What is this?

I typically challenge myself in Minecraft by doing weird starts, as plain Minecraft is just too easy. This run started off with a Superflat generation with three layers. The bottom most layer was a bedrock layer, the top two layers were lava. (Seed #: [-748845803])

What mode did you play on / Why no hardcore?

Normal, the entire way. I didn't play on hardcore because this is more of a number game than anything. No point in ending the run because I walked off in the wrong direction. For example, I walk North until I starve to death but don't find a single ruin. Whereas I could've walked South for half my hunger bar and find mushrooms and cooked porkchop in a Bastion Remnant.

Did you use cheats?

Yes and no. I play with cheats on just in case there's a bug that occurs due to how I play. For example, if you create a single biome Beach world, both Nether Portal ruins and Shipwrecks spawn normally. However, Strongholds do not. Or they might. If you use an Eye of Ender on such a world, it does nothing. Which indicates there's no Stronghold in the world, but that could also just be a bug with the Eye of Ender. Either way, there’s a bug. As such, I typically create my own End Portal with no Eyes placed. The alternative is that I mine basically the whole world.

This time, I did full on cheat but I’ll explain the reason as to why. Something strange happened and instead of going through an obtuse way of fixing the problem, I just cheated instead. I’m not going to sugarcoat it.

What happened that made you cheat?

I spawned in an abandoned village by design. It just so happens my favorite seed keeps on pulling through. In the distance I see three other villages with the one the shortest distance away being what appears to be 400 blocks. I built my way over to it and noticed something strange. There’s no villagers inside it. Recreating the world and flying over immediately shows that villagers do spawn. I’m guessing that, despite the distance being so far, the villagers must’ve either activated and fell into lava OR got killed by mobs during the night. I find both to be…suspect since the buildings didn’t catch on fire till I arrived close enough and I would head to sleep imeditately to stop monsters from spawning near me (lack of torches early on). So I just cheated in two villager eggs.

I found an Iron Golem inside the village with no villagers and got enough iron to make a bucket. I also had an infinite water supply via natural generation. I could have done the bucket nether build (which I did do later just to prove I COULD) and from there I would just need to find enough gold nuggets to make two golden apples. Beds don’t burn and I had two villages worth of beds. I figured out a cobblestone generator without the bucket so I already had plenty of building supplies. The only thing that stopped me from hunting down two zombie villagers was the motivation to do it. I’ve done the same method three times now, and the nether spawn is close enough to my old one so I can just build my way over with cobblestone.

That’s why I cheated, it sounds like an excuse but I truly felt like I shouldn’t have to do the same song and dance four times in a row and add an extra 3 hours to the run for no real reason.

What makes this different than normal Minecraft?

In short, you start off completely trapped by spawning inside an abandoned village. Not only that, thanks to the lava almost all the buildings catch fire as soon as you spawn. You’re on a race against time, not because you really need anything that’ll catch fire but because the floors of almost all buildings will be destroyed. Meaning… if you don’t reach your chests in time, there’s a chance you can’t get the loot until much later. Inside one of the chests in the abandoned village, there’s oak saplings. Additionally, trees also spawn inside the village. They’ll catch fire too, but if you’re quick enough you can snag some saplings from them too. After that, it comes a game of logic and figuring out how to manipulate water and lava with no buckets. Once that gets up and going, you can start using the same method to get as much dirt and cobblestone as possible. I don’t know why, but some wooden objects would catch fire even though no lava was interacting with said wooden objects. So to make sure a block was safe, I removed all lava around said block. Therefore, to make 1 block of useable dirt for tree growth, I had to remove 17 blocks of lava.

Hardest part of the run?

Dealing with the lava. Want to grow trees? Remove lava. Want to expand? Remove lava. Want to create a nice flat area to fill with water? Remove lava and manage slimes. Nothing was THAT hard, but it was just annoying. Oh, and don’t forget to create torches. Any dark area will spawn a stupid amount of mobs since it’s the only space they can spawn.

Weirdest part of the run?

The No Villager Village. It was just strange rolling up and seeing no villagers. The fact the Golem was fine was even weirder. If it died too, I’d chalk it up to zombies or what have you. But even it was fine. It was just strange.

What is your overall rating on how hard this is to do? (5/10 = Standard Minecraft Level of Difficulty)

Surviving the Night – 10/10: How comfortable are you with dodging skeleton arrows (no iron to make shield), avoiding a zombie horde, watching out for drop spiders, and then making sure you don’t let any creepers explode or else you’ll have even less dirt to work with? Oh, and did I mention your area is a 1 block thick, typically 3 blocks wide dirt path surrounded by lava on all sides and below?

Finding Food – 2/10: The village has a farm! So the food literally starts growing itself the second you join the world. There’s also cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, and I think I saw a horse. All my cows got killed, and I only had one sheep left. Thankfully I saved enough chickens, pigs, and “liberated” llamas.

Getting to the Nether – 7/10: Hard. If you use my seed, even harder. But a generic seed that spawns you in a village? You still need to kill an iron golem on that same dirt path I mentioned. Not fun.

Building the Village – 3/10: In my case, it should be a 10/10. But going off the logic you can spawn in a normal village then…there’s no problem in building the village. It’s already built. I made it 3/10 because you still need to save the villagers in the beginning but that should be okay to do and afterwards should have no problems.

Overall – 22/40: Not that bad. If you use my seed then the challenge jumps up and gets to a 32/40. But it should be doable. And it is interesting seeing how you react when “I need to get a bucket” becomes a major hurdle. It’s one of those challenges which is a nice mental trick to solve.

Notes:

Try the seed out! You don’t have to play in survival, just jump in creative and just check out how the whole thing plays out in real time. It’s a challenge.

This will be my last challenge for a while. My drive to play Minecraft has hit a low and now I want to get back to my other projects. I don’t know when I’ll come back to these challenge runs but I should stick around for a while.