Beyond the Far Lands

==Prologue==
Have you ever heard of a mod called "Beyond the Far Lands?"
It wasn't posted to many of the big modding websites, certainly not the Minecraft Forums. It doesn't have a page on the Minecraft Wiki, or the Minecraft Modding Wiki. Until now, it didn't have one on the Minecraft Fanon Wiki either. But, if you were on some of the more obscure Minecraft modding websites back in the 1.5-1.7 days, you might have heard of it. 
It made waves on the sorts of sites that had a habit of ripping mods off of other websites and redistributing them en masse without permission. A good reason why this mod wasn't popular outside of that limited sphere, was that the mod was malware; At least it appeared to be. With the mod installed and loaded, it became impossible to close Minecraft down without the game deleting each and every world you had saved, along with everything in your mods folder. If you tried to trick the game and used the task manager to forcibly close the game, or pressed alt+F4, the worlds would instead be cleared once you turned it back on. Additionally, the mod must have somehow altered the way world saves work because, if you copied any world save directly from the files while the game was running, closed it, then pasted the world back in, the world would be corrupted and could not be recovered.
While you might think the mod was just a mean-spirited, somewhat overly elaborate troll, you'd be wrong. And I know because I've seen the evidence. With my own eyes now, but back then, I instead saw it through screenshots posted in the comments section of the mod's page. I'd unfortunately managed to ignore all the warning comments before downloading the mod, because whatever website I was using (I can't even remember of the name of it all these years later) was full of bots and spammers linking phishing websites. I'd eventually just learned to tune out most of the comments and look for the ones that actually included screenshots of the mod.
The enormous, towering visages of the Far Lands made the mod irresistible at the time.
According to the few players who had played the mod for any substantial length of time, it did indeed re-add the Far Lands from Minecraft Beta Edition to the, at the time, modern versions of the game. However, from what I could gather, it would "disable" creative mode and cheats once you arrived near the actual farlands, which could cause you to plummet out of the air and die.
If you explored further in, however, there was supposedly more to the mod than just a re-creation of a novel feature banished to the outer reaches of the game. Of course, traversing the towering, twisted Far Lands was much easier said than done... Due to the mod's malicious features, it's obvious in retrospect that all of the reviews were from players who had only just begun to use it.
I tell you all this because, I was one of the victims of that mod back in 2013. I had installed it alongside a ton of others and while switching back to my browser randomly I happened to notice a warning from another user on the mod's page trying to warn other uses that the mod would delete your worlds. When that exact issue happened to me, it turned me off from Minecraft for several years. But more recently, I became much more interested in the mod, and wondered what exactly it was trying to do.
The reason I've elected to write this account now is because, just a few days ago, on the back pages of Google, sifting through irrelevant results and old corporate pages, I finally found what I was looking for.
It was a link to page hosted on a website called something like "Minecraft Emporium dot com." The page took nearly a minute to load, and when it finally did, my eyes were assaulted by a violently bright, deep ultramarine blue background with white lettering. Where any modern website would use thin white or black lines, the emporium used thick, detailed bars with metallic gradients. The website bombarded me with no less than 6 different "Download" buttons, all of various fonts and sizes, several of them flashing gifs practically screaming and wailing for attention. I was thankful for Opera browser's built-in adblock, which reported blocking an obscene 19 different ads, and 31 trackers.
Carefully picking out which download link lead to the actual download, I clicked it, and the crippled website took what seemed like a generation to finally navigate to the download page and begin the mod's actual download. Soon enough, a file named "FarLandsBEYOND 1 16 4.jar" was secured in my, now otherwise empty, mods folder. Huh, I hadn't expected it to be updated for a modern version of the game. I almost would have preferred to play it in its original form but, obviously I wasn't exactly overwhelmed with options. This was the only version of the mod I'd managed to find after months of searching, and I was going to play it.
I triple-checked that I had backed up and relocated all my saves and mods, as well as an entire second backup of every sub-folder in the Minecraft folder just in case, before I booted up Minecraft. It wasn't long before I hovered my mouse over the play button and started the game up.
It had never occurred to me to look more into the website I'd got it from, before playing...
==Chapter 1 - The Wall==
I barely glanced at the normal-looking main menu before diving headfirst into a new singleplayer world. The mod didn't seem to alter the game's menu screens at all. The obvious course of action was to put myself in creative mode and teleport myself to nearby the Far Lands. I had to look up where the coordinates were supposed to be and soon enough typed in /tp Spinosaurus4 0 64 -12550800
The game teleported me to an unloaded chunk, and I gazed up at the infinite sky sprawling in all directions, as my view slowly sunk down into the invisible ground. Soon enough I found myself on the surface, staring up at the enormous wall of the Farlands. I moved in a bit to get a closer look, but as soon as I hovered forward, I was suddenly switched back to Survival Mode!
