I Found Something Strange in my 1.6.4 World

This story is on hiatus. Writing might be resumed sometime after Beyond the Far Lands is finished.
A story written by for the Minecraft Fanon Wiki about 1.6.4
==Prologue==
It'd been a few years, I think, since I really sat down and played Minecraft single player. I've played plenty of Multiplayer, to be sure, but the game has sort of gotten... boring for me. I was voting the other day, you can use some websites to vote for certain servers and get your vote total in that server increased (giving you special ranks, gifts, etc. as well as just supporting a server you like), and it really got me thinking.
I used to love Minecraft, I'd play it almost every day. When I first picked up Minecraft 1.5.2, some 7 years ago now, it was really magical to play, in a way that's quite unreplicable today. Watching now-obscure, non-Minecraft, or abandoned channels like SkyDoesMinecraft or iancoullahan1 doing letsplays of maps, reviewing mods, or messing with their friends while exploring this vast and endless game.
There was always a mysterious, lonely atmosphere serving as a backdrop to industrious building and goofy antics of Minecraft. Who knew what was out there to be discovered? Who knew what sort of strange structures and creatures lay just beyond the render fog? Certainly not me. Rumors of Herobrine, strange houses, glitched giant slimes, UFOs removed mobs like the monster, or the enigmatic Farlands, along with the ability to obtain strange, normally unobtainable blocks like the Sponge in creative mode only served to reinforce the idea of Minecraft's world being an unpredictable, untamed frontier to be explored, hiding all sorts of poorly-documented secrets and curiosities ripe for discovery. I remember playing on my friends Rocket12345's and Kevo1496's servers when 1.6 came around, and with it the unobtainable zombie and skeleton horses, which we of course spawned in for our illustrious server upper class of admins and co-owners; If they existed, what else might lay near-dormant in the code, rarely spawning outside of some obscure corner of the map?
Well, things change. As the world of Minecraft became more and more familiar, the magic and the mystery faded. Enter 1.7, "the Update that Changed the World." I think if I were asked to pinpoint which update made modern Minecraft most distinct from oldschool Minecraft, I would pick this one. Between the addition of seven new biomes, the acacia and dark oak trees, 10 new flowers, stained glass, red sand, podzol & packed ice, the removal of huge oceans, and various other changes, such as allowing witches to spawn everywhere, this update, in my opinion, was the definitive start of "modern Minecraft".
I spent most of this update playing MinecraftPVP, a long-since shut down server where I played Sabotage, a Trouble in Terrorist Town-style game where the player tried to obtain good weaponry and armor while either figuring out who was a saboteur or, if you were the saboteur, killing everyone indiscriminately. I especially fondly remember buying a saboteur perk that allowed the player to explode upon death, and then heading into a machine that would test if you were a saboteur or not, letting the surrounding players kill me upon learning I was a saboteur, and exploding along with the machine upon dying.
While I loved Minecraft during this update, the single player mode wasn't doing it for me any more, at least in Vanilla. Once you really start to have a concrete grasp of what is and isn't in Minecraft, familiarize yourself with all the recipes, know every mob and its behaviors, well, you may be a "pro" and look cool to "noobs," but the sense of wonder starts to fade. Why explore when you know everything you might find? Why wonder what might be out there when you know exactly what is? The sense of mystery, the sense of intrigue, the sense of adventure started to fade for me, and I think a lot of other players as well. I tried a variety of mods to make up for this, and kept singleplayer fun that way, until one day I logged onto my main world and found a huge chunk error towering into the sky.
I thought it was cool at the time, but it was indicative that something was very wrong with the world. When I went back on the next day, the world was gone from the menu. No indication it'd ever been there, no world save in the game files, nothing. After that, I sort of stopped playing singleplayer. I've never again had a "main world" dotted with large-scale constructs, a few spattered attempts to do something like that, but never a successful one, I always just got bored.
With 1.8, I joined DMZCraft, a vanilla server with no plugins where the owner, Dotlizard, or one of the server admins would personally place a command block to teleport you to your home. We had an Ocean Monument as our spawn, and I eventually claimed another such monument as a home to live in with my friends as well. MinecraftPVP went the way of my friends' old personal servers, and with 1.9's horrid combat system I fell out of the loop on Minecraft. 1.10, 1.11, 1.12, now we're in 1.13. But I can't help but reminisce about how much I used to love this game. I wanted to get back that sense of wonder, that sense of mystery, of not knowing what's out there in Minecraft, and that's why I decided to go back to the very last version of what I'd consider Oldschool Minecraft, before the Update that Changed the World, irreversibly and irreparably: 1.6.4.
In a way, I got what I wanted.
==Chapter 1 - Before the World Changed==
Feb. 19th, 2019
The biome I spawned in was a cold forest of some sort, dotted by spruce trees and covered in snow. There were a few chickens mulling about the landscape. At the foot of a cliff I stood on layed a bay, of sorts, with icy shores, no doubt only the head of one of the enormous pre-1.7 oceans, which sprawled across vast portions of the map untamed. I took a screenshot, thinking I'd take a few more just to remember this later down the line. Punching down spruce trees, I made some simple wooden tools: A sword, a pick, an axe. Looking at those basic, brown tools, along with sticks, logs, and planks, brought me back to a simpler time. I picked up an egg laid by one of the woodland chickens, no doubt the first in a long line of junk items that would clutter my storage, and set off.
While I planned to construct a large home and dominate the landscape eventually, for now I needed a simple dwelling to make it through the night. Mobs are nothing to mess with when you only have wooden tools and no armor, especially on hard mode.
A nice cliffside over a frozen lake looked like a nice enough place to set up camp, I quite liked how it looked, uninterupted by patches of Andensite, Granite, and Diorite like cliffs in the current game are. Looks like my nostalgia wasn't so misplaced on that front, at the very least. I kept trying to press Ctrl to sprint before remembering how this older version of Minecraft worked, and I had to re-adjust to the rather clunky double tap system. My collection of junk items grew with the addition of some seeds I accidentally picked up. I was just about to begin digging when I recalled the importance of obtaining wool. Having played on a server with /sethome for quite a while now, I'd forgotten how vital a bed was, so I set off to obtain the necessary materials.
I noticed an Enderman teleporting about, but payed him no mind since I had no desire or incentive to fight him; Instead, needing food, I squared up against some chickens. When I realized I didn't have to wait between swings, I remembered just how much I disliked the 1.9+ combat and why I no longer bothered with PVP when I could help it. Of course, 1.6's combat wasn't exactly exceptional either, but it got the job done well enough. I slashed down chickens one after another, unimpeded by the new combat system, and went on my way, though first I made sure I wouldn't starve later by giving a few of them seeds to produce chicks. I also found a frozen river with some sugar cane growing near it, and didn't remember sugar cane ever being able to survive if its water turned to ice.
With all my energy expent on sprinting around, and realizing I might not know exactly where I was, I dug into a cliffside to equip myself with a furnace and some stone tools. Each door to barricade myself in cost me six wood planks, and they didn't stack, guess not all the changes of the new versions were that bad. In any case, I cooked up some charcoal while scouting the area for some last minute sheep, hoping to make a bed before night.
No such luck, I headed inside and sat through what I'd hoped would be an uneventful night; Unfortunately, that was not the case...
After I started devouring whole cooked chickens to regain hunger points, I started hearing spider noises. Now, one spider investigating my hovel wouldn't be too odd, but there were several of them chittering back and fourth through my door. I took a look and they were... Cave Spiders? Cave spiders do not spawn outside of specific cave spider spawners found in abandoned mineshafts, usually pretty deep underground. Even if there was a mineshaft nearby, there's no way it'd be close enough for the spiders to track their way to me from inside without me noticing a huge entrance. Even if that somehow did happen, they should have already made their presence obvious when I first started building here. I realized something definitely wasn't right about this situation.
From within the safety of my makeshift bunker, I quickly crafted up a stone sword, swung the door open and hacked one of the spiders to death with a few rapid slashes, but not before getting poisoned. I stowed a newly obtained spider eye and piece of string in my chest while waiting for the poison to ware off. Well-fed by cooked chickens, it didn't take long for me to be back to full health, so I threw the door open and took a swing at another one of the spiders; This one fell down off a narrow ledge in front of my dwelling and crashed down to the ground below, where, judging by the enemy drops, another one had already died prior. Collecting some more string, spider eyes, and EXP, I headed back in and hunkered down through the rest of the night.
Leaving my game on typing mode to allow the night to run its course (though with my volume up in case anything else went down), I checked the Minecraft wiki's page on cave spiders, specifically the version change log, thinking I might have forgotten some spawn condition removed in more modern Minecraft incarnations. Apparently, excepting a minor ID change, the only update after 1.2.1 to change cave spiders at all was 1.8, which only changed their behavior. Weird. Checking back to the game, the sun had begun to rise, and it'd also started snowing, so I figured I should get back to my quest. I searched around, to no avail, trying to find a mineshaft entrance, but instead I found some much-needed sheep. I crafted a bed and cleared out the essentials from my hovel, it had served me well, but I wanted to be near the ocean so I could fish for food.
Unfortunately, the snow was keeping hostile monsters who otherwise would have burned in the daylight alive. After a barrage of arrows and zombie punches, a skeleton riding a spider, of all things, ended up dealing the coup de grace, and my inventory dispersed in all directions as I was gunned down. I navigated around trying to find my way back to where I'd died, but the blizzard was still ongoing, so I was pursued by mobs the whole way. Eventually my hunger depleted so much that I could no longer sprint, so I just exhaustedly stumbled out of the way of oncoming zombies as I made my way across the tundra.
I was harassed by two spiders, a creeper, and a baby zombie; I managed to get one spider to back off by pelting an egg I'd picked up from somewhere at it, and the creeper's explosion seemed to end their pursuit. I made it to a small frozen lake before looking back and noticing the baby zombie was still coming. I couldn't out-sprint it, so I drifted through some water, hoping that'd slow it down. It did, for a time, but it kept up fairly well, I thought it'd for sure catch me eventually until I, by some miracle, managed to stumble across my dropped items just in time. I scanned the drops for the stone sword and lunged for it right off the bat, then turn around and cut the zombie down in a vicious and quick battle, losing most of my health in the process. With two and a half hearts left, I reclaimed my bed and my items and tried to make my way home. I went around in a big circle, confused, before finding the ice river from before, where I'd taken note of how I didn't think I'd seen sugar cane growind adjacent to ice before.
I took a screenshot of some squids swimming below the ice, just because I thought that was neat, before noticing a rose. I had quite disliked it when roses were renamed to poppies, and I thought it was cool to see one again, I had sort of forgotten that they were roses at one point. I picked one up and took it with me just for the nostalgic value. I found my way back to the big frozen lake and got digging to make my next home. One broken pickaxe and a lot of digging later, I had an entryway, cooking room, workshop, and an attic area; I even delved into a hole into the frigid lake and dug up some clay so I could make a flower pot for my rose.
With my house functional, I decided to tunnel into the back wall and build a stairway down to begin a mining operation. Another broken pick did little other than strengthen my desire to find iron, which I soon did. As the furnace smelted the ore down, I continued digging, only to hit a silverfish egg? Now, these little bug monsters are usually only found in strongholds, but they can be found in the extreme hills biome. When the tiny arthropod attacked me, I fumbled to take a screenshot and briefly hid my HUD instead by accident, but soon killed it.
I checked F3 thinking I may have tunneled into an extreme hills biome I'd somehow missed, but the biome was listed as "Ice Plains"; This oddity made me think back to the cave spider incident earlier, so I checked the Minecraft Wiki entry, but, as you can imagine, it said nothing about them spawning in Ice Plains biomes or having their ability to do so removed in any version.
Remembering that silverfish eggs could be mined quickly by hand, I hit the surrounding blocks with my sword. There were three more silverfish blocks, but with the old rapid fire damage system the insects were easily destroyed, and probing the walls with my sword didn't reveal any more eggs. Wanting to be more thorough in my search for answers, I checked the Minecraft Wiki article on Ice Plains, apparently the biome no longer existed, having been changed to "Snowy Tundra," and Ctrl+F searching for "silverfish" didn't bring up any results.
