will always lead you back to your bed.
Even without a bed, the night went by quite fast, as I was trying to soak up as much information as I could from Jerry.
Finally, when the sun came up, the both of us went out into the forest once more.
“We need to gather some more materials,” said Jerry. “You focus on harvesting some more wood and I’ll try to find some animals. Maybe I’ll find some more sheep so we can have some more food. Keep a look out. There may be other players. This place is quite old, but I don’t think it’s deserted.”
“Ok. I’ll be sure to have my sword close by,” I told him.
And just like that, Jerry disappeared, climbing his way back onto the mountain. I, however, made sure that I didn’t get too far away from our camp.
By the time Jerry got back in the afternoon I managed to clear up quite a lot of the trees in the immediate vicinity of our camp. I had gathered about a stack of oak wood and a few apples, too. I also gathered some seeds.
Jerry managed to come back with quite a lot of meat and wool. He then proceeded to cook the meat and craft a couple of beds for us to sleep in.
Two days had passed from the time that we had spawned on top of the mountain and our little cave began to look much more like a home.
“Don’t get too used to it, though,” Jerry told me. “We’ll gather as many and as much as we can carry and then we will set off to find a more hospitable place. But first thing’s first: we’ll start digging a mine tomorrow and we’ll start looking for some iron.”
A mine! I couldn’t wait to start digging deep into the earth. I heard that you could find all sorts of interesting things when digging deep enough. From resources like gold and iron, to things like lapis lazuli, which is a blue rock of some sorts, or red stone that you can use to build all sorts of contraptions.
And so, on the next day we started digging our way into the depths of the earth. The digging went pretty fast, I must say. At least I think it did. You kind of lose the track of time while you’re digging, because you don’t see the sun rising or setting.
We kept digging for hours on end and we found all sorts of stuff. We also kept close to one another, as it’s pretty easy to get lost when you’re digging.
I managed to find a large number of coal blocks, all bunched together. I started smashing the blocks with my pickaxe. The blocks cracked and turned into small pieces of coal that flew left and right. And as I laid waste to a coal block, I discovered another under it. I kept smashing away. Almost all of them were gone and the coal went into my inventory. I was quite proud of myself for harvesting so much coal. As I looked around, I saw that there was but one coal block left – the one that was under me. I started picking away at it. Jerry turned around and saw what I was doing. The coal block was splintering and at that moment I heard Jerry.
“Don’t dig straight down, Mike!”
But it was too late. I had already managed to destroy the block of coal from under me. Coal started flying everywhere and I fell. I kept falling and falling until I hit water.
I managed to swim to the surface and looked around. The light was very dim, but I could see a source of red light in the distance. I could hear Jerry’s voice from above.
“I thought I told you to NEVER dig straight down! Come on!”
“Sorry, Jerry! I’m fine, though. I managed to land straight in the water,” I yelled.
“Just stay put! I’m going to jump in there and help you come back up. Maybe we’ll find some stuff down there. Just stay put, okay?”
“Okay”
Jerry then jumped through the hole and landed right next to me in the underground river.
“Okay, let’s get to the shore. Keep your sword close. It’s pretty dark in here so we might run into monsters,” said Jerry.
And he was right, as soon as we got on dry land zombies started swarming towards us. We managed to fight our way through them and got into a small crack in the giant cavern wall. The crack was small enough for us to fight the zombies one by one. The zombies were relentless. About ten, green-skinned, lumbering, non-dead creatures tried their best to kill us. They quickly blocked the entrance to our newly-found shelter and launched attack after attack. Jerry and I stood shoulder to shoulder and lunged our stone swords at the monsters. We managed to land blow after blow, and with each hit the zombies turned red and bounced back. But with each zombie that we managed to turn away, two more would take its place. I got hit a couple of times, but luckily, it wasn’t enough to knock me down or separate me from my friend. In about five minutes, we managed to kill all the zombies. But as we got out of the crack within the wall, we heard a hissing noise. Quickly, the noise got louder and louder and then there was an explosion.