Plummeting to the ground, I tried to switch myself back, but soon realized this would be impossible. The commands weren't even recognized. And now, the challenge of this mod was made clear - Make it through the Far Lands without using cheats or creative mode.
I briefly considered starting a LAN server and trying to enable cheats that way, but I figured the mod would have an answer to that, and it might just end up crashing the game or something like that to get back at me for even trying, so I decided against it. Instead, with 10 hearts separating me from being cut off from this elephantine complex of incomprehensibly glitched blocks, I stepped forth towards the Far Lands.
The Far Lands, as expected, were an titanic system of towering, brutally unnatural landforms. At 12551040 blocks north, and everything south of that, the landscape was totally normal. But starting at Z -12551039, it jolted upwards in a series of massive monoliths that plateaued at 128 blocks tall. Along the way up these geological anomalies lay shady valleys and grottos and tunnels, which would no doubt be consumed by darkness if not for the rays of light that trickled down in modest volume from above.
As I approached the intimidating, starkly bizarre landscape of the Far Lands, I noticed one interesting detail with the water. Below a certain point, the Far Lands were completely drenched in water. Every space not taken up by the Far Land's walls was flooded. As you can see in this screenshot, this point seemed to be above the normal sea level by just one block.
As a result, the "rivers" in between these gigantic stone walls looked to be constantly flowing into the normal world's lakes and rivers. It gave the impression of some immense, untapped volume of water constantly pouring out from the edges of the world, and gave the Far Lands quite the "larger than life" feeling.
Now, if you've ever been to the Far Lands yourself in Vanilla Minecraft, you probably know that the area is essentially a plateau wrought with fissures dividing it into separate walls, and those fissures tend to be filled with very aggressive, angry mobs that want to kill you. I had unthinkingly begin approaching without considering the danger, when my mind jumped to thoughts of being leaped on by spiders, skeletons, creepers, and zombies as soon as I entered. Backpedaling slightly and peering into the tunnels ahead, I slowly realized that these enemies weren't spawning...
In fact, I realized that the edge of the Far Lands demarcated a dead stop, after which all mob spawning seemed to have been disabled. Passive, hostile, and neutral creatures alike seemed to have deserted all land past Minecraft's normal map. Like the Event Horizon of a Universe, an unseen barrier lay twelve and a half million blocks away from the world's spawn, creating a border at which the game's normal mob spawning parameters could not effect anything that lay beyond. An effect of the mod, no doubt, but why remove the mobs? Maybe they were trying to make it easier on me?
Then I realized that I wouldn't be able to get much food inside the Far Lands, without any passive mobs to cook up. So much for being easier. I collected some wood and cobblestone, crafting a sword and some tools, just to be safe, and was able to kill some pigs for food. Staring at the awe-inspiring visage of the abandoned world that lay before me once more for a few seconds, I reclaimed my crafting table and furnace, and ventured forward.
Before even entering, though, the first question was whether to enter the Far Lands by land or water. Scaling a 60-meter tall sheer cliff face wasn't exactly feasible so I dove down into the deep blue, flooded passages that lay below sea level+1.
In the submerged passageways, as above land, the landscape was alien and unnatural. The chasms that ran ceaselessly through the Far Lands were ever-present underwater too, creating an environment that seemed endless in every direction - A blue void ahead, and a black one beneath, as the water snaked down, down, down, into the dark below me and seemed to stretch on forever before me.
Aside from me, the water was devoid of life. No fish or hostile mobs of any kind could be found here. However, I did come across this abnormality:
In the screenshot, you can see some sort of atypical generation of lava through water. Is this even possible in the normal game? I really don't think it is, even with commands or something like that. Weird how it generated cobblestone at the bottom, but the lava and water seem to be magnetically repulsed by eachother everywhere else. I saw a few more of these in the Far Lands, but this was the only screenshot I got. Obviously, I avoided swimming into these things whenever I saw them.
I thought of something and hit F3 to confirm my suspicions. My coordinates were 75, by 62, by -12,550,969. What I was really interested in, though, was the biome. Sure enough, in the biome section, where it would normally say something like minecraft:Ocean or minecraft:Taiga, it instead said just "Far Lands" which was strange since, I can't remember ever seeing a modded biome that didn't have a prefix denoting what mod it was from. I chalked that up to the "unique" nature of this mod and kept exploring, deeper into the Far Lands.
As I explored further, I noticed that the daylight cycle seemed to be greatly slowed down. I knew it was still progressing somewhat since it was dawn when I'd started, but the day seemed to be going much slower. For now, that was good, but that also meant the night would be a lot slower too. I didn't like the thought of that.
As it turns out, my intuition would be right...
But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Eventually, I managed to climb and sidle my way through some diagonal tunnels and get out of the flooded bottoms of the chasms and onto land. Something important to note is that, the further I got into the Far Lands, the worse Block Lag got when mining. If you've ever had to deal with it on a server, you know how annoying it can be when you have to mine the same block 5 times to get it to actually break. As a result, I just avoided mining whenever possible.
