PixlBit

More Minecraft this weekend. I ticked off two more achievements with six to go. Mark's got more left to do but he'll catch up really quickly when he wants to. Right now he's winning the diamond hunt. He digs down to bedrock and clears out gigantic areas. I have a different method. I dig channels about every three blocks. That way I don't have to mine out every single block. It can get tedious doing every block. Now that we both have diamond pickaxes enchanted to the max, though, it's a lot faster. Not only that, but we discovered that the enchantment "fortune" on a pickaxe increases the yield for certain mineral types. The most important one is diamond, of course. Use a Fortune II or Fortune III enhanced pickaxe on a block of diamond and you'll usually get twice the normal amount of gems from it. In this way we've been able to get plenty of diamonds for equipment. Mark has gotten so many that he made a full suit of diamond armor. I'm close to that, but not really. 

So along the road to the Beaconator achievement, which requires a royal f-ton of iron ore, I got the achievement for riding a pig and then falling from a height to injure it. I only needed to fall about six meters (six block lengths) to knock half of the pigs health down to get the achievment. I didn't want to fall farther for fear of killing myself or the pig. A saddled pig is a rarity, or rather, the saddle is a rarity. Afterwards I corralled the pig so Mark could get the achievement too later. 

Then I got the achievement for shooting a skeleton from 50 meters with a bow and arrow. This seems easy but 50 meters (or blocks) is actually really far. You can barely see your target at that distance and at night, when the skeletons come out, it's even harder. It took me several attempts in between runs into the mines to finally get the right distance. What made it better was that I finally got my bow enchanted to shoot fire arrows and, from a great height at night, the firey bolts look really cool streaking over the landscape. I got it in the last minutes of our game time too, which made me cheer.

During this chase for achievements, I made good use of most of the forms of transportation in the game. I used horses and boats to get to mine locations. As for minecarts, once we build the Beacon, we'll have so much iron, that we can then build a railway and go for the achievement for riding a minecart 500 meters in one direction. That's like half way across the entire map! It'll take a incredible amount of iron to build, but I think we'll have plenty after building the Beacon. That takes over 2000 bars of iron! 

Minecraft is something else. I look at my stack of other games right now and ask myself, why. Why would I want to play some game with a very directed experience when I can do whatever I darn want in Minecraft. Well, I think I might change my mind eventually. I do feel the tug of the shooters and RPGs a little bit. Maybe when these achievements are done, I'll find Minecraft without much purpose and play something else. We'll see.