I figured I would just keep documenting these anomalies and dug out an area under the current house for more rooms, not finding any more monster eggs. Running low on chicken, I searched my chest for some string to make a fishing rod but only found one piece, instead of the two necessary. I headed out to the ocean anyways, hoping I might find a live spider on the way. I checked out a green grassy island, thinking it was funny how this lush little area had generated surrounded by frigid, frozen waters. I checked the biome and noted that it was just a regular ocean, trying to remember when it was that the biomes were made to generate close to biomes of the same temperature, when I stopped dead in my tracks. There was a brick block, something that never generates in the game and can only be made by a player, sitting square in the middle of the island.
Now, let me reiterate that this block can never generate in the world, not just in the sense that it won't naturally occur as part of the terrain, but even generated structures like villages, strongholds, and temples, where other "unnatural" blocks like cobblestone or wood planks can be found, never contain brick blocks. You can find stone bricks, sure, and nether bricks as well, but never ordinary bricks.
(Supposedly, there was once a brick pyramid that spawned in the pre-alpha version of the game, but that certainly shouldn't have affected my world.)
I had paused just looking at this unusual block, then approached it, looking around to see if there were any others nearby. It was completely isolated, alone on an otherwise normal island. I looked out into the distance in hopes of some explanatory structure that had slipped my memory, but found only cold, snowy, desolate islands at the edge of the distance fog. I took my silvery iron pickaxe and smashed my way through the block, hoping to uncover some explanation below. Apparently, it wasn't actually a normal brick block, but brick slab, though that similarly doesn't generate anywhere naturally. Below the brick slab was a stone block, and below that another stone block.
Now maybe I would have, on any other world, written this off as some oddity, some unusual one-in-a-million bug in an outmoded version that caused a grass block to have an infinitesimal chance to wrongly generate as a brick slab, for some reason. But here, on this world, things were different, I thought this must have meant something. The cave spiders? The silverfish? Something was strange about this particular world, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I reasoned that this brick slab hadn't been placed without purpose, but instead marked something. What that something was, I'm still not exactly sure.
I decided to construct a stairway down. I headed home and slept first, to assure no mobs would bother me, and then got to work. I broke my shovel, unfortunately, so I just used my hands to clear away the dirt, as I made a 3 block long, 3 block wide hole for a stairwell. I found some iron as well, which, while a surprise, was not an unwelcome one. I dug down around 20 blocks without finding anything, and decided to take a break from that operation to get some food or string, whichever I could find first. I bred and killed some more chickens to assure I wouldn't starve, and then headed back to sleep through the night.
I headed up to the attic and tried to sleep, but got the "You may not rest now, there are monsters nearby" message. I went outside but saw no sign of any monsters, even climbing all the way on top of the mountain, and checking in the underground area as well, but multiple attempts proved useless. Figuring I would just work through the night, I headed back to the pit. After dispatching a pesky creeper, which was nothing out of the ordinary, I noticed... slime balls? There were some dropped slime balls just laying on the steps.
Sure enough, looking down into the stairway, there were some slimes. One of them managed to accidentally fall to its death before I could kill it, but I dispatched the other one myself, giving me a total of 10 slime balls. I still heard the distinctive sloshing and slapping of slimes though, despite having killed all of those in sight; I dug into the ground and there was a little plus-shaped, two block-high chamber containing two more. The little monsters were easy enough to dispatch, but that didn't make their presence in the first place any less irregular. Slimes only spawn in swamps and in slime chunks, and though my friends have told me that every chunk is a slime chunk now, it definitely wasn't that way in 1.6. This incident only cemented the idea that the brick slab was there as a marker, it was indicating something buried beneath the ground. I would probably have dug all the way to bedrock right then and there if my pickaxe hadn't snapped a few blocks down.
I went back to my house, accosted by numerous mobs, including no less than 6 zombies that I had to fight while sliding around on the slippery surface of the frozen lake. Still no spiders to make that fishing rod, unfortunately. I bred and killed a few more wild chickens to eat. I made myself a cramped, gravel-floored, underground chicken coup for a more readily accessible food source, and chucked some eggs in there, but unfortunately, none of them gave me chicks. Making my way back to the stairway island, I dug further into the depths. With another broken pickaxe and another night slept through, I manufactured a third pick and prepared to make my final push to bedrock. After a few more swings, I stuck something and opened a hole into the ground. There was a drop of 4 or 5 blocks down, and some sort of opening with a bedrock floor below. I nearly scrambled down, but remembering the various dangers I'd seen beforehand, decided to instead complete my staircase. 
As I descended into the cavern, the void fog quickly blackened my vision. Torches, and redstone ore I could activate for light by a right click both subdued the darkness somewhat, but it was ever-pervasive. After traversing some winding corridors, I eventually found myself in an open room, with a 4x4 hole in the ground leading directly into the void. The room had four tunnels leading in and out of it, one of which I'd just come from. I clicked F3 to get a sense of direction, and apparently I'd just come from the southern passage.
The eastern passage was blocked off by gravel, while I nearly fell through the northern passage before realizing it was a dropoff into the void. The west tunnel, had a wall with three bedrock blocks and one stone block, I mined the stone block and it appears that behind this wall is some kind of well-lit room. I tried digging around and above to get in and managed to find one other porthole to see in, and I spotted a chest. Unfortunately, there's no way into this room as far as I can tell.
Clearing away the gravel of the east wing revealed an underground lake... The thing is, the lake wasn't just underground, it was distended below the bedrock. How is that even possible? I didn't think the game was even capable of rendering blocks down there. I threw a cobblestone block in to be sure the water would support my weight, and then jumped in, and a brief test of luck by swimming into area where the void should start to kill the player showed I was actually unharmed. Bizzare. I did find some diamonds as well, which was nice.
At this point, I started to think there it wasn't that something was unusual about my map, but rather something unusual about the game itself, or at least the version. I checked the version name in the top left corner of the window and it still displayed "Minecraft 1.6.4". I checked around the strange area for more content, but couldn't find anything else out of the ordinary, nor any way to get into that room. I think I'll take a break for now.
==Chapter 2 - Into the Deep Void==
Feb. 20th, 2019
I made a few more attempts to get into that room, but none were successful. I tried building a railway in, as well as using an enderpearl (which wasn't easy to get), but neither worked. I was looking over the screenshots I'd taken when I noticed something odd in the picture I got looking down the north tunnel. There was a white dot visible deep in the void. I thought it might be some sort of artifacting or a glitched void particle, so I went to investigate. Peering down into the void, there was indeed some sort of structure, just on the edge of blackness.
Now, before yesterday, I'd always thought it was impossible for any block to be placed below the void limit, and I do mean impossible, as in, even with world editors, mods, or hacking the game. I had always thought that the way the game rendered blocks, they simply started the count at the bedrock limit and went up, with the Minecraft engine not having any way to designate blocks as being in the void.
However, when I thought about it, I remembered that in 1.7, when I was playing on MCPVP, some people in the Hunger Games mode would use Dark Oak trees to place themselves above the upper build limit. Now, that wasn't exactly the same thing, sure, but it showed that in some way you could break the game's normal block placement parameters.
If you could force the game to place blocks above where it should be able to, I reasoned, you could force it to place them below that, too. I had seen first hand, with the sub-bedrock lake, that this map could indeed do just that, though I've never before or since seen such an irregularity.
I tried searching online for any other recorded glitches or intentional hacks/exploits that would either generate blocks below the void, or allow the player to place them there. I found someone named Acrios90 claiming to have destroyed bedrock with a diamond pickaxe in 2011, and an in-depth catalog of ways to actually break bedrock, but the only thing I saw that was anything like I was looking for was this Reddit post, where a trick was done with shulkers to get "blocks" under bedrock. Shulkers certainly didn't exist in 1.6. It appeared that, even within the strangeness of this world, the Minecraft client should not be able to support any actual block below Y 0; But, I could go to the lake with its lowest point at several blocks below Y 0, I could see the impossible for myself.
I decided that if there was something down there, I needed to see if for myself. Maybe there would be some sort of explanation down there? I didn't exactly expect to find a sign saying "This is a test structure for placing things below Bedrock and you downloaded the wrong game version somehow," but maybe there would be some sort of indication down there of how things came to be under bedrock, some reminder of an old feature that I'd long forgotten.
The first thing I tried was simply using water to get down, but despite the presence of anomalous sub-bedrock blocks, water I placed did not flow down into the void. I mined more ore and killed more mobs, eventually getting the string I needed for the fishing rod, as well as some extra for a bow. I crafted arrows, a helmet, and a chestplate, as well as a diamond pickaxe. Looking back, I wish I'd spent those diamonds on a sword instead.
When night came, instead of sleeping, I fought monsters. Specifically, I tracked down and killed endermen whenever I could find them, using water buckets to my advantage. Each one of these took out quite a bit of health, but I replenished myself with fish. Their teleporting enderpearls were what I needed to reach land in the black depths. With a few enderpearls in hand, I returned to the dropoff, and stared down into the abyss below. The small white mass hovered there, statically, unmoving and barely noticeable on the edge of vision.
I threw one pearl and it did nothing. I was worried that there might be nothing accessible down there after all.
I threw another, and this time, it worked.
With that distinctive ender clang sound and a bit of damage to my health bar, I was teleported into some sort of chamber. A staircase lie in front of me. I panned the camera up, and after a huge delay of lag, my view finally revealed that I was quite a distance below the endless floor of impenetrable bedrock.
I had to change my render distance to avoid the game freezing from this sudden spike of lag.
I made my way down the stairs, plunging even deeper into the bottomless black pit of the void. The floors and walls were all made of bedrock, and even with my brightness all the way up, it was somewhat difficult to see, but I noticed that the void's fog and particles had reduced their presence. Turning into a corridor, I narrowly missed falling into a hole in the floor, and noticed several additional pitfalls further along the hall. With caution, I continued down the passageways and further into this abnormal and obscure structure.
No mobs seemed to spawn here, I neither saw nor heard any life. Neither bats nor monsters which I would expect in such a dark environment, nor even any passive or neutral animals made their home here, it appeared. The blackened halls were silent apart from my footsteps, and utterly devoid of movement aside from my own, and that of the occasional void particle. When I rounded one corner, I finally heard the sound of a creature.
As I entered a much larger hallway, 5 blocks in width as opposed to the simple 2x2 halls I'd been cramped into, I heard the distinctive sound of a single large slime. I came across some iron bars, the first block I'd seen since entering the Deep Void that was not bedrock, and behind them saw a slime... At least, it was sort of a slime.
This slime was large, slow-moving, and silver in color. Slimes in Minecraft are only ever green, with the slime-like magma cube, which you could mistake for a slime, being a dark red. Slimes are never silver, white, grey, or any other color other than green. It pressed up against the bars and I headed down the hall to reach it. Following a turn to the left, I came to a pair of iron doors that were closed shut, blocking the way forward, but that wasn't the direction I wanted to go anyways. To the left of that doorway was another doorway, the twin iron doors of this one locked wide open.
I stepped through them to fight the slime, and began hacking away at it. The big silver slime itself wasn't much of an obstacle, but its separated pieces were much more formidable as a team. Thankfully, crowd control was much easier back in 1.6 than without the weapon cooldowns of modern Minecraft, so I was able to take them out. Still, I was only really able to get one good screenshot of the slimes due to their persistence and hostility. Though the first one had seemed slow, the smaller ones seemed even faster than I remembered slimes being.