Another noteworthy thing about the Far Lands is that, once you were inside, only blocks from Beta Minecraft and earlier seemed to generate. If I had to guess, the blocks were supposed to be accurate to Beta 1.7.3, the last version prior to the Far Lands being removed, but Beta 1.7 didn't add any relevant blocks so it's hard to be sure. The Far Lands mostly consisted of stone, with dirt and grass on the tops of the walls, and some veins of gravel and coal ore (the only ore to generate this high above ground, aside from the nether ores that cannot be found in the Overworld). The only foliage here consisted of oak trees, birch trees, and dandelions, alongside good old-fashioned grass. (Though there were also some spruce trees near where the Far Lands bordered the normal world, in this case a spruce-filled taiga.)
Once I got far enough, being able to look behind myself, and in front of myself, and see a sight something like this in both directions gave me a very strange feeling. I felt like an explorer who had gone too far and fallen off the edge of the world, landing in an impossible and unearthly area beyond both the geographical boundaries of the world and the bounds of how the world is supposed to look and work. The glitchy, unnatural chasms and walls seemed to continue like this forever, far beyond what the eye could see.
It was just a game, of course, but it still made me feel strange to see landscapes like this. Probably a combination of my nostalgic connection to the game, and the music, which had started playing. It was the song "Oxygene," also called nuance2.ogg. If you can't place the name to the song off the top of your head, I can't blame you. It's one of the shorter tracks in the game. 
I'd recommend you give it a listen, but to give you a gist, it's a track played solely with long notes from instruments that fade gradually in, and then fade gradually out. Listening to it, the way the instruments faded in and out seemed fitting to me, as if my journey had me passing the instruments at the same time I passed monolithic and towering features of the landscape, leaving them to fade into the fog behind me, as I left the normal Minecraft world behind me, and explored deeper into the Far Lands.
==Chapter 2 - The Farlanders==
I continued wandering the Far Lands for several thousand blocks, I noticed the sky still hadn't gotten any darker, even though I must have been travelling for more than 20 minutes, enough for a normal Minecraft day to have cycled through to a new dawn. The sun was now high up in the sky, seeming to be at its zenith. It moved at an incredibly slow pace, even as I tilted my character's head up to observe it.
I noticed, as I'd stopped walking to do that, how eerily silent the world beyond Minecraft was through my headphones. The Far Lands seemed to be devoid of any life. There were no stomping cows, or grazing sheep reducing grass blocks to dirt, or clucking chickens. But just as I prepared to move forward, I heard a distant footstep sound.
I spun my head in every direction, trying to locate the origin of the sound, but it was fleeting and soon gone. I stood still for a while yet, hoping to catch that noise again, but it never re-appeared. The Far Lands were bathed in an all-encompassing stillness yet again, one which I soon shattered by moving onwards. Each thud of my footsteps breaking the silence.
I walked for several more minutes before I caught sight of this:
It's obviously not really possible to tell what it is from this screenshot, but if you look closely, it's clearly some sort of pale yellow, humanoid figure with a name plate above its head. The nameplate in particular spooked me a bit. This was the only screenshot I managed to take, because as soon as I saw this being in the distance, I was attacked.
I was taken by such surprise that I didn't even manage to get a screenshot of them when they first attacked me, but I'll post a screencap I took of one I encountered after this event so you can get an idea of what they look like:
This monster looked like the default player skin, Steve, but it had its arms out in front of it like a zombie. It didn't use the zombie's groaning noises, or make any idle sound, but it did make footstep sounds, which I'm thankful for. If it hadn't been for the footsteps, I might not have noticed the first two that attacked me in time, and I probably would have gotten hit off of the edge.
I killed the mobs and they didn't drop anything as they vanished into a puff of smoke, making a classic "oof" sound on death. Once I looked back up to where the pale yellow figure had been, there was nothing there. Whatever it was, it was gone now.
A bit more on those mobs, while I'm talking about them. I referred to them as "monsters," because there was originally a mob in the game that used Steve's skin and was just called "Monster." It was removed a long time ago but, if you go to the Minecraft launcher and play some of the first available versions, you can see them back before they were made hostile.
These human mobs seemed to have an AI similar to that of a zombie, but they moved a bit faster. They also didn't burn in the daylight, but they didn't seem to like to spawn anywhere except the dark. Later on I was able to find two trapped in a grotto area they couldn't get out of to get to me, and I hit them bare handed to see how much health they had, and they were able to take 20 unarmed hits before dying. Much like the original human mob, I'd say they did about 3 damage, or one and a half hearts worth, each time they hit you. 
Here you can see me above two of them, who badly want to get at me, but can't quite reach.
From this point forward... I'd say around 5,000 blocks into the Far Lands, I started to encounter these monsters regularly. They were very rare, it seemed, but with no other mobs around, that still made them the most common.
