PixlBit

Mark and I, in an epic show of endurance, finally made it to The End and defeated the Enderdragon. Then I played the first half hour of Prey.

The problem of getting Endermen Pearls was largely solved by just repeatedly hunting at night. This isn't so tedious if you go after every mob out there. They all drop useful items, so it's still worth it even if an Enderman doesn't show up, but I discovered they do show up and fairly frequently if you roam around a while. I mined below ground during the day, hunted on the surface at night. That was the plan and it worked perfectly. We had enough Endermen Pearls to make all 12 Eyes of Ender needed for The End Portal with some left over. 

Once The End Portal was open, I quickly refreshed all my gear, adding enchantments to everything, and dove into The End. I was mainly after the Dragon's Breath achievement. You just have to capture some of it in a bottle. The Enderdragon bombs you with its breath weapon leaving an area of the ground stinking with poisonous gas. I just put a bottle in my hand, walked into it and there you go, one bottle of Dragon's Breath. 

After that things got tense. You see, you can't leave The End properly without killing the Enderdragon. There are 8 dragon regenerating crystals set high on obsidian pillars that you have to destroy first. I shot 6 of them from the ground with my arrows while fighting off grouchy hoards of Endermen (look at 'em in the eye and they attack). The last 2 crystals had cages around them so we had to climb to the top to expose them. That was tricky with the dragon flying all around us. Oh, there were deaths resulting in respawns followed by hasty dashes back from the regular world to recover our gear and renew the fight. Eventually we killed it (or put it into hibernation, it's not clear which) and was able to return to the regular world with all our stuff. 

The next and last achievement concerning The End realm involves respawning the dragon again. You do this by recrafting all 8 regenerating crystals and putting them back on the obsidian pedestals. Tricky part is, each crystal requires an Eye of Ender and a Ghast Tear. By now we'd harvested a lot of Ender Pearls to make the Eyes of Ender, so no problem there. But Ghast Tears, boy, those are tough ones. You see, Ghasts live in The Nether. They are huge floating jellyfish-like demons that shoot fireballs. Most of the time they are far away as they shoot at you, so the trick is to get them over solid ground, kill them, and then see if they dropped a Ghast Tear.

So Mark and I dove back into The Nether and hunted the mighty Ghasts. What battles we had in there: fire everywhere, Withers, Blazes and Endermen all attacking at the same time - total mayhem. We rushed to try and get all 8 needed Ghast Tears but only managed 6 before we had to stop for the day.

Then as a last minute thing, I started Prey, which had been installing all this time. So far so good. You choose your sex and wake up in an apartment with your brother (I think) on the phone. He's sending a helicopter to pick you up for some kind of test before you both launch for a space station. I searched the apartment and picked up and read things. I talked to an AI and a technician along the way to the helipad. Then I started taking tests that reminded me strongly of Portal, although I didn't do anything as complex as that. I won't spoil what happens next but it was intriguing.

I want to play more tomorrow but it looks like Mother's Day is going to take up the rest of my weekend, which is fine. Gaming can wait for mom.