PixlBit

Saturday Mark and I beat The Wither in Minecraft, but it took some failures. We summoned it in the front yard of Mark's house. It was probably a bad idea. The yard became cratered like it was hit by a barrage of WWI artillery. I got The Wither's health down about half way with arrows, but then it killed me. By the time I got my equipment back and attacked it again, it had regenerated its health back to full. So we reset to a save point and built a cage for it out of obsidian (hardest material in the game) and summoned it in there. That worked for all of a minute before it blasted its way out with its exploding skulls. I ran into one of our mines to hide from it and it didn't follow me. That got me thinking. We reset again and summoned it underground surrounded by a cobblestone barrier, then, before it could blast its way out, Mark hit it with his diamond sword, and I shot if full of arrows  That worked and we both got the achievement for defeating it.

The last achievement to do was to take the item drop (I forget the name of it right now but it looks like a star) from The Wither and build a beacon and fully charge it up. We made the beacon instantly, but to power it up to max level, we needed to build a pyramind of metal blocks four levels high to give it enough power. To do this required more work than any previous achievement, surprisingly enough. All day on Sunday, Mark and I dug for iron ore. The pyramid turned out to need a 9x9, 7x7, 5x5, and 3x3 level adding up to 164 blocks, or 1476 ingots. One of my trips into the mine, which took a good long while, netted me 250 ingots of iron ore. So you can see the task Mark and I had to deal with. 

I eventually enchanted my pickaxe and got a Fortune III ability. This seemed to increase the amount of ore you could mine from one block. It proved absolutely essential, and I kept fixing it up rather than let it break and make another one, like I usually do.

Lots of other crazy stuff went on as we mined. I gathered a ten dog strong pack to follow me around and Mark enchanted a sword that could kill and cook an animal at the same time. There were many near, and actual, deaths too. It's dangerous down there with cave ins, lava and water flows, unexpected pits and mobs of enemies everywhere. 

One particularly fugazy event ended up stopping us from finishing the achievement all together - at least for Sunday. Mark got himself killed by a combination of stepping in lava and getting shot with arrouws from a skeleton deep in a natural cave. I was nearby, luckily, and gathered his stuff in a box and waited for him to return from his respawn in the village. Why he hadn't been wearing armor and also carrying the very important beacon in his inventory was beyond me. When he returned, I put the beacon in the box for him to take, but later, when we had finished the pyramid, we both realized it was still there in that box deep in the cave we had left hours and hours ago. I quickly looked at the map and tried and remember where it was we were digging. I figured it out, and tomorrow we'll go down there and get that beacon to put on top of the pyramid and unlock the last achievement. 

What a crazy game this Minecraft - and totally fun.