After travelling another 5,000 blocks and encountering 4 more monsters, not counting the two who had attacked me originally, I noticed it was getting very dark. For some reason, I got a foreboding feeling about the night, like I shouldn't be exposed when it arrived.
The night was always dangerous in Minecraft, and I had become more nervous upon realizing I didn't have a bed. Given the lack of mobs, there was hardly any way I was going to make one. If I died, I would lose every last bit of progress I had made. 
Just in case, I slipped into a shallow dead-end cave and blocked off the exit with cobblestone. It would be a pain to dig out through the mining lag but, I didn't want to waste my wood on a door. Before sealing myself in, I'd mined an exposed vein of coal ore and crafted some torches.
Looking back, I'm really, really glad I didn't just make a door.
I stared at this craggy gray wall for several minutes as the sun dipped towards the horizon outside. I started to wonder if there would be no nightly danger, if things would remain unchanged from the day, and if I had just wasted my time being better safe than sorry. And then I heard it.
Well, at first what I heard were the footstep sounds I placed as being the same as those used by the monster mobs, apparently one of them was out there too. But that's not what I mean. I mean what I heard next.
Have you ever heard what it sounds like when programmers take human voices and compress them to fit them in a very old game, then the machine outputs something that sounds clearly off with the limited number of tones and sounds it can produce? A lot of you might be too young to have ever played a game that required that, but if you look up the announcer voicelines from the arcade game Gauntlet, you can get a pretty good idea.
What I heard a few seconds after the human footsteps, was screaming. Human screaming, digitized and compressed just like that. It sounded like several people, maybe several dozen, all screaming in agony. A vile cacophony of wailing and screeching quickly grew louder as its multiple sources all zeroed in on me from both directions down the path outside.
When I heard that noise, I tensed up and instinctively pulled back in my chair of discomfort, then in-game, I moved until my back was pressed up against the stone wall, and kept my sword out. As the screams grew louder and louder, it was only a matter of seconds until whatever was out there would be right up against the outer wall. While the mod had otherwise restored beta content, I definitely don't remember anything like that ever being in any version of Minecraft, it was like something out of a horror mod.
They were getting much louder now, I knew they were nearly upon me. It took me a second when I heard another noise to place it, I realized that it was the sound the Monster mobs would make when they took damage. By the time I'd realized that, the monster mob's death sound was already playing out. Whatever was out there, separated from me by just a one-block thick wall, had torn the monster apart in seconds.
Once they were done with it, I heard what sounded like dozens of footsteps on the grass just outside, and I was startled as I suddenly saw small cracks appearing in the blocks making up the wall as they tried to break it down. It looked and sounded like there was an angry mob right outside my front door, trying to knock it down to get to me. Several blocks started to crack as the overlapping screaming grew to its apex, now joined by loud, crashing sounds borrowed from when a Zombie tries to break down a door, as well as earsplitting metallic sounds like someone trying to break into a safe with a pick axe, which I later placed as an unused sound for a zombie trying to break down an iron door.
The blocks seemed to have only a percentage chance to break, much like when a zombie tries to knock down a door. I had no interest in finding out what that percentage was and barricaded the door with everything I had. I put my entire inventory between myself and whatever was out there.
As the night dragged on I ended up digging into the ceiling and walls to get more blocks to use as fortification. I was paranoid I'd dig too far and end up exposing another avenue for the aberrant riot outside to break in, but thankfully, that didn't happen...
Eventually, the noise died down, and I was left in silence again. I thought it might be a trick, and first dug out only a 1x1 straight line, hoping that would be too small for the violent intruders to get through; I hadn't seen them, but I saw them trying to dig on the second block up so, I assumed (and hoped) they needed at least a 2 block-tall space to fit through.
Cautiously, I peered out, and saw nothing.
I watched, and waited, the daylight was here, and whatever had assaulted my makeshift bunker last night was gone.
Before leaving, they'd shredded the wall, desperate to get to me. It was obvious that if I had left the game running and gone AFK to pass the night, I would have been eviscerated. 
I paused the game to get up and take a break, but couldn't get what I'd seen, and what I'd narrowly avoided seeing, out of my mind.
The deeper into the Far Lands I went, the more obvious the game made it that I was NOT welcome here. A new challenge had been made clear: Get what you can done in the day, and then survive the terrifying night raids. I wondered what the mod was sending these enemies to try and keep me from getting to, and I wondered what else would try to block my path as I went ever farther beyond the normal world of Minecraft.
==Chapter 3 - Bluffs and Fissures==
Navigating the Far Lands is not an easy task. While I was fortune not to be plagued by hostile mobs during the day, the Far Lands had many natural barriers and obstacles that would serve to trip me up. Because of the way the Far Lands is laid out, you are generally stuck on one path and switching to another that isn't directly next to it is pretty difficult, which can be a problem if your path runs into a wall or sheer drop down.