With them dead, I took note of my surroundings. I was in some sort of courtyard, its most striking feature was that the grass, as well as the few scattered ferns, were a light grey color. I thought at first it was Mycelium, but that was not the case, it was typical, normal grass that was totally grayscaled.
Surrounding the courtyard were bedrock structures on all sides except the west, where there was simple a one-block-thick, two-to-three-block-high bedrock wall, which I had no hope of scaling. I had brought a stack of cobblestone for my quest, but though some aspects of the void had been suspended for this dark area, my inability to place blocks remained in effect.
It should probably go without saying at this point that gray grass, colorless ferns, and most especially silver slimes are never supposed to appear in Minecraft. Grass can vary a bit in color, from the typical bright green of forests and grasslands, to a pine blue in taigas, to a yellowish color in deserts. Grey is not a color that grass will ever generate in. 
I paused the game and did some research, apparently MCFUser716051 had reported gray foliage appearing in his world all the way back in 2011, with one small area of the world graying with no odd effects on collected wood or leaves. While I was reading, I suddenly heard sound coming from the game, so I clicked back to the Minecraft window just in time to avoid dying from more monochrome slimes. I killed the slimes and didn't even get any slimeballs for the trouble. I was sure I'd paused the game, how did that happen?
Well in any case I decided just to proceed, I would check up on the feasibility of slimes' colors rendering strangely later. Through the north pair of doors lay yet another large hallway. On the left, going west, was another locked pair of doors, and to the right was an open pair of doors. It wasn't too hard to figure out where I needed to go.
When I entered the room on the right, a little silver slime dropped down from a 1-block hole in the ceiling. I dispatched it pretty easily and looked up. A few more were jumping around up there, but more importantly, there was a chest. It was close enough for me to right click from the lower level of the building, so I looked inside and found a single creeper egg, normally only obtainable in creative mode. I killed off the other slimes and pondered what the egg was for. On the right side of the room was the pair of closed iron doors I had seen earlier before entering the courtyard, but I had no desire to go back to that hall.
Remembering the other set of closed doors, however, I made my way back to the other end of the north wing. I placed the creeper egg down, spawning the explosive monster at an uncomfortably close distance. Whether or not you're normally able to spawn monsters in the void I don't know, but it worked here. I backpedaled away from the creeper just in time to not die from the detonation, but it still dealt a heavy blow to my health. The doors were knocked down.
Stocked up on food, I wasn't too concerned about dying from that. I headed into the formerly sealed area and was faced, yet again, with another T-shaped intersection. To the left, I peered over a dropoff, checking this time for shadowy areas hiding even further down in the darkness. I found none. To the right, I came across a sort of spire-shaped room with a myriad of paintings decorating the walls.
On the other side of the room was another pair of closed doors. I imagined this would be another creeper egg puzzle. Would the solution be as simple as just walking into a painting? Actually, when I thought about what the puzzle should be, it really started to dawn on me what the implications of there being puzzles in the first place were.
When I was first accosted by out-of-place cave spiders and silverfish, I'd thought the quirks of this world were just a result of a glitched, buggy, outmoded version of the game with long-forgotten irregularities. But this place, whatever it was, had to have been built intentionally. But by who? And why? I considered the possibility that it was a partially-completed temple, scrapped before it could be coded to generate, now spawning as a result of some catastrophic failure in the code, but that didn't really add up; It was carved out of pure bedrock, it matched up perfectly with its outlandish surroundings in the void, but no structures were ever placed in the void in any incarnation of the game, and it seemed that under normal circumstances, they couldn't be.
I pressed at random paintings, trying to find a classic secret entrance in them. By placing down signs, you can spread a painting over top of them and pass through it and the signs as if they were air, while making it look like you're just seeing at a normal painting. I couldn't find any secrets until I started jumping, and then finally stumbled into a secret area. Unfortunately, this entrance was blocked by a solid wall on the other side of the signs.
I tried mining through the blocks with my diamond pickaxe, but it became clear that my inability to place any blocks was twin to an inability to break them.
I started to worry while jumping around the tower looking for other secret entrances. Had I used the creeper egg improperly? Had I sabotaged my only means of progression? Thankfully, I remembered then that paintings were not blocks themselves, but entities, like the silver slimes. If I could kill the slimes, I should be able to damage the paintings as well. Using my sword, I quickly slashed a few off of the walls. Right next to the secret door, I found a hidden chamber with a button in it, and pressed it.
A crackly "hiss" came through the speakers as the button ignited some unseen TNT. Another of the paintings was dislodged from the wall as a series of booms rang out behind the wall. The unbreakable bedrock remained unaffected, but the stone wall supporting the signs had been demolished. I stepped through into a small room, and entered a cramped 1 block wide, 2 block tall walkway, sidling down the way to the chest I spotted at the end.
As I opened the chest and pulled out a creeper egg, along with a healing potion, I suddenly took damage. I closed the inventory screen and whirled around to face down a pair of blueish silverfish.
These minuscule insects didn't seem to be any different from the regular silverfish, other than their odd hue. With low health and low damage, I easily swatted them to death with my sword after taking a screenshot.
Though I wanted to press further into this dungeon, I had places to be, things to do, and matters more pressing than spending all day playing Minecraft. I decided to log off for a while and continue my adventure later. After shutting the game off, but before getting off the computer, I did a bit more research on mobs with unusual colors:
I found A minecraftforum post where mobs turned solid black, and as stated on the Minecraft wiki, mobs will briefly turn red when they're damaged, indicating a brief period of immunity. But these mobs were not immune to damage, and their textures all looked very clean. The mobs' discoloration did not seem to affect, for example, the black parts of the silverfish eyes. I don't think this was a simple glitch with the damage overlay, and I'm starting to give up on a reasonable explanation...
==Chapter 3 - The Blue Depths==
Feb. 21st, 2019
When I loaded the game back up, I blasted open the iron doors pretty easily. There was another t-intersection, but like the last one, it wasn't much of a conundrum to figure out which direction to go, as the righthand side just led to a dropoff. I started heading down the left path, but didn't seem to be getting anywhere. Eventually, I gave up on being cautious for pitfalls and just started sprinting, but even still I didn't seem to be making any progress in this unreasonable long passageway.
I pondered whether I might have done something wrong, or be missing some sort of puzzle. I went back a few dozen blocks, considering whether it might be one of those old tricks where the player gets teleported back and thinks they're moving forward forever, but there was nothing back the way I'd come either. I checked my F3 coordinates and found I was indeed still getting farther and farther away from the compound I'd left. I also took note of the Y coordinate:
y: -127 (feet pos, -125.380 eyes pos)
I was now over 125 blocks below the bottom of the world. Having given up hope of trying to find out how or why I was able to be down here, I just kept going down the hall without thinking too much on it. Spending minutes of running on a nether highway or something like that is bad enough on its own, but you usually have some scenery to look out at and the avoidance of walking off the edge and falling into lava to occupy your brain; In this tunnel, all I had to look at was 2 endless walls, a ceiling, and a floor of pure bedrock. The same texture over, and over, and over...
I was starting to get bored and wonder if this area was a spiteful prank, added in to waste your time after promising something more. I'd eaten my last fish to regain energy, and was a few minutes away from just logging off, when something happened in the game. Nothing changed visually, I didn't even realize anything had happened at first. But a few seconds in, I realized I was listening to a new song.
I've been playing Minecraft for 8 years now, and this song was definitely not in the game, not in any version I've played. The song's sole real instrumentation was something like a piano or an organ, joined only by a slight echo. I don't know enough about music to tell you what octave or notes the song was playing in, but every key sounded piercing despite not being particularly loud. The theme sounded cold, distant, and a bit sorrowful. It reminded me of something you might hear in an antarctic level of a video game, where you have to constantly worry about freezing to death, and you're surrounded on all sides by miles of barren, desolate ice and snow.
Writing about it, I can't help but think not about how different it was to Minecraft's songs, but how much it fit in with Minecraft's soundtrack, if anything. While Minecraft generally uses carefree and relaxing music, it does have some rather foreboding songs, like the Disk 13 music. Much like the strange silverfish and slimes, as well as this place in general, the music almost matched up with something you would find in a normal Minecraft world, just not quite.
Now, when I listened to this song, I remembered hearing a while back that sometime in 2013 there were something like 20 new songs added in a secret, unannounced, and unnamed update. Most people probably never realized anything changed, and I certainly didn't notice this secret update- I said I'd give up on trying to reasonably explain these events, but I guess some part of me still wants to.
With the music helping me keep from getting bored, I made my way a few hundred blocks more, and eventually found a corner. Down a short hall was another one of those silver slimes.
I killed the slime, only to have it split apart and its smaller pieces gang up on me, but like last time, it was easy enough to dispatch them with the old combat system. I noticed upon collecting its EXP that my XP bar was glitching around and the number couldn't seem to figure out what it wanted to read as; The number would stay still for a few minutes at a time, but whenever I got XP it would glitch out a bit more. Past this little landing room was a bigger room with three exits (including the one I'd come through), a cupboard, and some sort of table or bar.
The cupboard, consisting of two outward-swinging wooden doors, two wooden planks, and a double chest, contained only a wooden sword with the bane of arthropods enchantment. Well, it was pretty much useless to me now, but I guess it would be nice in case my sword broke. On the bar was a flower pot with a little black rose. I realized the music from before had faded out sometime recently.
The exit to the left of where I'd come in just led to an observation room of some kind. Not a particularly big or memorable room, and not one with any sights for you to see, just the 2x2 hallway coming to a close with a row of iron bars blocking the player from moving forward without obscuring their view of the dropoff.
Down the forward exit was another hall. There was a small 1x2x1 "room" gorged out of the wall of this walkway, though I hesitate to call it a room, it was more like a ventilation shaft. The "ceiling" and "floor" of this room both consisted of iron bars, giving me a view of the drop down into the void, or up... which was also into the void, at this point.
Eventually the hall branched: Going forward was a stairway, and to the right was a balcony. I was more interested in the balcony, so I investigated that first.
There was a little guard rail consisting of iron bars protecting you from walking straight off the side, but you could jump over it if you wanted to. I certainly had no desire to do that, though. Off a few dozen blocks from the balcony, I noticed that there were large pillars standing strong in the blackness. With my already low graphics settings, I couldn't see their tops or bottoms, just having my eyesight follow them down until they were enveloped in fog. I'm not sure if I'd be able to see their endings even with high graphics, really. I wonder how far they went down?
One of these pillars was exceptional in that I could actually see the top of it, you can see it in the left hand side of the next screenshot, in fact. The pillar didn't have anything on it and I did not feel like wasting my last few enderpearls to get to it, so I didn't pay it much attention.
Around the side of the building, I ran into what else but a parkour section.
I considered using my enderpearls, but figured if I really had to, I could switch to them if I fell and throw them to avoid death. I didn't want to use them up in case I had no way of progressing later, or accidentally teleport myself into the wall and lose all my progress just because I didn't want to bother jumping.
While jumping on iron bars might seem hard, since they have such a small hitbox, it wasn't that difficult in this instance. The trick was to account for the natural shapes of the bars and launch to where you'd have the highest area to hit. For an L-shaped segment of bars, for example, you'd want to land on the | section jutting upwards, since that gives you a runway to hit and you don't have to be as precise.
