I wasn’t really coming up with a good idea for this post, so lets go with one of my backup ideas: featuring one of my Minecraft worlds.
This one is one of my oldest and most developed worlds. I created it right after biomes were introduced to Minecraft, on Halloween 2010, less than a month after I started playing. Biomes are different types of regions such as deserts and forests and jungles. Before this update, Minecraft just had one biome, so every part of each Minecraft world looked about the same. There was some variation, but compared to what we have now, it pales in comparison. I’m probably not going to feature my very first world since it really didn’t have much going for it, plus I was learning and thus made some very odd structures.
I think of this world as “World 5″, since that was its original name. When it was made, you could only have 5 worlds, and if you wanted another, you deleted an older one. Now, you can have as many as you want, and can name them what you want.
My main house on this world is a lighthouse. It even has working lights, sort of. Sure, there is an actual mechanism that properly alternates revealing and blocking off the lights on each side, but, um, you can’t see it from the ground. For whatever reason, the very top of it doesn’t change properly. This whole world has issues with loading areas, probably because it is a rather old world and so much has changed.
For instance, this desert has snow on it because it’s now classified as taiga, and the snow covered trees below now bear the characteristic color of a dry desert. I think the ice there is in fact recently melted. The landscape hasn’t changed, but the biomes got rearranged, and the weather and leaf colors changed with them.
Which is a bit of a pity, since I had been planning on building a chateau under those trees, a place devoted to the joy of snow. It’s a lovely little island in the middle of an ice-covered lake, after all. But now, the colors are completely wrong, and that chateau will never get built.
Speaking of unfinished projects, this was one of my more ambitious projects: a giant tree. I built it all the way up to the height limit, and was using optical tricks to make it appear like it went even higher. Now, I wouldn’t need those tricks. The world height got doubled. If I built a tree to the top of the height cap now, it would solidly dwarf this one. A few other things: the branches are odd because I built it before you could use shears to pick up leaves and place them where you wanted, so all those leaves come from growing a tree on a dirt scaffold, then I connect the bottoms of all those trees together. It took a long time, too, since this was before bonemeal was introduced, which grows trees instantly. Oh, and the smaller trees in the foreground look odd because they came into being as “trees” rather than the “Oak”, “Pine”, “Birch”, and “Jungle Tree” varieties we now have, and these “trees” leaves grabbed from all the new types rather than choosing one and sticking to it. There are four different types of leaves on those trees, and they drop different saplings, even, so I can grow birch trees in this world despite never seeing one in the wild.
I still like this world, since I’ve spent so much time in it, and it has some rather lovely features. I’ve got a house in the caves behind this waterfall, for instance. But it bears the scars of its age, and many features are missing entirely. I stop back in for the occasional photo, but I’ve retired this world. I now work on other worlds, though no other has gotten quite as much attention as this one did.
Still, every so often, I build something new for this place. Like a farm, and a place to keep my livestock. It just feels right to do so. It helps me remember how things can change.
