I hollowed out a little room inside the the hill:

Entrance room of house

When I’d played before, for whatever reason I’d just felt like digging; I continued that habit here. I dug down a little bit, but almost immediately created a second room:

Basement workroom

You can see the entry stairs, the chest (a single one at a time), the crafting table, and the edge of the furnace. There’s a little alcove blocked by the chest where I put a flower; in the dark area to the right, I started digging down.

The stairs down from my basement

After not too far (at least in retrospect, it felt like a decent distance at a time), I ran into my first natural cave in the world!

My first cave

Which was very steep: I fell right over the edge, though fortunately I landed on a ledge not much further down.

The cave is deep

And it’s plenty deep beneath that; in fact, I still haven’t gone down to explore the bottom. (I really should do that soon, shouldn’t I?) Also, the bridge across the cave in this picture is a later construction, it wasn’t there when I found it.

There was only one strange thing: I could hear a sheep. So either I’d discovered cave-dwelling sheep, or something strange was going on. And, as it turned out: it wasn’t a cave, it was a ravine!

Daylight - it's a ravine!

Animals still like it here

I carefully climbed up the ravine to ground level; and, in fact, there’s a peak that went up quite a ways above ground level. (It’s the place in the world that I know of that has the longest distance from top to bottom.)

The peak above the ravine

I wondered where I was in relation to where I started. I can’t remember exactly what I did then. My guess is that, being a nervous person, I: went back into the ravine, climbed back to my basement, noted how I’d turned, went back to the ravine, climbed to the surface from there, and faced in the correct direction to get back to my entrance. Of course, now it’s obvious which direction to go:

The view of my house from the ravine

That’s the back of my house, which wasn’t there at the time; but I was pretty sure that was the correct direction to go in, and if you go just a bit to the right from there, you’ll see a natural arch, with the entrance to my house just on the other side. (Where the stairs are in the picture below; of course, those weren’t there at the time, but if you went in that direction, you’d soon see a torch.)

The arch leading to the entrance to my house

Actually, I lied: this blog isn’t just going to be pictures of my Minecraft house. No, it’s going to be much more interesting than that: I’ll also include pictures of my Minecraft spawn point!

Spawn Point - East

Spawn Point - South

Spawn Point - West

Spawn Point - North

I decided to go north; in retrospect, south seems pretty interesting, too, but at the time I was playing on an underpowered computer with a low draw distance, so I probably couldn’t see the trees there. (But I’m looking forward to exploring it in the future!) There may have been a tree up north that I could see and immediately chopped down, I don’t remember.

I walked up that hill, wandered around, and then got nervous: what if I did something interesting, then died, then couldn’t find my way back? So I went back to as close to my spawn point as I remembered, and created a clear sign as to where I’d gone:

Trench from my Spawn Point

A big unnatural trench should do the trick, no? And, at the top of the hill, I turned the trench to the right:

Trench turning at top of hill

This looks really different now from when I first saw it: for one thing, I’ve planted a bunch of trees, and for another thing, you can see a window that obviously didn’t exist back then! At any rate, that hill looked promising, so I walked towards it. I’m assuming that it must have had a coal deposit visible on the surface, because that’s where I started digging my first cave.

The entrance to my house

Like I said in my first post, “this blog is intended to be pictures of my Minecraft house”. In fact, that’s where the idea for this blog came from: Jonathan was complaining on Buzz that

You know what we don’t need any more of? Stupid Minecraft posts. I don’t want to see another fucking Minecraft house. Everybody has a Minecraft house. There’s nothing special about your house. I don’t care.

And my reaction was, “That’s a great idea! I should write about my Minecraft house!” So I’m going to, Jonathan is going to be bored, and the rest of you are going to be bored, too. I suspect something more interesting will come out of it eventually, but that more interesting something won’t be here, it will be on my main blog. But here you will find too many pictures of my house, an entire travelogue of my experiences in the game. (Plus similarly boring chatter / pictures of other games.)

I’m playing in peaceful mode; this is my second world, because I took too long a break after creating my first world and lost track of where I was. Unfortunately, I didn’t start taking pictures until recently in my second world, so you’ll see a lot of future construction (e.g. windows) in the early pictures; ignore them.

And many thanks to Matthew Gallant for his Beginner’s Guide to Minecraft.