Jumping over, and then jumping back, wasn't too hard. On the other side was a chest with a creeper egg. As you might expect, going up the stairwell lead to a pair of iron doors, which I used the creeper egg to destroy.
The deep blue water of the next room was a stark contrast to the dark, monochrome palette of the rest of this underworld so far. This segment of the world was still made largely of bedrock, but used a lot more vertical aquatic movement to get around. It was at this point the next new song started to play.
The music that booted up here was very unlike any track I'd heard in Minecraft before, and even the antarctic-style music from earlier. The theme of this area, if that's what you want to call it, was a slow and calm song, but sounded very... important? I'm not sure quite what the word is, if there is a word. I can only describe it by likening it to an experience: Have you even been to an empty church, or at least a nearly empty one? A vast building blanketed in spirituality, meant to house hundreds of people, but only currently housing less than a dozen or so (or maybe even just one... as far as you know). Utterly quiet aside from your own footsteps, passing hallways lit by humming, artificial lights and lined with dark offices. Just you, amongst the dozens of offices, libraries, waiting rooms, stages, classrooms, and attics & storage rooms. People might think going out into the deep woods and away from urbanite life is being "alone," but you're still surrounded by birds and insects and creeping creatures; But in a place like that, you're totally enveloped in the stillness and isolation.
Not only are you completely alone, but you're alone in a very important place, one where you might get the impression you should tread lightly.
The low, reverb-heavy string instrumentation of this music gave me a feeling like that. Delving further in, it was a bit hard to get my mind off the music. In this entryway, there was an exit on the far left, and one below the water. While I was still contemplating what I was hearing, before I could pick a direction to try first, another new enemy emerged from the left.
This creature was some sort of sponge monster. Unlike the other two new mobs, which had simply been color-altered versions of vanilla animals, this one had its own unique texture. I killed a small one before snapping this screenshot, killing a larger one and another tiny one afterwards. There was nothing in the little grotto they'd come out of other than them, so I submerged myself and went through the underwater exitway.
In this waterway, I was accosted by two more of the hostile sponges. It was harder for me to advance on my opponents underwater, and, unlike me, I don't think the sponges had to worry about drowning. As it turns out, the music I was hearing was just the song's opening, and the music smoothly, but quickly, transitioned to a much more active melody. There was a constant shaking noise, a bit like a maraca or some similar instrument, underlining varied energetic strings of electric notes; Don't take that description to mean it was at all light-hearted or upbeat though, the music sounded... dangerous? It sounded like the sort of music you might hear while jumping around cliffs or navigating a cavern in a Ys game, more than a Minecraft song.
The music ramped up as I just barely managed to avoid a drowning death and surface in another cramped, flooded room, the challenge of this dungeon became clear: Fight mobs and find your way from air pocket to air pocket without drowning. I'm not sure if it's significant or not, but no water here flowed. There was a lot of water, but it was all source blocks, no currents or movement other than my own and the sponges'.
I can't really remember every room I had to go through here, but I'll try to describe the enemies a bit more, so you can get a good idea of what I had to deal with along the way. The sponges were a bit like magma cubes, they sprung out like a coil when jumping, and on land could only move (and therefore attack, unless you walked into them) by jumping. Unlike magma cubes, however, these sponges could use their jumping under water, albeit quite lazily, and also alternate between jumping around and floating at the surface of the water, which allowed them to speed after you if you hung around on the surface.
Also, be sure to keep in mind that this was 1.6, and a player's swimming ability and speed were severely limited compared to what we have now.
These sponges didn't drop anything other than EXP points on death, but I did thankfully find a chest at one point containing some steaks (I ate them all before completing the dungeon, but that's as good a use as any). While the sponges were in some ways more difficult than magma cubes due to their aquatic abilities and ability to float after you on the surface, they didn't split apart on death.
Another minor thing I found interesting is that when a sponge jumps up and then falls to the ground, it splashes out blue particles, like water from a soaked sponge splashing around. I took a a few screenshots in a dry area to try to show this off, which you can see to the right.
The sponges weren't too bad in a one-on-one fight, but working as a team, they could dole out a lot of damage, and underwater, time was always on their side thanks to my limited supply of air. At one point, I came across a large sponge that was completely blocking a tunnel, along with a few smaller ones acting as its guards. The big sponge wasn't really able to attack me, but I couldn't move past it and it soaked up damage like a tank. I had to backpedal out of that area and try again twice before making it through. Thankfully, they only did this once.
In between managing my health and oxygen, I took note that I did actually really like the color scheme of this dungeon; The deep, strong blues and dark blacks would have been nice if I wasn't so worried about dying. Would I even be able to get back here if I died? Would the entrance seal itself off?
Eventually, after going countless rooms and facing near-death on a few separate occasions, I managed to find some sort of machine room, where the music faded, probably indicating I had escaped the temple. There was an apparatus here constructed from cobblestone, cobble stairs, furnaces, and dispensers, as well as fences. Two fences ran down through a hole into the floor to who-knows-where.
What, if anything, this machine was or is supposed to represent is beyond me. There was nothing in the dispensers or furnace. Behind this room was another room, to its right one exit, and to its left a third room with a pair of iron doors blocking the way forward. Strangely, these doors were crooked, one of them on the far front of one block, and other the back of another block. They sealed the way forward despite their asymmetry, so I went another way.
Out the other door, there was a junction of paths. To the right, another parkour balcony with iron bars, and to the left, simpler parkour consisting of normal blocks. I went through the harder parkour first, wanting to get it out of the way. I noticed that near the end, there were iron bars shaped like chairs sitting sideways, affixed to the bedrock wall, and between them a table-shaped cluster of fences. Jutting from the middle of this "table" was a wooden plank block with a railway and minecart with chest affixed.
Inside the minecart chest was some charcoal. I wondered what this might be useful for, and then remembered the furnace. Maybe I was supposed to cook something in it to open the doors? I struggled much more on the parkour return trip, and would have definitely died if not for a low-hanging bar probably placed for that exact purpose.
On the other path, up a few easy bedrock block jumps, was a grassy area. Another little building to its left with wooden doors held a couple of hostile sponges and a chest with some raw pork. One little thing I found neat was that this building had a sort of crudely-carved pool in it; Whoever had designed this area had given specific thought to the fact that these hostile sponges were aquatic creatures, and needed water to live in.
Cooking up the pork, I indeed found the pair of crooked doors was open. I went through, but there was another pair of closed doors beyond them. I turned around to go back, but the doors snapped shut and stopped me from leaving. I thought this might just be a cinematic event, where the next set of doors would open for dramatic effect, but no such thing happened.
I sat there for a few minutes of nothing, looked around the tiny room for any hidden buttons or secrets (there were none), then turned the game off. Did I do the puzzle wrong? Have I permanently doomed myself and lost all that work? I don't know. I'm logging off for now.
==Chapter 4 - The Other Side==
Feb. 25th, 2019
After logging back in a few days later, I realized I still had my enderpearls with me, and just used them to force my way through the door. I didn't think it was fair of the game to assume that I had enderpearls to get through, but I guess I had to use them to get down here in the first place. Down the hallway the crooked doors had blocked off, there was a right turn into a staircase. The staircase led up, and up, and up, what seemed like hundreds of blocks.
It turned out it actually was hundreds of blocks because, checking my coordinates, I found out I had actually traveled back above the bedrock barrier and into positive Y coordinates again. I found myself in a cave and was harassed by skeletons, spiders, and a few other sorts of normal monsters you'd expect to encounter in a regular game of Minecraft. When I finally saw daylight again, it made me reflect on just how alien the world I had come from and the world I was back to were from each other.
Figuring I could finally make a base of operations to save my progress, I mined up some cobble and iron ore. Heading up into the sunlight, I found myself in some sort of forest wetland area. Apparently I came up on the border of a swamp and a forest. I actually found a dog, though, and having plenty of bones from skeletons, tamed him. I even uprooted a daisy and crafted it into yellow dye to stain my dog's collar yellow.
I found a witch shack in the swamp, but it didn't have anything of value, so I left it alone. There was an extreme hills biome up ahead that I could see past the swamp trees, forming a single vast mountain in the distance, which I thought would be perfect for a base. Unfortunately, I was right...
When I approached the mountain and headed to the left, trying to find a way up, I noticed some sort of jutting cobblestone staircase, crudely affixed to the side of the mountain. While I was used to strange structures in the deep void area I'd recently escaped, I hadn't seen anything like this on the surface before. All the more strange, while all of the void structures seemed to be carefully carved and prepared for player interaction, this staircase seemed quite sloppily made.
Additionally, while all the void structures had been carefully interlinked and linear, this structure was simply sitting out in the wilderness, it would have been very easy for me to go in one of the other three directions and miss this thing's existence outright. It just seemed an atypical feature even by the standards set so far.
After I made my way up the stairs, I noticed a house already established on the top of the mountain summit.
Getting closer, I got a better look at the house. It had a cobblestone foundation, oak planks for the walls, and a stone brick roof. There were also glass panes serving as the building's windows, and a sheered sheep in front of the house surrounded by wooden fences. There was also a bridge or causeway leading to another grassy pinnacle broken off from the main mountain, but I would explore that later.
I swung open the wooden door and headed inside with my dog. The house was L-shaped and contained a bed, three furnaces, and a crafting table, along with a double chest. There was also a basement area of some sort, with stairs leading down to it and those stairs protected by some sort of odd shell (I took some screenshots of the interior but you can get a better view in a bit so I won't bother uploading them). I looked in (though didn't steal from) the chest, and inside was all sorts of clutter, and I don't mean it was filled with goods like gold or diamonds either. There was all sorts of random stuff like grey wool, sand blocks, mob drops, buttons, bonemeal, string, seeds, sugar cane, dirt, cobblestone, used wooden tools, you get the idea.
I was about to head down to explore the basement when I saw something. My finger darted to the shift key as my eyes went wide upon seeing what I saw. Through the wall, I could make out the unmistakable, iconic shape of a player's nameplate. It was coming right towards the house.
Not sure what I was dealing with, but knowing it could be very dangerous especially as I had no progress-saving sleep since leaving my house days ago, I decided to get away. With no alternate exit and no way to know how fast the thing out there was, I took the second best option: hiding. I hopped down the stairs into the basement, still crouching to avoid my own nameplate being seen.
Of course I thought it wasn't possible for any mob to "see" your nameplate, but a few days ago I'd also thought it wasn't possible to survive a hundred blocks below bedrock and fight hostile sponges either; And even so, I wasn't so sure I was dealing with a mob here. You can name mobs with name tags, but their nameplates don't show up through walls. As far as I know, only players' do that.
The basement was shoddily dug out from the ground, its walls, floor, and ceiling were all made of patchy stone and dirt, with blocks randomly jutting out as though little care was put into its construction. There were mines, or something like that at least, branching out asymmetrically from the basement, but the only light underground was one torch in the main basement. The mines were simply being blocked off with wooden doors in some half-hearted bid to keep the mobs confined.
I had to unshift and right click to open the door, then right click again to close it after passing through, to get into the mine, unfortunately exposing my nameplate and making some noise. The other nameplate's owner didn't seem to notice, I think it headed over into the sheep pen briefly while I was in the basement, giving me a bit of extra time.
I watched the nameplate hover near the door, it seemed to slow down, pass through slowly, then stay stationary for a bit. I heard the distinctive creak of a wooden door closing. It was as if whatever was up there had been taken aback by the door being left open. The being, whatever it was, headed down towards the corner of the house, but stopped.
