PixlBit

I tried really hard at the Map Room achievement in Minecraft and came up empty but I learned a few things. Then I played a little bit more of Prey.

First Mark and I continued the world we played on Monday. He mined for diamond and I explored the world trying to piece together all the maps needed for this achievement. I discovered that the large world in Minecraft on XBO is a 5x5 grid and not 3x3 as required by the achievement. That’s the medium world. So I had to throw out two maps that were too far away. I started working on the maps just around the first map. I did it on horseback and by boat but there were so many twists and turns in this complicated world that it took a long time. Each area is only 864x864 bricks, or that many meters, .8 km or .56 miles. It doesn’t sound like much but try to navigate it on foot with no roads and mountains and rivers in the way. Just having to dismount from my horse frequently, leash it and drag it across rivers made me think of the endless trials Lewis & Clark had to overcome. I don’t know how they kept going. I got totally burned out on this virtual world.

So Mark and I quit that world and started a new one. This one was medium sized so it was exactly as many areas as was needed for the achievement. I mapped the first area completely and then tested a hunch I had. I hung the map in a picture frame and made a new blank one and activated it. It revealed the same area. Now I had a copy at the base, safe from harm, and one in my hand. As I revealed more of the area, both maps changed. Cool! The map in the frame looks really good on the wall too.

Then I went north to the next area I wanted to map out. I got there by boat easily and, as soon as I got there, I found a pyramid ruin. I got all the stuff out of it without being blown up and then did some more mapping. Along the way, I saw an Enderman and instinctively attacked it. I forgot I didn’t have armor on and got killed. I lost all my stuff plus the two new maps I was making. I tried to recover it all, but being respawned a whole map away, the system must’ve erased all my equipment. So. . . that was frustrating.

I started from scratch on the new map but soon I got killed again because I couldn’t find any food until night and then a skeleton archer killed me. That really soured me and I gave up on the exploration quest and just dug a mine back on Map #1 with Mark and got killed again when a skeleton archer followed me down an underground river system, shooting me the whole way down. It was getting out of control.

Mark and I both quit that world and we each started single player games doing totally different things. I cranked up the difficulty in every conceivable way and he put his on creative and built stuff. I was really getting into that hardcore play-through when time ran out on the day. I love playing with no health regen because it makes me play super carefully. Plus I kind of know I will not last all that long. Something about knowing it won’t take a long time relaxes me. These long term objectives just stress me the heck out. I’m kind of done going for the map room achievement. I need to keep objectives short to keep my sanity.

I managed to sneak in a half hour of Prey while Mark was out getting candy. This game, like many have said, really does feel like Bioshock in space. It’s survival horror in an interesting place full of readable and listenable objects. The mimics remind me of the head crabs from Half-Life except they can hide taking the form of any object in a room. I got my first skill tree upgrade and went for The Scientist route. I got the Goo Gun but haven’t used it yet. I’ve been picking up and reading anything I see. I’m always tempted to sweep rooms of all content but I’m trying to resist that and try and think about what I would actually do in such a situation. It would not be to riffle through every drawer and computer system I saw. I’m enjoying it. I just need to pull away from Minecraft, but I think today’s failures might have cured me of it for a while.