houses, humming and sighing as they went about their business. Funny mobs, these villagers, they don’t do much, but at least you can trade with them.
On the outer part of the yard there were a bunch of bigger houses. These ones had two or three stories and lots of windows. Some of them even had balconies, with small pots of flowers and vines on the sides of the railing. I figured that those ones belonged to the players that lived in the camp. The far most corner of the yard had a stronghold made out of grey stone bricks and some sort of dark red bricks, like nothing I had ever seen before. Finally, the yard also housed a couple of farms that had crops of wheat, carrots, pumpkins, watermelon and even some sugar cane. The farms also had some animal enclosures with some cows, chicken and a couple of sheep and a couple of pigs. What they also had, were dogs, tied up to some wooden fences. What they didn’t have, were horses. I found that pretty odd, but I forgot about that detail pretty soon when I saw something else that drew my attention.
We finally reached the stronghold, after walking across the entire village, as the stronghold was directly opposite to the gates and the stone passage.
The stronghold opened its gate and out came a guy that was wearing a full set of diamond armor and who wielded a diamond sword. The guy slowly walked up to us.
“Greetings, guys! My name’s Micah, I’m the leader of this clan and sort of the…mayor, if you will.”
“Hi. I’m Jerry and this is my friend, Mike.”
“Nice to meet you. How did you guys get here?”
“Well, we found this…” I never got to finish my sentence because Jerry quickly intervened.
“We found this railway and decided to, you know, take a ride and see where it gets us. We’re sort of traveling around. We’re adventurers.”
What Jerry said, or rather what he didn’t say made me very curious. I made a mental note to ask him about it when we had a chance to talk in private.
Micah didn’t seem to pay any attention to the situation.
“Awesome. We don’t get many visitors these days. This place was really popular some time ago, a lot of players coming and going, building and crafting all sorts of stuff. But, some griefers spawned one day, a whole bunch of them. They really ruined it for everybody. Players started leaving, few remained. Eventually, the griefers left. But they left some things behind. Some bad, some good.”
“They left bad things behind?” I asked Micah.
“Yeah. I don’t really want to focus on that,” said Micah.
“Fair enough. So what happened when they left?” Jerry asked him.
“Well, a few of us remained, me and Zeke over there,” said Micah, pointing at Mr. Black Helmet. “We found this village and rebuilt it. Then these four guys came along with Trent, the guy from the tower. They were a clan in search of a place of their own. We became friends and formed a new clan and rebuilt the village as you see it now.”
“Impressive,” said Jerry.
“It really is, isn’t it? And you haven’t seen even half of it,” said Micah, probably bursting of pride. “You can stay with us for tonight, but if you decide to join us and our clan, you are welcome to stay for however long you want.”
“How can we join your clan?” I asked Micah.
“Eh, we will have all the time in the world to talk about that tomorrow. You guys just take a tour of the place. You’ll find that our Inn has good accommodations, even if we haven’t had any guests in it for quite a while. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
And with that, Micah went back inside his stronghold, followed by all of the archers, who by then had placed their bows within their inventories. The only one who remained in the yard with us was Zeke, who had to be our tour guide for the day.
“So. Sorry about the ‘warm’ reception, guys. We don’t get many players around here, just like the boss said,” said Zeke, our new “friend”. “Micah really got upset when those griefers came around. We really don’t take kind to strangers poking their pickaxes in our business.”
Jerry and I looked at each other.
“We’re not griefers, you know,” said Jerry.
“Right, right, I believe you. I do, really.”
He took us around the village showed us the farms and how they work. Apparently they had some sort of contraptions built so that the eggs from the chicken would get collected instantly inside a chest. They also had all sorts of weird contraptions that automated their crops. I had never seen things like those before, which wasn’t all that surprising, considering how big of a noob I was, but the most interesting part was that not even Jerry had seen most of those contraptions. When Jerry asked about a particular contraption that had some sort of red circuitry running through it, Zeke just brushed off the question saying that Micah was “the brains” behind that particular one and that only he knew how to build them. Zeke also specified that there was another location that had a huge wheat and vegetable farm, but it’s off-limits to strangers, or rather “new acquaintances,” as he put it.