Suddenly, I heard yelps coming from my tamed wolf. It let out a few more pained yelps, followed by a whimper, and I tightened my grip on the mouse. I wanted to barge out right then and hack whatever it was apart with my banged-up iron sword, but I calmed down just before reaching the door and gave it some logical thought: Considering the strange rules of this world, I don't think it'd be quite that easy to finish off the attacker:
If I killed this entity, and it was some sort of player-themed enemy, or somehow, an actual player, hence its nameplate, it could very well respawn at the bed a few blocks away from me. I would be damaged from fighting it at that point, and with no respawn point anywhere near here myself. I could die to its second attack and respawn thousands of blocks away with all of my items here. Even if I walked all the way back out here without forgetting the coordinates, I would have no guarantee that this is even the same world I came from, you might have to pass through the void corridor to reach this place, like another dimension or something like that.
I heard the faint sound of a chest opening, and then eventually the entity headed back out and left. I came up after him and snapped a few screenshots, though only one was really any good:
Looking at it now, it's clear this other "player" is indeed a human, at least visually. It has some sort of odd yellow tinge to its entire body. I pressed tab, thinking I might have somehow ended up on a server, but no player menu came up. I don't think any player menu is supposed to come up, even a blank one, unless you're on a server, but I could be wrong.
I looked through the house and my dog was indeed nowhere to be found, confirming my belief that it'd been killed. The door I'd left open had been closed by this stranger, and, perhaps most strangely, all the furnaces had been lit to cook up pork.
My anger towards that abomination came back, though. This was supposed to be my world, I was supposed to come back to a nostalgic game version and just enjoy myself, but now there was some sort of freak running buck wild uninvited, with its own house and property. Bad enough, it was now even attacking my pets. I decided the only reasonable course of action was self-defense, so I elected to detonate a bunch of bombs right inside of this unwanted squatter's house.
I crafted a bit of TNT with the sand and gunpowder from his chest, deciding to blow him up with his own supplies. I considered typing something in the chat, but figured I'd just look like an idiot trying to talk to a video game. I didn't want to get too carried away, but I was still pissed, so I placed down some TNT and prepared to blast the house. I took a screenshot beforehand, which shows the house's layout off pretty well if you were having a hard time visualizing it.
As I pressed all the buttons and vacated, the house was obliterated in a series of blasts and explosions. Random building blocks and drops from containers were scattered everywhere, and I picked a few up, so I had to re-organize my inventory a bit and throw some trash away. Unfortunately, I also threw the arthropod sword away, but it wasn't much use to me anyways.
I remembered that the house wasn't the only structure here, and I headed across the bridge to the other rocky outcroppings and slashed through a few zombies and skeletons on my way as the night had begun. Across a small bridge made of slabs and a third bridge made of oak wood (probably supposed to be a fallen tree), I found myself in a small graveyard sort of area. There was sand covering chests presumably representing coffins, and cobblestone walls acted as headstones.
The most striking feature, however, was this statue: 
I didn't like it one bit. It gave me an eerie feeling. At least, I blame the statue partially, but the eerie feeling was also probably partially brought on by the next new music track. The music that started playing here was an eerie ambiance. Looking back now, I think it might have been some sort of slowed down choir music, since it sounds similar to other examples of that that I've heard, but I have no idea what they were chanting. I could be completely wrong on that anyways.
The statue itself was made of cobblestone fences bending and winding in varied directions, each topped with a wither skeleton skull. At the statue's base were coal blocks and mycelium, along with a chest filled with some miscellaneous raw meat. Particles from the mycelium floated up and reminded me of the void particles, as did the bedrock-like texture of the wither skulls. I wondered what association this statue might have with the void.
In any case, I elected to blow this up too.
I placed down some TNT, some cobble, a button, and BOOM, blasted the thing into nothing. I picked up two wither skulls and some random garbage from the explosions. However, more interestingly, I noticed that I had uncovered some sort of crypt below where the statue had once stood.
Descending down, the gravel and stone passageways grew more cramped, until I eventually reached an entryway where a set of black doors surrounded by bedrock halted the way forward. I tried mining through the doors, but like the bedrock, they simply never cracked, even under the pressure of my diamond pickaxe.
The music had faded out by the time I reached the surface and headed back to the house, the only other location where I could think to investigate. Perhaps I could find the materials for some more TNT and knock the doors down that way. The discolored, yellow humanoid hadn't returned from wherever it had gone, so I headed down into the basement.
Most of the doors held nothing, but I noticed one up against a flat wall. Behind it was a staircase leading down into a hallway with two rooms, both secured by iron doors with no switches to open them. I cracked down the iron door of the right room and stumbled into some sort of oddity:
It was a carved sandstone block atop a netherbrick fence, and that atop a netherbrick block. There were torches arranged around the room like some sort of occult ritual was meant to be performed there. I smashed and grabbed, destroying all the torches and stealing the out-of-place blocks. I noticed that a simple piece of paper dropped with the mined sandstone, but placing it back and mining it again without the odd torch setup did not replicate this paper drop.
The other room was very secure, I had to mine through two doors to get in and it was secured by three-block-thick walls filled with water. Water also dripped from the ceiling and I assume it filled the space below the floor as well, probably placed to counteract explosive mobs. Inside was a chest, a damaged anvil, and some rambling, nonsensical signs, as well as plenty of torches.
The signs contained messages jotted down like notes, I remember one saying
"NEED
TWO
PLAYERS," and another said
"1
4
3 (corner),"
Though without context, what this means, I have no idea.
Inside the chest, there was some named pieces of paper and a used silk touch shovel. I took the shovel with me as well as the pieces of paper and fled the building out the end of the hall, which dropped the player down onto the side of the mountain. I noticed a small doorway off to the side in a cave and breached that building, but found only a chest with a single diamond sword named "Blue Key". Better than my worn-down old iron sword, I guess.
The papers don't seem to be in any order and I think some of them are missing. Here's what they say:
"AND KEEP MOBS OUT OF THE ROOM"
"AS SOON AS YOU LOCATE HIM"
"KILL THE OTHER PLAYER"
"RETURN TO MY ALTER IF YOU"
I checked the other piece of paper I got from destroying that weird piece of carved sandstone, but it isn't named. I hiked into a nearby jungle and created a small base of operations for the time being. Oddly, even though it's night, I can't sleep in my bed. I can lie down, but my character never goes to sleep and timeskips to the next day. I just shut the game off for now.
==Chapter 5 - The Tunnels==
Feb. 26th, 2019
Alright, so I looked over the screenshots I took yesterday. I spent a lot of time looking at that discolored yellow-tinged character running away from that house. No matter what I do, there's no getting anything legible out of that nameplate.
While this world is interesting to explore, one of my friends had to point out to me that it could be a hacked version of Minecraft that somehow got downloaded through the official Mojang Launcher - and that by extent it could be a malicious file presenting a threat to my computer. It made sense that that could be a possibility, I don't know why it didn't really occur to me earlier.
Just in case, I backed up some of my important files before playing again today, and ran an antivirus scan that didn't come up with anything. Additionally, I did a search online to check if there were any reported instances of hacks occurring due to the Minecraft Launcher having a data breach or hack of some kind. Thankfully, there were no such reported instances I could find, and I had already been playing on this strange world for over a week.
Loading up the world, I spawned back in to my little jungle hovel, which remained undisturbed. I went outside and sealed the building up behind me, leaving no exposed doors or windows behind as an indication of my presence. Whatever that discolored humanoid... mob... thing was, I'm pretty sure it could open and close doors. I hadn't seen it break any blocks like windows, or use levers or buttons, but I wasn't going to take the chance.
Actually, that reminds me, I came up with a name for that thing, I'm going to call it "the Invader" for ease of reference. I think it's a mob, I'm not really sure what else it could be. It's a single-player world, so the Invader could not be a player, right? I mean, even if I somehow joined a server without realizing it, I should be able to see a player menu when I press tab.
Anyways, that thing, whatever it is, it's in my world, right? And it killed my poor dog unprovoked, so it's certainly not a welcome guest. Hence, the Invader.
Come to think of it, if it does use levers and buttons, maybe I can use that to my advantage and set a trap for it? Oh, I also left that "Blue Key" behind, so I wouldn't lose it while out exploring, and if I was sent back to my base by a death, I'd have a diamond sword at the ready.
I left in the very early morning, before the mobs even started to burn off. As I reached the edge of the Jungle and was facing back towards the hill where the Invader's home was located, I noticed the glow of a torch to the far left of my screen, off in the distance.
The torch was a few blocks away from the mouth of a cave, but once I reached it, I noticed another torch off a distance from this one in the opposite direction from the cave - Why would anyone place a torch there? I walked over and saw a third torch on a tree a little ways from the second - They were like a trail.
I had initially intended to stake out the general direction the Invader had traveled after he killed my dog, but this seemed like it might lead me to a more specific location. If I found nothing, I could always come back and go the other way.
Sword and bow by my side, I followed the trail of torches across several biomes. It seemed like there were less mobs around than I would expect. Thinking back on it, I don't actually remember seeing or even hearing any of the normal passive mobs on my journey.
The only mobs I did encounter prior to reaching the first notable landmark were two creepers and a lone spider which was lurking in a cave, apparently dark enough to make it hostile. I dispatched all three without too much issue, though, using my sword against the spider and my arrows to take out the creepers.
Eventually though, I reached quite the landmark indeed.
This castle compound sat along the border where a sprawling plains biome met the mountainous Extreme Hills. It wasn't until I got closer that I noticed it was visibly battered and scarred. Some pigs and cows were milling about, along with even a few horses! Unfortunately for me, I tamed one of them, only to realize I... didn't even have a saddle.
I was cautious in exploring the base, wary of any hostile mobs that may have been be lurking nearby; However, the little castle remained well-lit. There was a main house building surrounded by what was a very heavy-duty wall for a relatively small home. There was also a mine entrance and another small building, along with some farmland and fenced-in areas, outside the protection of the wall.
The castle's wall had iron doors which could only be opened via levers from the inside, or by being forcibly knocked down. There was even a watch tower in one corner of the compound that gave me a very good view of everything surrounding the castle when I went up it. It was as though whoever lived here had been fearing an attack.
It appears as though they were correct, as part of the castle was blasted open in what looked like a creeper or TNT explosion. A smaller building outside the main walls looked like it had been burned to the ground, and the mine entrance and one of the animal pens were visibly missing blocks as well, probably from fire damage. Additionally, one of the doors was missing from the main house, and ladders had been set up on the wall in two places.
Oh, and there was also a bridge, I'll include a picture of that later, it didn't seem to have any visible damage done to it. Lastly, there was what appeared to be a little tree farm for wood, which makes sense as this building was surrounded primarily by plains with a sparse selection of trees.
Inside the house, the conditions were clearly lived-in. There were furnaces with coal left in them, and even a gold ingot in one, and the chests were full of miscellaneous items. One noteworthy thing I found, though, was the book.
I screenshotted each page of the book I found in the chest and I've transcribed them here for you to read. Some reformatting and spellchecking was done on my part, and I changed a few exact coordinates to things like [Coordinates X] so you wouldn't have to memorize the actual coordinates when the book refers to them:
Sheldon's Book Hey Sheldon, it's you from the past, here. I've been having memory troubles for a while, so I'm just writing this to help myself remember everything I need to do. I was gonna write a txt but I probably wouldn't remember to look for it. As long as this stays in my inv or my chest I should be able to check the latest entry to remember what I'm doing. Write down something before doing it 
 