Normally you'd have the option to mine through walls, or fly in creative, but neither were reasonable options for me. The game cut off cheats and creative mode, and block lag made mining into the walls scarcely more feasible than mining through walls made out of obsidian. This also meant it would take ages to mine materials to build towers or bridges to get around, and worse, wasting those materials might prove fatal if I were to need them during the night raids.
Keep in mind that closing the game isn't an option, since it will delete all your saves, so aside from quick breaks, I had to finish it all in one sitting. Even aside from that, I needed to get to the other end of the Far Lands as soon as possible in order to keep the number of nights I would have to spend with the screeching swarm of enemies, that could crack through blocks to try and get at me, to its absolute minimum.
When my temporary base had been assaulted the previous night, I had not heard any screams from below or above, only from the sides where the path was. This made me wonder if perhaps these swarming enemies would not spawn on top of the Far Lands. Additionally, the paths on top of the Far Lands were MUCH wider and more reliable to use for transport compared with the narrow catwalks and promenades of the mid-Far Lands. On the other hand, the water might provide fish, which would give me food I couldn't last long without now. Without rotten flesh or even spider eyes the only other possible source of food was apples dropped from clearing trees, which looped back around to the mining lag issue.
I didn't spend much time deliberating. What ultimately made the decision for me, between the two, was that I could always jump back down from the top, but getting back up from the bottom was a much less feasible feat.
Starting this chapter out around midways up from the Far Lands' flood level, I was thankfully able to find an ascending cave fairly close to my starting point, probably part of the same cave generation as the shallow dead-end I'd taken shelter in the night before.
From there I walked forward a while waiting to see if the opportunity would present itself to climb up higher without expending blocks or mining time. Unfortunately, my luck did not hold out, as I instead came across a large chasm that gouged out the narrow path in front of me, making it impossible to advance. To my right, a drop, to my left, a sheer cliff face with an overhang, and in front of me, another drop. Thankfully though, I was blessed to have a new path begin just across a short chasm from where my old one ended. 
Too far to jump, but even in the Far Lands, mining and crafting is crucial to the game. I was able to halve the number of blocks used in all my constructions by crafting my cobblestone blocks into slabs before placing them down, which saved me an invaluable count of resources.
I put down my crafting table and built a little bridge to be able to get across the gap, and you can the finished product in the screenshot.
Continuing forwards, I was accosted by another one of the Monster enemies, but I'm thankful it was there because it alerted me to the presence of a dark cave secluded back under a shadowy overhang, which I might have otherwise missed. Dispatching the enemy with my stone sword, I clambered up again to a pleasant, sunny gulley only a few blocks below the maximum height. I walked here for a while before getting too impatient to wait for a climbable embankment, and set to work constructing a cobble slab staircase to the top.
When I finally reached the summit of the Far Lands, at 128 blocks up, I felt a slight sense of accomplishment.
As I mentioned before, the pathways here were spacious and much less likely to require a detour of your route. Nothing jutted up above you, and in the rare event a chasm opened up below your path, the neighboring paths were pretty much always close by to switch to.
The tops of the Far Lands also brought some new abnormalities and glitches I hadn't seen in the mid far lands or the flooded far lands. Specifically, there were these weird pseudo-snowy glitched grass blocks. I dug out the ground around this one to give you a good view:
There's only one in that screenshot, but don't be confused, they would sometimes dominate the landscape. They essentially looked to be grass blocks, only with the snowy grass texture on the side, and the foliage color tint mysteriously absent. Almost like somebody had scraped the snow off the top of some grass and exposed the dead, gray, withered grass underneath to the surface.
At around 15,000 blocks into the Far Lands, I started encountering two new mobs.
The first was what I call the Farlander Enderman:
These things look like Endermen, except they're white in color, and their eyes and particles are tinted bright green instead of purple. Interestingly enough, when looking up details on the endermen to verify that everything I remember being different for regular endermen from this one really was different, I found out that Notch originally considered naming Endermen "Farlanders," or changing the name of the Far Lands to "The End." Not really sure where this association comes from but, I guess their presence here makes some sense, at least.
Out on top of the plateau, I had no interest in provoking this dangerous mob, so I left it alone.
The second mob, some sort of cloud monster that only spawned at cloud level and above, was far more annoying.
This creature had the first new model I'd seen introduced in the mod, so I was interested to get a screenshot of it. The cloud enemies consisted of a few white cubes that swayed and bounced in the breeze, clearly meant to resemble clouds; They could float around and strafe around the player, keeping their distance if they needed to. They were a lot more challenging than any of the flying enemies in the normal game, who were purely offense-minded and made little effort to avoid damage.
The cloud mob had a ranged attack, but instead of shooting a projectile, it would get in somewhat close and then blast you with a gust of cold air. The attack only did 2 damage, or a single heart, but keep in mind that I didn't have any armor. Its face also changed from that weird zig-zag pattern to an open mouth when it was attacking, much like the Ghasts in the normal game can change their facial expressions. 