Apparently, while we were busy fighting off the zombies, a creeper managed to make his way right next to us. The explosion scattered a bunch of stone blocks from the cavern wall and it took a sizeable chunk out of our health bars. Jerry was the closest to the explosion, so he received most of the damage.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. But we best eat something and get out of here and we better do it fast,” said Jerry.
We both got out some cooked meat and ate it as we got closer and closer to the light source in the distance.
The light source turned out to be a great lava river that cascaded from the side of the crevasse and split into multiple rivers when it hit the cave floor. The rivers then flowed directly into the water. The light from all that lava lit the entire wall and most of the cave. We could see iron blocks, gold blocks and even some lapis lazuli.
“Well, we’d better make the most of our journey into this dark place. Stay close,” said Jerry.
We then managed to build ourselves a small shelter into the cave wall and we crafted about six furnaces to help us melt whatever material we found into ingots.
I don’t exactly know how much time we spent there, but we did manage to find a lot of materials. We crafted ourselves a couple of full armor sets out of iron: helmet, breastplate, greaves and boots. We also crafted a nice set of iron tools. Stone tools are ok, but iron tools are much better.
After I crafted my armor and my tools, I became more and more confident. I started wandering further and further away from Jerry and went on searches for materials all by myself. I managed not to get lost, because I had a system: whenever I wandered off by myself, I o built these small pillars that indicated the way back. Clever, right?
We managed to gather stacks upon stacks of resources and we decided to give the small tunnels that riddled the cave wall a try. That was a good thing as we managed to find even more iron and gold.
As I was digging away at an iron vein I heard this strange noise coming from the ground. It was deep and pretty scary. Jerry heard it too.
“What is that?” I asked Jerry.
“It’s probably a mineshaft,” he said.
“What’s a mineshaft?”
“It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s an abandoned mineshaft. It looks really cool and you can find all sorts of cool stuff in it. Imagine all the mine tunnels that we dug so far, but only cooler.”
“So, are we going to look for it, or what,” I anxiously asked him.
“Not today we won’t. We’re running low on food. We should focus on getting back to the surface and finding some more food. We still have some meat inside that chest of ours, but we will probably have to find more food. Maybe even build ourselves a small farm and plant some crops.”
After a couple of minutes we managed to harvest all the raw materials that were inside that tunnel. We then reached the main cave and headed to our shelter, in order to get the materials that we had put inside the furnaces.
We walked inside the shelter and emptied all the furnaces. But when we turned around and headed for the exit, we saw a long pair of black legs.
“Enderman,” said Jerry. “We’d best be careful. These guys are tough and we don’t know exactly
how many of them are out there. There could be just this guy or there could be more of them waiting for us.”
“How do we get past him?”
“We need some water. Water hurts these guys. We grab a bucket full and dump it near him. When the water touches him, he gets hurt and teleports himself away from it,” he explained.
“Well do we have any water? I don’t,” I told him.
“Me neither,” he said.
“We could always dig past him. Couldn’t we? I mean we can dig through the side wall and keep digging and turn right and reach the main cave,” I told him.
“We could do that, I guess. We don’t even need to get that far away from him,” said Jerry.
“What do you mean? Won’t he see us?” I asked.
“He will. But Endermen are different from other monsters. They see you, but they won’t attack you, unless you attack them first or unless you look them straight in the eye. For some reason, they really do not like that,” he said. “I will start digging past him. Follow my lead, and whatever you do, don’t hit him and don’t, I repeat, do not look him in the eye, or we are both toast.”
“Understood. Lead the way,” I told him.
Jerry started digging carefully, block after block. After two sets of blocks were destroyed, he started making his way out. He managed to destroy another three sets of blocks and finally we reached the main cave. I looked right and saw the tall, dark shape of the Enderman. He had long legs and long thin arms. His whole body