 
1/26/19 - I saw a dog at [Dog Coordinates], get bones to tame it, skeletons drop them. You can press F3 to view your coordinates. 
1/27/19 - I returned to [Dog Coordinates], couldn't find dogs, now I have 50 bones 
 
1/28/19 - Apparently you can craft bones into bonemeal and use them to grow trees, so I'm doing that for wood instead of going all the way to the forest 
 
2/2/19 - Can't remember what this little building was supposed to be. Maybe a stable? 
 
2/5/19 - Okay, made one pen for cows and one for pigs. Pigs are lured by carrots and cows by wheat. Apparently you can ONLY GET CARROTS from a zombie drop, unless you're near a village? Don't think there's any villages around here. 
 
 
2/7/19 - Today I went to the forest to get birch saplings, use the birch wood to decorate the mine entrance. When I went to the forest, there were mean wolves there, and I had to run away, so be careful. 
 
2/10/19 - I killed the wolves today. I don't know why they were bad, the wolves before weren't bad. I got the birch saplings and put them on the other side of the castle from the oaks so they don't get mixed up. 
 
 
2/12/19 - So today I went all the way to [Desert Coordinates], there's a desert over there and a pyramid temple. I found a cool unique sword called the Blue Key. I think it might be a story item or something since it has a name? It will make a good weapon. If you lose it, you can try going back there. You can press F3 to view your coordinates. 
 
2/13/19 - I seriously can't figure out how to make the sleep thing work. Aren't you supposed to be able to sleep and skip the night? 
 
2/14/19 - When I went to the forest today, to see what was on the other side, I saw a strange mob over there. I thought it was a person but I checked and this is singleplayer. I must have forgotten about this mob. It was like a person but it was red, not solid red because I can still see his eyes and his mouth and face, plus his clothes too. But everything was just slightly red, like if a normal person was covered in a red slime. The weird thing is this mob was digging around in the dirt and breaking blocks - I do vaguely remember a mob that can pick up blocks but I guess I'm just forgetting the details? 
 
I'm gonna call this mob, the Dirt Dweller, for now, until I learn its real name. I was gonna go up to the Dirt Dweller, but there was a blaze that shot me with three fire blasts. The fire blasts hurt me and I had to jump in the river to escape it. I killed the blaze and he dropped some blaze rods, whatever those do. 
 
Anyways, if you go near the forest, bring water buckets, because the blazes spawn over there, and they will burn you if you're not careful. I think it must be a rare spawn since that's the only one I've seen. Same thing, for the Dirt Dweller. 
 
 
2/15/19 - A lot happened today. 
 
When I got on early in the morning I was over by the forest. I ground that first blaze rod up into powder which was not a good idea, apparently you can use them to make an alchemy table. So I was back over there looking for more blaze rods. 
 
 
When I went to the forest, though, I got hit from behind. I thought there were no day mobs that attacked you, so I spun around surprised, and saw in the distance, the Dirt Dweller. He was outside of a little 2 by 1 crevice in the side of a mountain on the extreme hill side of the river, a few dozen blocks away from me. He threw a few eggs at me and only then did I notice there were two wolves charging at me. He was using the eggs to get them to attack! 
 
But since I had the Blue Key, I was able to make quick work of them. After I had disposed of his pack, I took a shot at the Dirt Dweller with my bow. He retreated back into his lair. I noticed he had a nameplate like a player only now that he was underground, but it soon disappeared like he was sneaking. I dug after him, but the crevice gave way to a labyrinth of tunnels, and I had no idea which way to go after him. Plus, I was low on health, and I started to realize I probably didn't want to face him before healing, since I had no idea what sort of things he had hidden in there. 
 
 
I went back later and the crevice was just gone completely. I didn't remember any mob being able to do that much advanced block placement and removal - That must be why they have the iron doors and redstone stuff, to avoid that kind of mob. Well, I got to work securing my castle and spent several hours doing it. I made the observatory into a big watchtower with glass to stop him from shooting me if I'm in it, and all the doors are iron and can only be opened from inside now. 
 
 
A few hours later, however, I was sorting out a chest when I heard a thunderous BOOM like a creeper explosion. I closed the chest and saw the nameplate of the dirt dweller outside. Once I rushed outside, I saw he had blown a hole in the wall and just finished placing down ladders to climb up into the base with his iron sword equipped. We hit eachother but he was knocked back off of the base. The night mobs came after him, but he had the wolves with him and they protected him while he bolted in another direction. I saw fire in the distance and realized he had set my pens and buildings on fire. 
 
Spiders were crawling up and attacking me now, but I fought them off with the Blue Key. Just in time, I saw the Dirt Dweller trying to sneak attack me by jumping from up on top the wall while I was looking down on the spiders. He was persistent, and brutal, but he had made a mistake attacking me before he was healed. I slashed him with the blue key and nearly pinned him against the wall, but he was able to escape. 
 
I chased after as he went around my house, setting fire to the path around him and my house in an attempt to damage or distract me. However, one last well-placed arrow was all it took. When I hit him, the game made a loud noise and the screen sort of warped. I was scared it crashed or lagged out, and maybe the Dirt Dweller would come and kill me while the game was glitching, but he dropped dead as soon as the game returned to normal. 
 
His dogs turned into angry wolves, but darker than I remember, and something wasn't right about their eyes. They were killing the hostile mobs outside and making ravenous noises, that sort of scared me, especially with all the adrenaline of that fight. They killed the mobs below and were jumping up to try to get to me. I killed them all with my bow one by one, since I didn't want to go down there. 
 
I guess that takes care of that problem? It was kind of scary, though, and I don't remember anything like this in Minecraft. Usually, I only forget the inconsequential stuff like where mobs spawn or what they drop, and of course how to craft things. 
 
2/16/19 - So today I noticed, and I'm not sure when this happened, but my arm is blue. In fact looking at my inventory, my whole skin is blue. Is that normal? I guess it probably is, usually you don't look at your skin right? I remember the character being sort of blue, but I thought it was just his clothes? Just a weird choice by the developers I guess. 
 
Anyways, today I was out past the tree farm, making 100% sure the perimeter is secure before rebuilding everything, those wolves scare me. I already got one of the pens fixed though. However, when I was out there, I saw a yellow man. I think it may be another Dirt Dweller-type mob, or maybe it's a friendly version? He looked like he was covered in yellow slime. Given the different color. He was running in the opposite direction of the Castle, and I do mean running, sprinting as fast as he could. He never even turned around, I don't think he saw me at all. I tried to follow him as best as I could, I almost lost him but caught up a little bit as he stopped to eat something. I still couldn't get close, though. He kept sprinting around and I eventually just got too low on hunger to sprint and lost sight of him completely. 
 
I fished and ate my catch to keep going in his general direction, but couldn't find him. What I did find was a cave with some torches in it, and they're not mine. Maybe it's a Mineshaft, don't those have torches? I was gonna starve soon if I didn't head back, so I just put a trail of torches leading me back to where I need to go. The co ords are just [Coordinates near the Invader's house] but I want to use the same trail in case I missed that yellow guy. 
 
 
 