The main thing that made this mob annoying, though, was that its wind attack dealt a huge amount of knockback. When I fought it, I was expecting the mob to attack from the front, but instead, it strafed around to my right, so that when I turned to face it, a cliff was behind me. 
As you can probably guess, I was hit by a an air blast and thrown clean off of the ledge.
Down, down, down... Past pathways and catwalks and grottos, I plummeted straight down and crashed into the shadowy blue water below.
I sank down below the murky water and particles, a mixture of exhaustion and anger growing from being knocked all the way down after reaching the top. However I remembered I had needed to fish for food anyways, so, I tried to look on the bright side. Unfortunately, I would soon realize there was going to be no time for fishing.
You probably can't make out in the first screenshot exactly what was down there, neither could I at the time; But once I saw there were several black shapes in the depths that wanted to get to me, I decided very quickly that I didn't want to be around to find out what they were.
Unfortunately, they were very fast underwater, and my wish went unfulfilled.
This was the last screenshot I got of them as I had to pay close attention to avoid getting caught and no doubt meeting my end. These swimming monsters resembled a cross between the default Steve skin, and a drowning victim. Their mouths were permanently pried open, their skin had a bluish tinge to it, and patches of their blackened hair seemed to be missing. Their clothing was also grayscaled instead of blue.
They rocketed towards me underwater, much faster than I could swim, but thankfully for me, their speed came at a cost. Whenever one missed me, it would lunge past and slowly come to a stop before it was able to turn around and try again. I could bat them away with my sword to slow them down and skitter out of the way. 
The encounter demanded of a huge degree of accuracy and quickness, but thankfully, it was over within what seemed like only a couple seconds.
I was incredibly thankful to come across this waterfall springing out from right next to a cave. I was able to swim up it and jump into the cave. You may also have noticed it had started to get much darker by this point, and started to rain.
This wet, rainy grotto was home to yet another waterfall, which I jumped into and torpedoed up as high as I could get. I whirled around ready to fight in case the creatures had followed me, but they didn't seem to be able to come on land, even a darkened gulley during the rain.
Once I was done I came to realize I didn't need to fight, I needed to hide.
It seemed the night raid was, mercifully, only triggered by the night, and not by the rain, unlike normal hostile mob spawning in Minecraft. But the night was coming soon, and I would be overwhelmed without shelter. I had spent practically all of my cobblestone to reach the top of the Far Lands, a venture which ultimately seemed to be pointless now.
There were no caves to take shelter in now. Nowhere to hide. 
I slammed my pickaxe into the side of the cliff and slowly carved out a 2 block tall, 1 block wide crevice through the block lag, hoping it would protect me. I made my shelter deeper and used newly carved out blocks to barricade the way behind me, as I squeezed in to my pitch black domicile, and the sun sank beyond the horizon behind me.
As expected, the events of last night repeated themselves again. The screaming and wailing began in the distance and rapidly grew closer from the left and right of the path I'd come from. I realized that every night here would be like this, until I either reached the end, or died trying and got sent back to the beginning.
I hadn't wasted any time, though, and kept mining into the cliffside. The mining lag was intense and kept this from being a quick or easy process, but I only had to go two blocks at a time. Once I mined out two, I'd step forward, turn around, and place them behind me, to block the path the crowd of unseen terrors outside would have to take to get in.
I still hadn't seen them, but I could hear them clamoring behind me, trying to get in. I slunk further and further away from them, until eventually when I mined one piece of stone at eye level, I saw cracks forming on the wall behind it, in front of me. Quickly re-sealing the space I'd made, I realized I'd dug too deep, and that whatever the things were outside, they had me surrounded.
Thinking quickly, I changed course, turning to the left and digging in. Re-sealing the way behind me as I went. However when I saw a crack forming on another eye-level block behind me just before I sealed it off, the realization that the thin two-block stone wall on the east was not enough to stop them sunk in. The crowd outside seemed even more ravenous and quick than last night. I dreaded the idea that they may be getting faster with each encounter.
Forced to think on my feet yet again, I tilted my head up and began digging straight upwards, placing blocks below me as a tower. Would they be able to follow here?
It would seem not, because, only a few seconds after I started to hear digging directly under me, the sounds all began to quiet with the arrival of the dawn. I began a new day at over twenty thousand blocks into the Far Lands, but less proud of my progress and more worried of losing it. Near starvation and with the countdown to night already looming over my head yet again, I wondered what terrors would be waiting in store for me on the next stretch of my journey.
==Chapter 4 - Labyrinth==
When I unpaused the game, I was growing weary of having to beat it without shutting the game down even once. Of course, I had to press on or risk losing every bit of progress I'd already made. But for now, the same ends could be reached through another, more immediate threat - starvation.
