Tunneling Addiction

I think we need to talk.  I have a significant problem on my hands… and that problem is Minecraft.  What I mean by that is that I have been obsessing about the game since Christmas day, and wound up staying up until 1:30 last night.  I apparently was digging more tunnels that never seem to end… and just when they appear that they might… I find a way to start a new one.  I’ve said before how my bases in Minecraft tend to be more a complex of interconnected tunnels and underground areas than really anything big and above ground…  and in truth that is happening again in a big way.  The project I happened to be obsessed with last night, however was my treasure room.

When I play Minecraft, it is less that I am willfully building structures and more like discovering them in the existing land.  I almost always start out exactly the same way… which is burrowing into the side of a nice large hill with the purpose of creating a temporary shelter to survive that first night.  However what inevitably happens is that I then use that cave as a sort of starting point for burrowing deep into the hillside and connecting up a bunch of disconnected areas.  Then it is almost as though I am uncovering a lost civilization… and connecting up pieces to create a former empire or something.  Which lead to the thought that I really needed a proper warehouse/treasure room… and where better to put it than deep under the ocean.  I have a dock of sorts and off of it is a large building hovering out over the water… which then leads to my obsession of the night which is a large stairwell shaft that leads down into the water and underground beneath the ocean finally ending up in a room with tons of chests for storage…. and then apparently I dug a shaft back up to create a skylight of sorts.

There was then a point last night when I realized that I had no real way of getting back out of my tunnel system other than jumping from one of the many bridges I have built.  As a result I constructed this entrance point of sorts that leads out onto the mainland…  and being me I then apparently started off a whole new tunnel complex to the left of the above screenshot.  Now my previous tunnels had quickly ended up in the ocean… where I built some sort of an outpost.  One of which literally is a staircase that goes deep down into the ocean and all the way down to bedrock.  That was a bit of a challenge to build and I ultimately flipped on creative mode since I had to be underwater for large chunks of time during its construction.  It is cool however because as you are going down the staircase I have windows that allow you to see out into the ocean and it is really cool when the sun is coming up and the water is swarming with squid.

This new tunnel project however that has consumed most of today… is apparently going off in a direction where there is nothing but land and mountains.  So as a result each time the tunnel has broken free of the mountain briefly I have created a little outpost or at least an exit into whatever area happens to be surrounding it.  There are roughly five of these… and another that I discovered yet another ravine while tunneling, so I took time to build a ladder all the way down to its floor.  The problem with my tunneling obsession is that I have zero clue where exactly I am going or if I will ever reach a point where I consider it “done”.  This is ultimately the challenge I face each time I boot back up Minecraft, is that I get caught up in a project that I never quite know when it is going to let go of me.  However since it had literally been a few years since I last built anything in the game… I am guessing I had a lot of tunneling pent up inside of me.