Yeah, I know, quite a read. This has definitely gotta be near the maximum number of characters allowed in a Minecraft book, right?
I read it from the comfort of the watch tower as night was setting. I could see if "Sheldon" or any of his swanky pals decided to show up, and if they did, there was only one way up for them to reach me (up the ladder, and I've got a bow, keep in mind), plus I could just break a window and jump out to get away. Sometimes it pays to think ahead.
I stayed on guard the whole time, but "Sheldon" never made an appearance, nor did the Invader or the entity Sheldon called the "Dirt Dweller." Assuming the authenticity of this book, I hope Sheldon really was able to get rid of the Dirt Dweller on a permanent basis, as he doesn't sound like the sort of character I'd like to encounter.
Of course, the authenticity of this book as the experience of an actual player? It doesn't seem likely. Regardless, maybe this map has the book included as a sort of worldbuilding lore packet? It raises a few more questions than it answers - For one thing, if I have the Blue Key, does that mean Sheldon no longer has it, or is there just more than one?
Thankfully, the book does give me at least two locations to explore. The Desert Temple where the Blue Key originated from, which I have the exact coordinates to go to, and the Dirt Dweller's lair, which we have a vague location for.
I decided to head for this underground passageway first, though before that I built a little cobblestone pillar to take a few screenshots of the castle and bridge. After that, I headed off in the direction of the forest I could see in the distance. I thought it was going to be pretty difficult to locate the Dirt Dweller's tunnels, but it was much easier than I'd first thought.
I guess the idea here is that the Dirt Dweller had emerged from the ground and simply never returned, having died in battle. Alright, well, that made it simple enough for me. The Dirt Dweller seemed to be a very dangerous and vicious entity, and this was his element, so I kept my bow and sword ready. If I did end up encountering him, my plan was just to use the cramped tunnels to my advantage and stop his wolves from overwhelming me with sheer numbers, and retreat back behind a bend in case he had picked up a ranged weapon since his fight with Sheldon.
I would think if he had a bow, he would have used it.
The Tunnels were about what you'd expect hearing someone called "The Dirt Dweller" built and lived in them. They were mostly made from dirt and hung around near the surface, occasionally diverging deeper to avoid water sources. They were complex in layout, but minimalist in design. Many of them simply lead to dead ends, as though they had been forged out of deranged compulsion rather than for a planned purpose.
The Tunnels were also pitch black, meaning I had to place torches as I went. Strangely, I only encountered three total zombies in the maze, and no normal skeletons, spiders, or creepers like you'd expect to see on the surface or any dark cave.
The Tunnels were, however, very dangerous in spite of this. The first major issue was the traps.
Here you can see the first one I encountered. It's a dead drop into a cactus, with a ladder on the side that lets you avoid it if you can see and you're paying attention to what you're doing. I saw this trap design repeated a few times, but it was far from the only type of trap.
One of the simplest traps ever thought up, a TNT block covered by a stone block with a stone pressure plate, forced my progress to a crawl as I had to check every block so as to avoid triggering one by accident. Also worth noting is that these explosive traps were only used in the deeper underground sections, never where the explosion would breach the tunnel and expose the underground passages to the overworld.
Dispensers also lurked unseen in the darkness, shooting out arrows or dispensing lava to flood a victim. The former were annoying as they were pretty much unavoidable if you, or another entity, tripped the trap - the latter were easier to deal with, though, since you could just block the lava or, even easier, re-trigger the trap, which would cause the dispensers to suck the lava back up.
Also of note is that oftentimes the walls and, in the deeper areas, the ceiling, (along with sometimes the floors) would be concealing a chamber full of lava. I almost got boiled figuring that one out. This meant that if you found yourself in a troubling situation, you couldn't just barricade yourself in and dig out quite as easily. You could, however, try to use this to your advantage, but it was always a gamble to swap one problem out for another.
The second issue I encountered was the mobs.
Yeah, I said there were "no normal skeletons, spiders, or creepers," but the mobs I encountered here were anything but normal.
The first of the new mobs I faced in the Tunnels was this monstrous-looking wolf:
I heard these things before I saw them. They were loud, snarling, and vicious. They were the same size as normal wolves, but had much darker, more brown-toned fur. Perhaps their most distinctive features were their eyes, which looked diseased, with deep, blood red scleras and pure white irises/pupils.
Usually you can kill wild wolves in about one or two swings with an iron sword, but these ones took three hits to fell. Thankfully the pre-1.9 combat system allowed me to dish out swing after swing after swing with my sword and cut the wolves down in rapid succession.
Usually, the wolves would either be ahead of me in the Tunnels, guarding the path forward, or they would sometimes pop out of these little 1x1 tunnels in the sides of the walls that lead back into a smaller chamber. I dug into these tunnels to see if there were spawners, loot, or other things of interest, but they were empty. You can see one coming out of one such tunnel in the screenshot, but they often came out in groups of 2-4.
Though the wolves were fast, and persistent, they had no ranged combat nor the intelligence to take cover if I started shooting them with arrows. One or two were easy enough to dispatch, and if there were too many, the trick was just to outsmart them by going backwards and pelting them until they died. The one advantage they did have was that if they triggered an arrow trap behind them, it would usually fly over their short hitbox and hit me instead.
The second mob native to the Tunnels was this skeleton variant:
These skeletons had a sort of coppery taint to their color pallet, and they bear what I believe is a simplistic rendition of the letter "W" carved off-center into their forehead. The W Skeletons were a bit of a problem because they had a ranged attack, which is bad enough in an open space where you can dodge it, but becomes a major issue when you're confined to a one-block-thick tunnel.
On the other hand, though, the W Skeletons dropped both arrows and damaged bows which I could use to repair my own bow when I killed them. They also dropped bones, but they couldn't be used to tame the vicious wolves. Trust me, I tried.
The W Skeletons were usually only found if I messed up and triggered a trap that unleashed them, or went down the wrong tunnel into an area where a few of them would be hanging out. The most common way to encounter them was going down a ladder into a dead end room. Though I remember Sheldon's book reporting the wolves tearing apart other hostile mobs, they seemed to leave the w skeletons well enough alone, unless of course the skeletons accidently friendly-fire'd them with their arrows in the confusion.
Near the end of the Tunnels, I found a long cobblestone slab bridge going over a dropoff, with a button on each end of the bridge. Along one wall of the dropoff, three empty one-block-thick, two-block-deep, two-block tall chambers were indented. In a moment of poor judgement, I immediately rushed to press the button nearest to me, just wondering what would happen. Unfortunately, what happened was that trapdoors above the chambers opened and released three of the w skeletons into the room, nearly shooting me off into certain death below. That exact room is the source of the screenshot of the w skeletons you can see above.
I guess the concept here is that, if the Dirt Dweller were running from someone in his tunnels, he could hit the button and let the skeletons shoot his pursuer off the catwalk. I guess if I did end up encountering him, it would be good to have the trap already activated rather than have him use it against me (probably).
Ultimately I ended up reaching the Dirt Dweller's home.
As you can see, he had one last resort in the form of that makeshift machine gun, loaded with arrows (which I promptly looted), just in case somebody made it to his inner sanctum.
It seem all that planning didn't save him, nor stop me, in the end.
One thing you may notice about the Dirt Dweller's home is the bizarre choice in light source. Like the rest of his tunnels, there were no torches here until I came along; Instead, the Dirt Dweller has open, unguarded lava pits that swelter his rooms with light. In a fight, I suppose this could also be advantageous, though it seems like quite the hazard for daily usage.
If you were hoping for the Dirt Dweller's home to contain secrets, treasures, or maybe answers, all I can tell you is - you weren't alone. However, I was disappointed to find that he had no unique weapons or books for me to find, just chests full of dirt, stone, gravel, flint, and various types of ores, along with plenty of shovels and bones. He also had a bed, which I destroyed... Just in case.
He also had a small indoor oak tree farm of the type you'd usually see on a factions server, presumably to provide himself with sticks for his tools. He seems to have been relying mostly on mushrooms for sustenance.
As long as I spent searching for secret chambers and hidden doors, and trust me, I spent a long time looking, there was simply nothing to be found. Eventually I dug myself out past the lava-guarded roof of the Dirt Dweller's lair, built a water elevator in case I need to return while skipping the maze, made my way back to near Sheldon's home, and logged off.
If the Dirt Dweller was anything more than a vicious and savage person, if he held any secretive knowledge or special items, they were not entombed in his former home. Operating under the presumption that this is some kind of story-driven hacked Minecraft version (with yet no answers as to how it ended up on my computer), it seems bizarre for whoever made this hack to have built this entire dungeon but have left it totally barren of meaningful content to find. Thankfully, I can now access the Dirt Dweller's home chambers directly, and I've marked the coordinates down in a .txt file in case I need to return.
This trail of breadcrumbs seems to have unearthed far more questions than answers, today, and it's really left me with only one lead to follow: The Desert Temple where Sheldon's book claims the Blue Key originated from. We'll have to wait and see what answers it holds.
==Chapter 6 - Boiling Sands==
Feb. 27th, 2019
I believe I mentioned back in my first entry that biomes didn't always generate primarily next to biomes of similar temperature. Prior to 1.7, you could have, say, a tundra generate next to a jungle, or some equally ridiculous combination.
Even knowing this, when I crossed the bridge next to the ruins of Sheldon's Castle and trekked through the mountains in search of the Blue Key's origin point mentioned in that book, it was still jarring to see that just over the extreme hills lay an immense, sprawling expanse of desert hills.
Now, this was before rabbits were added to the game, so the desert was pretty much empty during the day. No pigs, cows, chickens, sheep, or other passive mobs spawned here. I suppose if you went deep underground, you might be able to find a bat, but other than that, the only mobs to encounter here were the hostile night mobs. Since it was currently the day, the desert was abandoned. Nothing but miles and miles of sand and cactuses in every direction.
By this point, though, I had come to expect the unexpected, and constantly kept my guard up, expecting to encounter some new threat from this empty expanse. Perhaps a burrowing sand worm enemy, spitting cobra monster, or a deadly vulture of some sort.
The greatest threat for the time being, however, seemed to be a less exciting, more irksome one - the hunger bar. I had expended all my energy fighting through the tunnels, for all the good that did me, and now I was running short on food. I had only a few pieces of bread remaining, which I hesitated to use up since I might need to sprint out of a bad situation in a hurry.
Generally in Minecraft, you get food either from farming, or from killing animals - As I said previously, there are no animals in the desert in this version of the game. As for farming, the desert has no plants whatsoever aside from cacti, no grass to make into farmland, and no water necessary for growing crops on that farmland.
Without energy from food, you can't regenerate health, and if your hunger bar gets low enough, you simply starve to death outright.
Thankfully, there is a third way to get food - fishing.
You may recall that all the way back at the start, I was hoping to craft a fishing rod, and eventually managed to get the necessary supplies and do so? Well, I'd had that fishing rod with me the entire time, tucked away in a corner of my inventory.
However, there was still one last roadblock - You can only fish in water. Water is not something the desert is known for an abundance of. There were actually water lakes that generated in deserts in 1.5 and earlier, but I was one version too late to take advantage of that.
Unwilling to use up my bread, I simply shambled towards my destination at a vastly reduced pace, unable to sprint. This brought up the new problem of the impending night, and with it, any number of unforeseeable dangers.
As I rounded the bend of one more sandy hill, though, I found that wouldn't be a problem any longer.
A winding river was a more than welcome sight. I happily dashed up to its banks and started fishing. I crafted a furnace out of some spare cobblestone and cooked up my catch (then just generic "fish" rather than cod, salmon, or tropical fish). There are no trees in the desert either, so it's a good thing I always try to carry a spare crafting table, just in case I need it.
I noticed something odd, though, about a desert well a few blocks away from the edge of the river. Bizarrely, I found that, instead of being filled with water, the well was bone dry, but not empty - In its center was a little stone pressure plate.
I'm no fool, or stranger to traps, so I threw a block onto to the plate and ran back. Sure enough...
With a blast, the well was consumed by white smoke as a huge crater formed below its center, where I suppose an unwitting victim was intended to be standing. Apparently, I was not a very welcome guest in this lonely desert - Perhaps it wasn't as lonely as I had thought.
As I proceeded onwards on my trek through this inhospitable desert, I was cautious to avoid any further traps. Oddly enough, I didn't encounter any. The isolation of that desert well trap still seems pretty odd to me, even looking back on it now.
With my hunger bar dealt with and no more boobytraps to avoid, the only threat was an occasional creeper wondering out of a cave, or me blundering into a cactus while not paying attention, on one occasion.
Eventually, after cresting the summit of a hill, I found exactly what I was looking for.
A desert temple lay across a river from me, though it was immediately evident that this was not an ordinary temple. For one thing, the "ankh" symbols on the sides of the towers were made of blue wool - while the wool wasn't unusual in this version (it would later be replaced with terracotta), the color was quite an abnormality. I guess it made sense though, I mean, this was where the, or at least a blue key was from, right? So I guess it was color coded.