You probably know that in Minecraft, almost all food is either dropped by animals or harvested from crops. With a more conservative definition of what constitutes "crops," you might also be able to create a third category for foraging for Apples, Chorus Fruit, Kelp, Mushrooms, or Berries. You can also obtain food via fishing, and there are a small number of very low-quality food items available from killing hostile mobs, specifically rotten flesh and spider eyes.
More concisely, you can get food from blocks, from mobs, or by fishing.
As mentioned before, there were no cows, pigs, chickens, or sheep in the Far Lands, nor even any rabbits, bees, or fish mobs, so I would not be able to slaughter animals for food. In fact, there weren't even any zombies or spiders or any other normal mobs from the regular game, for that matter. At first that had seemed like a blessing, but it was now quite the detriment, as I couldn't even use them as an emergency food supply.
The most promising prospect for crops would normally be wheat, which could be grown from grass seeds found almost anywhere. Unfortunately, "almost anywhere" did not seem to include my current location at the time; I hadn't really noticed before but there was pretty much no tall grass to be seen, aside from a small amount I'd spotted near the pseudo-snowy area much earlier, now quite a ways behind me. None of the other crops requiring tilled dirt were obtainable here at all, either.
There were no berry bushes, kelp, or obviously any chorus fruit; Trees and mushrooms were an occasional sight in the Far Lands, far and few between, there were none nearby for me to harvest now that I needed them. I really wished I'd thought ahead more, but it was too late for that. 
I thought over every possible option while staring at the dead, paused screen, before realising there was still one other way of obtaining food - Fishing.
Much to my luck, back at the beginning of my journey, before I had even entered the Far Lands, I had needed to obtain some coal from a cave in order to cook up some porkchops; When I'd gone into that cave, I was attacked by some spiders, who happened to drop enough string for me to use to make a Fishing Rod now.
While that may sound like a problem solved, it's important to keep in mind the events of the prior day, where falling into the water had made me realize the rivers of the Far Lands were tremendously treacherous. I didn't really want to get close, considering I only had one life, and approaching the river after that deadly encounter wasn't exactly a smart idea, however, it didn't seem I had much of a choice.
Sword in hand, I descended back down one of the two waterfalls I had swam up last night. Now too weak from hunger to sprint, even if I were attacked, I could only slowly slink through the shadowy grotto, prepared to stand and fight instead. I approached the mouth of the cave and was thankful that, if they came up after me, they'd all be bottlenecked into a small crevice. There they'd be forced into one-on-one duels where I could knock them back down and they wouldn't have a chance to gang up on me.
But as I peered down into in the deep blue waterline, I couldn't see any monsters.
Eventually I started fishing, but things were slow-going. When I eventually did catch something, it was just a piece of string. The Far Lands seemed to have their own fishing table - for those unaware, that's basically just a list of things you can catch with your fishing rod in each biome, and determines their percentage chance to be fished up. I say that because, after that piece of string, the next thing I fished up was:
This ugly, oversized, taupe angler fish. Its icon was much larger than that of the fish in the vanilla game, extending all the way up and into the black bar at the top of the inventory hotbar box it took up. It also had a glazed-over white eye that stared out into space. I can't say it was an appealing sight.
Do people even eat Angler Fish in real life? Well, in any case, I was going to have to eat this one or starve to death.
I placed down my furnace and started cooking it up, as I continued to fish. Much like no normal mobs spawned in the world above, none of Minecraft's regular fish seemed to bite in the world below.
I also didn't see any more of those drowned steves from earlier. I think maybe they only spawned because it was raining, or that allowed them to get closer to the surface? Or something like that. But I wasn't exactly going to jump in and test that theory out.
I retrieved the fish from the furnace after it had finished cooking. "Cooked Angler Fish" the item name said.
I was relieved that it restored two of the little drumsticks of hunger points with no further side effects. Still, I wasn't sure I wanted to meet the living variant of this fish, if one existed. 
I continued to fish and stock up - a few interesting things happened during that time. I grew increasingly paranoid that something would come up behind me and knock me into the pond, so I created a little fishing pier out of cobblestone slabs. I'm thankful I did because I might have missed the opportunity to take pictures of an odd occurrence if I had not.
At one point, a large figure glided under the water. It moved silently, and had it been deeper, I would have had no idea it was there. I caught sight of it swimming out from the northern tunnel and gracefully making its way south and out of sight.
While it didn't seem to notice my presence, I wouldn't wager on it being a friendly NPC.
Eventually I felt I had a good stockpile built up, having obtained some more string and other junk, as well as about a half stack worth of cooked anglers. I set off and hiked a ways before it started to rain. I wasn't going to take any chances and started setting up a shelter.
I had seen the night time monsters break through blocks, so they could get to me from the sides, and maybe from above, but could they tunnel up? I had found a good location to put that to the test and, above a large pathway, I carved out a little alcove and placed a nice cobble slab floor to keep me safe.
