semi-rhetorical question
Why does it bother me so much to get lost in MineCraft?
I'm not talking about odd situations like "fell down hole with no tools, waiting to die of hunger" (last night's situation) or "stuck in an endless desert with no trees whatsoever" (one of my iPad worlds; I started at place-with-trees, because I have tools and torches, but right now I can *not* get out of the desert, and I am running low on said tools and torches, and trees are kind of necessary for those things; you can eke out a basic existence with just wood and cobblestone (since logs can be burned into charcoal), but you can't do diddlysquat without trees). I'm also not really talking about "I built a perfect scale replica of the Enterprise and don't remember where it is" or whatever.
Just ... getting lost. Having to start over.
Basic early-stage gameplay (on survival) is: punch trees for wood, get basic tools, get torches, get basic shelter. Survive first night. Figure out food source, go looking for resources, upgrade tools, kill things, survive more nights, go out for more resources. Upgrade home base to have chests, furnaces, maybe some decorative stuff.
Sometimes, in foraging for resources, I lose track of where home is. And it frustrates the hell out of me.
Like, my non-desert iPad world? I spawned on a savannah, so had several stairstep-trunk trees, so I just adapted one into a treehouse: partially done, with an 11x9 floor of acacia wood blocks and a frame but no walls or ceiling. I decided I wanted the walls to be mostly glass, so I went off in search of sand to smelt down. Found sand; found a NPC village; have no fucking idea where home is.
Now, the rational reaction is one of two things:
1) Shrug and make a new home base, maybe (in this example) centered on the NPC village. It's not like old home base had a whole lot, and all of what's there -- furnace and crafting table, wood, cobblestone, coal, a modicum of iron -- is not just replaceable but *easily* replaceable.
2) Temporarily make a place to store stuff, dig down far enough to get redstone, make a compass, follow compass back to spawn (while leaving trail if I want to do a more permanent pathway)
But somehow my brain flips out and chooses door number 3:
3) Panic, flail, and stop playing that world, with sometimes the added bonus of wanting to quit Minecraft altogether, though I usually end up just creating a new world to play in.
The odd thing is, there is *no actual advantage* to starting a new world instead of continuing with the old one. I mean, either way I've "lost" the time and effort put into making the first (usually basic and crappy) shelter, and the shrug-and-rehome option at least allows me to start with some resources on hand. And yet I can't seem to do it. I'm too disappointed to take it further.
Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has
comments
I'm not talking about odd situations like "fell down hole with no tools, waiting to die of hunger" (last night's situation) or "stuck in an endless desert with no trees whatsoever" (one of my iPad worlds; I started at place-with-trees, because I have tools and torches, but right now I can *not* get out of the desert, and I am running low on said tools and torches, and trees are kind of necessary for those things; you can eke out a basic existence with just wood and cobblestone (since logs can be burned into charcoal), but you can't do diddlysquat without trees). I'm also not really talking about "I built a perfect scale replica of the Enterprise and don't remember where it is" or whatever.
Just ... getting lost. Having to start over.
Basic early-stage gameplay (on survival) is: punch trees for wood, get basic tools, get torches, get basic shelter. Survive first night. Figure out food source, go looking for resources, upgrade tools, kill things, survive more nights, go out for more resources. Upgrade home base to have chests, furnaces, maybe some decorative stuff.
Sometimes, in foraging for resources, I lose track of where home is. And it frustrates the hell out of me.
Like, my non-desert iPad world? I spawned on a savannah, so had several stairstep-trunk trees, so I just adapted one into a treehouse: partially done, with an 11x9 floor of acacia wood blocks and a frame but no walls or ceiling. I decided I wanted the walls to be mostly glass, so I went off in search of sand to smelt down. Found sand; found a NPC village; have no fucking idea where home is.
Now, the rational reaction is one of two things:
1) Shrug and make a new home base, maybe (in this example) centered on the NPC village. It's not like old home base had a whole lot, and all of what's there -- furnace and crafting table, wood, cobblestone, coal, a modicum of iron -- is not just replaceable but *easily* replaceable.
2) Temporarily make a place to store stuff, dig down far enough to get redstone, make a compass, follow compass back to spawn (while leaving trail if I want to do a more permanent pathway)
But somehow my brain flips out and chooses door number 3:
3) Panic, flail, and stop playing that world, with sometimes the added bonus of wanting to quit Minecraft altogether, though I usually end up just creating a new world to play in.
The odd thing is, there is *no actual advantage* to starting a new world instead of continuing with the old one. I mean, either way I've "lost" the time and effort put into making the first (usually basic and crappy) shelter, and the shrug-and-rehome option at least allows me to start with some resources on hand. And yet I can't seem to do it. I'm too disappointed to take it further.
Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has
comments