The Minecraft Experiment, day 19: The Tower

Tom Francis

Minecraft Diary - Day 19 - Lava Pit

When I first started playing Minecraft a few months ago, I played with a rule: if I die, I have to delete the entire world. Now I'm trying to get to hell and back. The diary starts here , and new entries currently go up weekly on Wednesdays.

World 10, deaths 9

In case merely being in hell was too pleasant, I am in a pit, in a sea of lava, in hell. I got to this island by walking backwards into thin air and laying a bridge beneath me as I went, but the floating Ghasts of this dimension smashed it with fireballs and knocked me off. The stretch I've got to cross to get to dry land is even bigger than the one that nearly killed me, so I poke a hole through the rock to check just how big, and do some risk analysis in my head.


That's what my calculations come out as. I'm not doing it. It's a miracle I made it to this halfway house without dying. Now that I know how dangerous bridge-moonwalking actually is with this many flying jellyfish around, the prospect of doing it for even longer with no safe haven between here and dry land is just stupid. I'll just take one of my, er, other options.

I can't dig any further down, because I'll hit the lava sea. I can't build up, because I'm surrounded by Ghasts and there's nowhere safe to go on this island. I can't go across because it would mean bridge moonwalking under fire again.

But wait - maybe I can go up? The nether world is a giant cave, and the roof is made of diggable rock. Building a vertical column beneath your feet is much faster than constructing a bridge as you walk, and once I hit the roof I could dig into it to hide from the Ghasts.

It didn't sound like history's sanest idea, but there wasn't a safer option. I dug around my little pit, hollowing out the small island I was on to gather as much rock as possible to slap down beneath my feet as I went. Then... well, whatever its flaws, my plan wasn't complex. Jump up, look down, place blocks.

The moment I hit open air, the Ghasts scream. It sounds like a pet shop going through a meatgrinder. By the time I've placed five blocks, the first four are obliterated by a fireball smashing into the ground where I started. At ten metres, I lose metres six through nine. I'm fifteen metres up when a shot hits the ground I'm actually standing on, sending me plummeting back to the tenth with a jolt. That's where I am when the first one hits me in the face.

The whole column is gone now, and it couldn't save me if it wasn't - the blast knocks me clean off it and slamming back down to the island. I scramble around the dark rock looking for my hole to hide in, and catch the edge of another blast. I don't have time to look, I break my cardinal rule and dig directly down. The ground gives way, and I drop into the large cave I dug out when I was collecting rock.

I'm almost dead, and my only hope of escape just got demolished. Hope you guys had a good new year, because I spent it in a pit eating ham and crying.

Next: I take the only way out .

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