However, I wasn't depending on this to protect me, and just in case, I spent the rest of the day installing an emergency exit. It took the rest of the day due to the block lag, but by the time I was finished, it was fairly impressive. From my second story open room, a 2x1 tunnel lead out with two branching paths each leading to a dead end I could tunnel into as I had done to survive the past two nights.
Since the tunnels were cramped with only 1 block of space, I could place cobblestone slabs behind me along my route and cut the mobs off from reaching me. I'd also redirected a water source I'd found to serve as a waterfall elevator I could close off behind me, and even set some pitfall traps along the way using trapdoors
This time, I was ready.
Or so I thought...
When the screaming started beneath me, I was still on-edge. I was wary of being shot at with projectiles, or letting in a flying mob, but I almost considered mining one of the blocks beneath me to see what the mobs were doing underneath, when suddenly, cracks started forming in the floor without my input. The mobs were ascending and breaking through.
Soon enough I, unfortunately, finally saw what had been chasing me every night:
The first Farlander I saw was this revolting mob, that looked like a villager that had been skinned alive, only with raw, pink flesh also covering its eyes and mouth.
This skinned villager was the reason the mobs had been able to ascend - It placed down similarly fleshy, pinkish-red blocks and could tower up. It seemed that other mobs could climb these blocks similar to ladders, only they could be climbed from any direction. When the villager monster spotted me, it looked up and made a horrible wet, organic noise, like a dog hacking up a lung, that made me start backpedaling away from the hole in disgust and worry that it may vomit up some vile projectile attack at me.
I could see other farlanders swarming like insects in the dark below, but seeing this grotesque mob was enough to send me into evacuation mode. I turned and flew out the emergency exit, only to see cracks starting to form in the rock above, as more mobs dug down. I was able to capture two more behind a cobblestone barrier.
I don't even remember taking this screenshot, I must have done so reflexively. As you can see, these were two more mob types that joined the monstrous riot trying to get to me every night. One was a withered, gray creature with three eyes, and a torso covered in repulsive red growths. The other was a tall, purple monster with an enormous mouth, which stood taller than the normal two block limit, but seemed to have a hitbox that allowed it to walk through anyways. The latter monsters were the source of the loudest screaming noises of the entire crowd.
You might also notice a large crack is forming on one of the cobble slabs from the grey triclops creature trying to break through it. I didn't bother trying to kill these two as I saw more monsters fall into the hole behind them. I dashed across a canyon-spanning cobble slab path and saw that my alternative route had been overrun:
I could make out two other mob types from what now seemed more like an army of monsters all singularly focused on ripping me apart here. One was a black creature with a tapestry of stars or white speckles strewn across its body, wearing an ominous red mask (fittingly locked in a permanent expression of screaming or chanting) and wielding a golden sword. The other was some glitched mess wielding a crossbow.
I had placed these two paths close by and in visible range of eachother so I could see if one was overrun, so thankfully, it did its job. Unfortunately, this also meant I just barely survived as crossbow bolts wizzed past my head following a low-fidelity scream from the vaguely humanoid mass of pixels with a crossbow.
I passed through a chamber where I had set myself up to quickly tower up, and after doing so, caught one last screenshot; This one of the fleshy villager creature in good lighting and in its full nauseating "glory," building a tower of its own to race after me:
From there I was too preoccupied with survival to take screenshots. I took several hits in the back from the glitch-textured things as monsters dug their way in all around me. Most of the creatures were capable of running at a quick enough pace to keep up with me while I was sprinting. I couldn't sprint backwards, so this meant I couldn't really turn around and place blocks to halt their progress.
It was quickly becoming clear that I would not be able to evade them for long. The digitized screaming and occasional, stomach-churning, wet gagging noises assaulted my ears as I took one of the last turns towards the dead end my emergency "exit" ended at.
Thankfully, I had one last trick up my sleeve. I rounded one more corner and bolted into the waterfall I had redirected earlier. The monstrous wailing continued as the abominations swarmed up the falls behind me. They we right on my tail, but they weren't fast enough, and they were too dumb to see my next attack coming. 
I got up before them. and as soon as I was on the ground I slammed down block after block to bury the water source. The water disappeared from under the mobs and they plummeted back to the tunnel floor below. I backed away as they screamed below me and crossbow bolts whizzed uselessly into what had once been the waterfall hole.
I retreated and filled the tunnel up with a myriad of blocks I'd picked up from my excavation project behind me. Soon I'd sealed myself behind meters upon meters of solid rock. They tried to dig in after me, but I'd started digging in the opposite direction myself.
While it had taken great effort to survive, the day break brought an end to the attack. I now knew what I was hiding from each night, and if I'd been just a second too late in putting the vertical distance behind me with that waterfall, they would have reached me. All that filled me with motivation to put as much distance behind me the next day as I possibly could.
==Chapter 5==
To be added.
Category:Standalone stories
Category:Stories
Category:Pages by Spinosaurus4