Unavoidably ... Minecraft

 

Wrapping up my series of gaming superlatives, we've come to the largest user base in gaming history and probably they biggest modder community as well.  And if those could somehow be argued, it has at least been, hands down, the best bang for the buck of my life.  Good ol', Minecraft.    It was about $20 back in 2007, still in beta, and 13 years later, they're working on 1.17.

Here is my home page for my Minecraft ventures over the years.  I have played or tested nearly 1,000 mods over the years, and built and released a few modpacks of my own.  I was doing Minecraft videos (let's plays and tutorials) in the version 1.4 to 1.7 days; it was fun taking imaginary viewers on my expeditions with me, riffing comedy skits with the zombies, but ultimately YouTube got flooded with so many super-high resolution videos and live streams that my equipment just couldn't keep up.

I have about 10 massive modded worlds now, which I cycle through, a few months playing one universe, a few months with another, and each time I switch back, it is just a delight to revisit those place, maybe find some far-off building sites I had forgotten about.  It is amazing how each world can have thousands of different items and recipes.  Each with effectively infinite blocks to explore and move, and tunnel through, and whole technology trees to craft and figure out.  Within each world, I have 8 or 10 or 50 villages, settlements, outposts, lonely towers, mining colonies, and I try to make each one a little bit different.  The world works best for me when resources are only available in certain areas, so one town may be the only place that makes holy hand grenades, and another town may specialize in quarried stone (while ignoring other blocks).  Some worlds have pre-generated castles and structures, some of them bigger and better than anything I could have dreamed up myself, some of them with whole legions of walkers or goblins to defeat before claiming the place, moving in, slowly transforming into one of my bases.

I have never seen a game that pulled off such simplicity so effectively.  Really, just pick up blocks, place them down, harvest resources, craft new blocks, that's it.  The vanilla game is pretty dull to me, and the core team with their million dollar budgets somehow take a whole year to add the most basic items.  

But then there are the modders who can crank out massive, incredibly well designed add-ons like IndustrialCraft (yes I remember when that came out), Tinker's Construct, Thermal Expansion, Big Reactors, NuclearCraft ... okay, I started with technology mods ... well, at that point, there are actual engineering challenges, like generating high voltage, building whole power grids, stepping down the voltage at key junctions, making sure every machine has the right current, or they might explode.  

Then there are the food mods, top of the heap being Harvestcraft (thanks, Pam), which add new challenges like growing all the crops needed to supply a variety of restaurants: setup one shop with all the burgers, add an Italian restaurant, take a break from mining to try all six donuts and just work on the logistics of it all.  

And the magic mods: Thaumcraft, Botania, Astral Sorcery and many more, each with detailed in-game reference books and whole new ways of thinking.  

Tired of the same old mobs?  Go with Better Dungeons or Advent of Ascension or OreSpawn (OMG) and you will never be lonely again.  Add Infernal Mobs to have a chance of randomly boosting any mob into a potentially town-destroying, teleporting, regenerating sparkly force from hell ... each with its own hilarious, smart-ass name up in the boss bar.  

New mods are coming out all the time, rising to dominance for a few versions then fading away to make way for the next wave; a constantly shifting spectrum of toys, all embodied in blocks and inventory items.  Anyway, the point is that while waiting for a few new blocks from Mojang itself, a modpack may update six times and bring in hundreds of new things to play with.  Or start a new modpack: it's not unusual for them to have 3000 or more new blocks and items to figure out.

So, for $20, I got hundreds of hours of puzzles, exploration, and video tales to tell, and the worlds are still there on my hard drives, waiting to welcome me back again.  Sometimes, I do other things for a few months, but it is like re-reading a favorite set of books.  I can close my eyes and walk through the worlds, which comes in handy as a meditation tool or when in the chair at the dentist ("if you need me I will be in a virtual world"), but a bit annoying when I am trying to sleep at night and it won't shut off.

I kept a blog journal of the daily adventures for a while. Odds are, any specific urges to write about Minecraft in particular will be added over there.  But, for this current blog, my personal experiences with various games, that's where you might find me after hours.