In addition, the temple had a sort of dock affixed to the shore in front of it. This is the only time I remember seeing a desert temple next to a river, can that happen in the normal game? Well, either way, it happened here, and the temple had a dock to match. Docked in this small port were two boats and some sort of small ship made out of wooden planks and fences.
I entered the temple through the top left door, expecting that things may not be as simple as one would hope. Just a few blocks into the structure's interior, I was proven right.
Looking down from the top of the pyramid through that hole in the floor, I saw the first new enemy of the desert - some sort of mummy. In the screenshot, you can only see one, armed with a golden sword, but there were several of them down there, both armed and unarmed - As soon as they caught sight of me though, most of them headed for the stairs to come up and get me.
While, in hindsight, the smart thing to do would have been to seal the stairs and pick them off from above, that is not what I did. Instead, I charged over to the staircase to face them head on.
Mummies, in essence, are the same thing as zombies, except that they are immune to burning in the daylight, and never came equipped with any armor. About one in five of them would carry a golden sword, but they never carried any other equipment, unlike zombies.
I liked the mummies because they seemed like normal enemies, and they made sense to me. Delving below 0 on the Y coordinate scale to fight springing sponges in an underwater bedrock labyrinth? Some lime-colored humanoid running around building things of his own volition and killing my dog? Those are examples of things that aren't "normal."
Not only would I not encounter those in any actual released version of Minecraft, but it wouldn't make sense for them to be in any future version, either. Mummies in pyramids, on the other hand? Yeah, I could see that. I mean, they aren't in the real game, but they wouldn't seem out of place if they were.
Also, I wasn't paying attention to it at the time, but as you can see in the screenshots, my EXP meter continued to act weird and glitch out. When I killed the first mummy, the experience points it dropped actually seemed to drain my meter rather than fill it. It looks like I actually went down a level after killing that one.
Descending into the lower level of the desert temple, I didn't see any signs that anyone had visited here before me. So much for "Sheldon."
However, when I mined through the floor to head down below to where the chests normally are, I found something quite unexpected!
Instead of one tall chamber with a collection of chests, there was a much smaller chamber with four hallways branching out from it. Below the pyramid was a far more complex series of rooms and passages than in any normal desert temple. The only true dungeon in normal Minecraft is the Stronghold, but this version of the game was evidently filled with them.
In this particular dungeon, almost every room seemed crawling with mummies. In the narrow corridors, it was easy to keep them in front of you when they attacked from the front, however, they would also sometimes do a pincer maneuver on you, and swarm in from both directions, which was very difficult to counteract, and usually best avoided rather than dealt with.
One strategy I came up with was to charge in and attract attention from all the mummies, then use some Flint and Steel I had taken from the Dirt Dweller's base to lay a trail of fire, which they would hopefully charge through attempting to get to me and be burned up in the process. Since the halls were all carved from sandstone, I didn't have to worry about the fire spreading.
When I put this plan into action, though, something odd happened:
Instead of burning up, the mummy would catch fire and take a small bit of damage, before its wrappings burnt away, revealing a charred, burnt, grey zombie underneath. This grey zombie was immune to the damage from the fire, though it stayed lit very briefly.
Just goes to show that oftentimes, the best way to get things done is to charge in and deal with your problems head-on. So that's what I did for room, after room, after room, until I had reached the very bottom level of the dungeon.
Even with the mummy issue dealt with, the treasures of this temple were not left unguarded. This is where I encountered the first miniboss of the new game, which I took to calling...
The Undead Adventurer.
The Undead Adventurer, as the name implies, was a combination of an old-timey 1920s adventurer, and a corpse. The Undead Adventurer seems to have a very similar model to a villager or witch, with an abnormally tall and elongated skull and folded arms covered by its sleeves.
The miniboss wore a wide-brimmed, tan safari hat with a brown hat band, as well as an unzipped pilot jacket and tan pants, hence why I refer to it as an adventurer. The Undead Adventurer's face and chest were obviously skeletonized.
This monster was probably the most difficult thing I'd had to fight yet.
It had three "attacks" if you're willing to use a more liberal definition of the word.
The first was pretty straight forward - the miniboss would simply try to blow you up with a bomb. These didn't blow up blocks, but would definitely harm me. I'm blessed to have been able to get even a single screenshot of this happening.
For his second "attack," the Undead Adventurer pulled out this grayish spawn egg with blue dots and spawned these little hostile blue bugs - I think they were meant to be scarabs? They used a model similar to the silverfish or endermite, and weren't much tougher than either. However, the bastard liked to start spawning these little monsters and just never stop. He seemed to have an infinite supply of these annoying peons at his disposal, and took full advantage of that.
Though their damage wasn't impressive, the scarabs could knock you back into the much more punishing bomb explosions if they got in your way. Thankfully, though, they themselves could also get blown up if they found themselves in the blast radius of the Undead Adventurer's explosives.
The Undead Adventurer's third and final attack was only activated if you got close to him, he would punch you. It hardly did any damage, but damage wasn't the issue.
See, the main threat from this mob wasn't that it was was some huge monster that could wallop you like most of the real game's threatening mobs, like the Iron Golem, Elder Guardian, Ender Dragon, or Wither; Instead, this mob was deadly because it was smart.
The way AI worked in old Minecraft, both for mobs from the normal game and the atypical mobs of this game, hostile monsters will generally just walk up as close as they need to be to you to attack, and then attack, only moving from there if you become too far away for them to attack again.
For melee monsters like your zombies, spiders, slimes, or the new mummies or scarabs, this means just constantly walking, or crawling, or jumping into their target to beat them up.
For ranged mobs such as skeletons, this means walking into range of a player and then shooting at you while standing still, only moving if you flee or are knocked back far enough that they need to get closer to have you in range once again. If you walk up to them and start hammering them with your sword, they will just sit there and take it while still trying to shoot you.
Now, I think the behavior of skeletons has since been changed, but in 1.6.4 the only real exception I can think of is maybe blazes? Which I believe would sort of float upwards when you attack them.
I say all this to draw a very sharp contrast with the way the Undead Adventurer fought. He was constantly circling around me and backing up to avoid letting me get too close, while using his grenadier skills and army of insects to whittle down my health.
If I got close enough to him to swing, he would punch me back while backpedaling away from me, spawning more scarabs to slow me down as he put distance between us. He would never use the bombs close enough to himself that he would be damaged by them. If I tried to use the bow on him, he would do his best to avoid the arrows with his jittery strafing movements while throwing more bombs at me.
I tried burning him with the flint and steel, but he was smart enough to avoid any fires I placed down. He was even able to sprint in order to avoid me.
However, I had one advantage he didn't - endurance. Though he had a greater pool of health, as far as I can tell, he had no way of replenishing any he lost. If my hunger got low, I would dash to one corner of the miniboss fight room or up the stairs leading in and devour some bread, recuperating hearts. One time I did accidentally throw a piece of bread instead of eating it, though, and I wouldn't recommend copying that particular part of the strategy.
When his health got low enough, though, the Undead Adventurer had had enough. His last ditch effort was to turn tail and run away instead of fighting me.
The miniboss fled in a mad dash and lead me on a wild chase through the pyramid as he attempted to escape. He spawned more scarabs to slow me down, and they were much more effective in doing so in the narrow passageways of the temple. It almost seemed like he knew this, and would spawn them more frequently in there, but that could just be coincidence.
Though he was fast, he couldn't outrun my arrows, and I shot him in the back, reveling when I finally saw his model turn red and plummet into the ground, disbanding into a puff of white smoke as he dropped some EXP for me, as well as a compass.
While compasses are usually supposed to point back towards the world spawn, this one seemed to point in a totally different direction. Looking at where I was and comparing coordinates, it seemed to be pointing back towards somewhere in the vicinity of either my home, the Invader's home, or the staircase I'd emerged from two days ago. Of course, the target may have been something in-between my current location and that region, or something beyond that region, but it seemed most likely it was pointing back there.
When I thought about it, maybe it was pointing back to the Blue Key? I mean, that's the point of the temple, isn't it? Well, there was only one way to find out. If it did turn out to point to the Blue Key, that would mean there was basically no gain to having come out all this way, and I'd really accomplished nothing since leaving my jungle hideout - at least, that's what I thought at the time.
I once again made my way through the sands, weaving my way around the desert's hills and dunes, the night having expired at least once during my expedition into the desert temple. A few, now docile spiders roamed the landscape, along with a handful of creepers, but I easily avoided them by sprinting out of the way if one got too close. They were too slow to be much threat.
However, in my periphery, I caught sight of a village. It wasn't what the compass had been pointing to, but it was still worth checking out, I thought, for useful crops and perhaps a blacksmith to loot.
The village looked pretty normal, except for being connected to a very large, exposed cave. Remember that, as its important for later.
As I got closer to the village, though, I noticed a few of these hanging around:
These were simple traps, and I'd built many of them myself in the past. By digging three blocks deep in the desert and making a little room for a cactus at the bottom, you can make a trap that's easy to miss and cannot be jumped out of.
If this was the trapmakers home, I wanted to catch him or her off guard, so I charged into the village. You might think stealth would have been a smarter idea, but there wasn't really any cover to hide behind and do a stealthy approach anyways.
It soon became clear, though, that the village was abandoned. Not only by whoever had made the traps, but there were no villagers to be found either. Some, but not all, of the wooden doors of the houses were missing. If I had to hazard a guess, the cactus traps could very easily have killed all the villagers off one by one, with enough time.
I'm pretty sure I remember villagers just wandering into cacti and not even reacting to the damage they were taking, so it's reasonable to assume that they would be killed off pretty efficiently by cactus pits they couldn't escape from even if they were smart enough to try to do so.
I noticed some sort of cobblestone house in one area of the village, and took a brief look inside:
I'll get back to this house, but I continued investigating the village, wanting to make sure that the Invader or some other hostile entity wasn't nearby.
I investigated the blacksmith in hopes of finding some materials. Oddly, I found it had an iron door with a stone pressure plate.
I threw something on it and stepped back. Sure enough...
Yet another trap. At this point, they were getting easy to recognize and account for, and weren't much of a threat.
Like I mentioned earlier, there was a large cave that ran through the village. Inside, I found the most complex trap so far:
It might look pretty obvious here, due to the brightness of the lava, but in the pitch dark, this tripwire would be impossible to see. Those pistons push the blocks away and then recede back into the wall. If I had been standing in that narrow passage when the trap went off, I would have plummeted into the lava. The column of vertical lava on the other side appears to be some sort of bait meant to get you curious enough to run over and investigate.
This was really odd. Why would whoever lived in that house want to fill their own village with traps that would mostly be a threat to themselves and their own villagers, rather than anyone else?
Looking at that trap, I wondered if that lava pool was actually the bottom, or if they had used signs to make a secret area below. On that suspicion, I dug down, and indeed found a hidden chamber.
Below the lava was a layer of signs, followed by a pitfall into this hallway, where two of those W Skeletons from the Dirt Dweller's lair were waiting to shoot anyone who fell down. You can't see them in the screenshot, but there were also hoppers on the ground, which would no doubt collect your items if you were unlucky enough to fall prey to this devious project. I checked, and there were no items in the hoppers, nor any chests below them.
Back to that house from before, I gave it a second look. It appeared almost unfinished with its lack of a roof, made primarily from cobble but with a sandstone floor. There were window openings but, despite the great abundance of sand, no glass in the windows.
I checked the furnace on a hunch, and found some freshly cooked glass waiting within. Next, I headed down the basement stairs. The basement consisted of a simple little hallway with two doorways.
I checked the right first.
You should be able to recognize this sinister-looking statue. I had definitely seen it previously, near the Invader's home. This one looked... Incomplete, or perhaps damaged. I checked under the ground for another pair of black doors, but this one had no such thing. I did take the Wither Skull for myself, though.
Next was the left door
Once again, this was easily recognizable. Another chiseled sandstone shrine. Unlike the one in the Invader's home, I didn't bother to defile this weird little alter. However, I did raid the chest in its room, finding two very interesting pieces of paper:
The first piece of paper read simply "TAKE KEY" while the second contained a pair of coordinates. I expected that the coordinates would be the same as those of the blue desert temple, but these coordinates lead not to the temple I had come from, but somewhere far in the opposite direction, past even the Invader's home.
It looked like I had a new lead after all.
Category:Stories
Category:Standalone stories
Category:Pages by Spinosaurus4