Hardcore Minecraft

Good Morning Friends. Sometimes you react to something in ways you didn’t quite expect, and that ultimately led to my lack of a post yesterday. Wednesday we had the swearing in of the 46th President of the United States, and while my friends were celebrating this momentous occasional… for me it felt like I had just finished something terribly strenuous and had hit a wall. Sure I felt elation and excitement for the things to come, but I also felt like this pressure that had been grinding down upon me was lifted and when I finally allowed myself to relax. That pressure had been shaping me in specific patterns that I was not even aware of, and with it gone effectively collapsed. Come yesterday morning I just couldn’t function enough to string together a post.

Gaming is always the salve that I used to medicate my wounds, but I spent most of Wednesday night flailing aimlessly between games. When I did land on something, it was Minecraft a game I have used so many times in the past as a warm blanket when I was not certain what else to do. There is something about the gentle soundtrack and the repetitive sound of mining that orders my nerves. I started dinking around with the beta on the Windows 10 client and started a new world with a random seed. Building a base in Minecraft always takes me back to laying in the Livingroom floor with scissors, tape and a sharpie building a Cardboard base for my GI Joe and Star Wars figures. I just sorta wish there was more to the game where I could create NPCs and assign them specific functions within it.

This is going to be one of those posts where I am not exactly sure what order I should be talking about things, but some background that I feel like we need to get out of the way. I first got into Minecraft 11 years ago and it was this specific video that hooked me. I remember watching this and then buying my way into the then Alpha of the game and the rest was history. We ultimately ended up getting a Linux friend to host a Minecraft server for my World of Warcraft guild and for awhile we spent way more time in that game than in WoW. All of that said it is impossible to explain the impact that this one video had on me, and in turn all of the people that I sold on the notion of playing Minecraft as well. I’ve been a subscriber to DavidAngel64 or “X” ever since but most of the games he plays on the regular aren’t exactly my jam.

Now we scan forward to yesterday and I discovered that Minecraft Hardcore mode is apparently a thing, and not only that but X is doing a brand new adventure series as he explores Minecraft after a very long hiatus. So for those who also had no clue about Hardcore mode, essentially if you take a Death in Minecraft it deletes your save game. So you have one shot and as a result the stakes are so much higher for everything. When we first started playing Minecraft it was shortly after the release of survival mode and everything in the world seemed new, interesting and dangerous. Guildchat and eventually server chat was filled with all of these discoveries we had made. The challenge however is that after awhile Minecraft became a “solved problem”. We knew how to get what we wanted and how the world as a whole functioned, and as such the adventure aspect was gone.

I have to admit I kind of miss the danger that Minecraft used to represent. Granted playing on Hardcore is probably going to make me significantly more cautious than I normally am, but also with that comes a sense of excitement each time I get myself into a situation that is going to be difficult to get out of. I did some research yesterday and it seems that Hardcore mode is only available in the Java Client. It locks the game to the Hard difficulty setting and then triggers special logic if you die keeping you from being able to play that world again… though I think in theory you might be able to do something to recover it and edit it to a different game mode. I believe you are limited in your ability to use addons and maybe those are limited to just texture packs.

Now I find myself contemplating doing a thing. Part of me wants to start a hardcore game and record my struggles, and then chop it up into 10-15 minute chunks as individual YouTube videos. I realize that this is precisely the exact thing that X is doing right now and that I am just copying this thing I saw… but also I think the struggle of trying to play Minecraft seriously after all of these years might lead to some humorous moments. The last time I played Minecraft with any seriousness was right before The End was first put into the game back in November of 2011. Since then there have been so many updates and so many changes to the way that the game functions. I would in theory once again be forced to explore the world and learn the systems as I go.

I’ve been in this habit for a very long time of when I play Minecraft I am doing so in order to build with some virtual legos. Often times this is in creative mode or at least survival peaceful to allow me to just aimlessly wander and build things. So part of me wants to play Minecraft in a way that locks me down a specific path that I can’t actually deviate from. Sure I know how to survive that first night, but how well will I do when the pressure is really on. How much of my base building skills will be useful when I am desperately searching for a reliable source of food? Things like going for Diamond weapons… become way less important than just finding a reliable source of iron and coal.

I am still not 100% sure I am going to do this thing, but I really think I want to. I just have to set aside some time when I can record in peace.

3 thoughts on “Hardcore Minecraft”

  1. I’d be up for checking out your vids too, Bel. I haven’t played Minecraft seriously for about as long as you have. I occasionally have looked into mod packs to revitalise the experience but never tended to get much past installing and loading into a world, puttering around and putting it down again.

    Oh- there was on exception to this, I forget when but it was definitely later on than 2011, I played online a fair bit on a server that while mostly vanilla, had some added systems like a skill based / learn as you go system with skill capping similar to UO, and a reagant based magic system.

    I quite enjoyed that, and played it as a survival-style MMO.

    More lately my exposure has been via my kids, my youngest in particular plays it a lot. But his builds get better and better, so clearly learning from the experience. 🙂

  2. I’ve been on a real Minecraft kick the last month and have been watching a ton of Minecraft on YouTube. If you do decide to record your gameplay you’ll have at least one viewer.

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