick a distance and dig them all that far, marking that distance by a corridor that was parallel to my original corridor. The funny thing was that, when I did that, I found that several of my recent branches were within two or three squares of hitting that new corridor exactly! So clearly my brain had developed a notion of how far a mining corridor should be…

View of branch corridor across the lava

This is a view of one of my branch corridors from across the lava pool that my main mine corridor ran into. For whatever reason, mining sets me up with a mindset of “we must make the landscape conform”: I don’t try to actually remove lava and water that I encounter, but I do try to maintain as regular a pattern of corridors as possible given the presence of those liquids.

Loot from that mining session

Here’s my loot from that mining session. A good amount of diamond, but not too exciting otherwise; and, as always, I wish I had more iron.

My bed

Once I felt like I’d mined enough, I went up and started things smelting while I harvested wood and reeds. And I built my first bed! I’ve only used it once, though: while it would come in handy when doing outside work, I still feel like following the rhythms of my world for now.

After that, I needed a break from mining (whether of ore or wood). I remembered that, when poking in the sand near my spawn point, I’d uncovered what seemed like it might be a cave. So I went over to give it more of a look.

Is there a cave under the sand?

Looking into the cave

Inside the cave

The outside view after removing all the gravel

There was a bunch of gravel under the sand; once I dug that away, there was indeed a cave. Which was reasonably tall, but didn’t go very far, so it wasn’t as exciting as I’d hoped for. Still, it was something, and I think I even got a bit of iron out of it.

After that, I returned to my house. I went to organize my goods in my chests, and realized that they were starting to overflow with junk. So I wanted to find a way to dispose of those extra blocks. And the easiest way to do that was in the lava pool in my mine: so I went down again!

My incinerator

Which sounds kind of silly, except I really like the journey from my house to my mine: it’s a nice familiar path, and it’s surprisingly fast. So I took a bunch of blocks down there and threw them away; while I was at it, I also built a third corridor parallel to my main mining corridor, this time on the right side of the main corridor. So now I have standard distances to travel on both sides when I’m mining.

How did that chicken get in here?

When I came up, I was surprised to find that I had a guest. I still have no idea how it got there: I checked, and all the doors were closed. Though the route from the ravine into my house isn’t guarded by a door: did it manage to make it through that? Did I leave a door open briefly earlier without realizing it? Did it glitch into the house? Did it spawn in there? Beats me; for now, though, I’m happy enough to have a chicken living with me, so I’ve left it there.

My current loot stash

Here’s my current loot stash. 257 iron ingots, which would be enough for 672 minecart tracks. And I now have enough diamond for a full set of armor, if I wanted to be ultra-fashionable, with one left over for a record player to boot! (I doubt I’ll do the armor, but I will do the record player.) I should make some bookshelves, too.

I’m not sure what I’ll do next. Maybe explore above ground, to see if I can find a place for a house that isn’t dug out of a hill?

I spent most of my Rock Band time Sunday playing Pro Keys, but I figured I should put in a little more Pro Guitar time: among other things, my fingers were aching a bit after Saturday’s practice but not actively hurting, so if I’m going to toughen them up, I should keep at it. Maybe I’ll even find time to play some evenings this week; actually, it’s possible a blister is starting to develop on one of them, so I might need to hold off a bit.

I made it through the single-note lessons; pretty straightforward, and nothing else was nearly as painful as the one where I had to slide, though many required multiple attempts. The upstrum one was interesting: I’m not in the habit of upstrumming much on regular Rock Band guitar, but it felt a lot more natural with a pick in my hand. Though the guitar didn’t seem to detect it reliably when I was playing on the highest string, which is unfortunate if it persists. At any rate, I’ll want to work on that when playing.

My hands were pretty lost again today. Both of them felt out of place, and I was constantly moving my head in a triangle between the screen, my right hand, and my left hand. Which is ridiculous, and I really need to learn where various parts of the instrument are: so after a bit I decided to stop looking at my right hand and just guess at where my hand is supposed to be to strum each of the strings. Which worked surprisingly well, so I’ll definitely want to keep that up! Though I am developing a bit of a bad habit of resting my pick against the string while I’m feeling out where the string is: that wouldn’t work if I were playing for real or if I were playing at a normal speed, so I’ll want to break myself of that at some point.

I’m also looking at my left hand more than I’d like. Some of that is inevitable: for now, I’m more or less incapable of making large jumps up or down without looking. (Though I will say, the on-screen feedback is really good, so I might actually be able to correct just by looking at the screen.) I tried to force myself not to look other than that, though, with reasonable success. There are still times where I know that my fingers are in the wrong place but don’t quite know how (generally if my fingers are on a fret and don’t know if I should move my hand up or down), but that should improve soon, I imagine. There are also situations where my ring finger is on one string while my index finger is unintentionally on a different string: I find that somewhat embarrassing, actually, but I’m sure I’ll learn the angle to hold my hand in soon!

I finished the Apprentice songs today, though I ran into a strange bug where the game obstinately refuses to credit me with having finished one of them; I hope that goes away after a reboot! They’re still pretty straightforward. My current plan is to go through them all on Easy before trying any on Medium: certainly I can use a lot more practice in playing individual notes. Though the songs are so stripped down that I sometimes feel that having the context that chords would provide would be useful in understanding the music, so I may start playing through the early songs on Medium while going through the late songs on Easy; who knows. It may also be the case that picking out the notes in the late songs on Easy will be hard enough that I’ll find simple chords to be easier: I haven’t looked ahead to see what the difficulty curve looks like.