The second part of our tour was about the houses, the player houses that is, which by the way, did not have any form of security on them. The doors were made out of iron and you could open them with a simple press of a button.
We stepped inside Zeke’s house, which was the only one that we were allowed to see the inside.
“It’s not much, but I like it!” said Zeke.
The interior was pretty nice looking. The floor was made out of dark wood, the windows were pretty big and let in a lot of light. Torches hung from the wooden beams that went across some of the walls. To be honest, Zeke had a lot of nice objects inside his house. He had a jukebox, carpets, potted plants, armor racks and all sorts of stuff. Upstairs he had a nice bedroom with a whole lot of paintings, a crafting table and a furnace. What caught my eye, though, was a funny looking lamp that he had on the side of his bed. It was made out of a weird looking block that radiated a warm light.
I couldn’t help but ask.
“Hey, Zeke! What is that?”
“It’s a lamp, man, obviously,” he laughed.
“But where did you get the materials?”
“I got that glow stone from the Nether. Where else?”
“The Nether?”
“Precisely. We make regular trips to the Nether. You find all sorts of stuff there. But it’s pretty dangerous, though. One false move and you’re either toast or you get completely lost. It’s really simple to do both of them. Compasses don’t work in the Nether and neither do maps, by the way. So unless you stick together with your guys or pay close attention to what you’re doing and where you’re going…”
“You get lost and you die, I get it…”I said. “It’s pretty dangerous right here, too.”
“Oh yes. Make no mistake: The Overworld is pretty dangerous, too. But there are things in The Nether that can scare the spots of a cow, if you know what I mean.” said Zeke
I didn’t know what he meant, but I sort of got the bigger picture.
When we finished seeing the upper part of his house, we went down the stairs and I saw a lever and an opening in the wall next to it.
“Hey, Zeke! What’s that?”
“What’s what? You mean that? It’s the basement. You’re not allowed in there. It’s off limits for strangers.”
I looked at Jerry and remained silent. I bet that he found that odd as much as I did.
Anyway, Zeke then escorted us to the Inn, as the day was almost over. The Inn was essentially a small house, one of those that were huddled up together in the middle of the yard. This particular house had only one room in it. The room had a crafting table and a furnace; a chest that had some loaves of bread and some apples in it and four beds. I wondered why there were only four beds in there. I mean, did they never have more than four players as guests in their camp?
But, as I walked up to one of the beds, it dawned on me! These weren’t real beds; they were made out of wood and carpets. Of course! They wouldn’t want strang
ers to sleep in their village. That way the strangers would keep respawning there.
That being said, we couldn’t sleep that night and we couldn’t go out and about, roaming the village – Zeke was kind of clear on that one that unless we joined the clan. As guests we were not allowed to roam the premises at night. And so we were basically prisoners, for the time being. Time usually flies when you’re doing interesting stuff in Minecraft, not when you’re sitting around in a small shack and waiting for the day to come. At least the two of us had some time to talk privately about all the weird stuff that we saw that day.
I went first.
“These guys seem pretty strange to me.”
“They don’t just seem pretty strange, they really are strange. I don’t know what it is, but they just put out this bad vibe about them,” said Jerry.
“Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask you this: why did you interrupt me when I was about to say that we were in that abandoned mineshaft?”
“I didn’t want them to know about it. I didn’t think that it would have been wise. I mean, you saw the way that they treated us. Their tunnel led straight through to the abandoned mineshaft, the abandoned mineshaft from which we gathered almost all of the visible resources. What if they thought that it’s their mineshaft and their resources and that we stole all of their stuff? I mean that railroad was obviously built by them. Although I don’t really know why the end was missing.”
I guess Jerry was right. I certainly didn’t trust