User:Miner Bob

=Week One=

Fiddled in creative mode for a bit to get the hang of the interface and world mechanics. Crappy FPS on my machine [Atom with Intel int. GPU, XP SP3, 2GB RAM] Turned all the options to fast, and it's jittery but playable at normal render distance, 10-12 fps. Tried Optifine, both the vanilla and MT packages; No improvement.

A peaceful world
Seeded pi to the 22nd. Spawned in a river valley in extreme hills biome; Sheep abundant, trees not so much. Dug a tunnel by hand for a lair, the hill I chose was thin enough to dig clear through into a small valley on the other side with a few trees and some flat space for growing more. Harvested the trees and planted the seedlings. Crafted a wooden pickaxe or three and started tunneling down 1:2 to the east from the midpoint of my first tunnel, which will now serve as front [the valley] and back [the river] entrances. Found a nice coal seam about level 56; Excavated it, and squared off the resulting pocket for a work/bedroom. Secured it with a cobblestone wall and wooden door, also put doors at the tunnel mouths. No mobs to worry about, but best to avoid bad habits. Continued to tunnel down and east, taking any ore pockets along the way, until I hit bedrock. According to the debug screen, I'm under ocean at level 4. Put out side shafts at level 12 to seek diamonds and redstone. By this point, I have iron tools to work with, and an extra furnace and crafting table up on level 16 or so. The south exploration drift hit a small cavern almost immediately; got more iron, coal, and a bit of gold. The north drift went for quite a ways before opening into a veritable cathedral; Lava- and waterfalls everywhere, obsidian floors where the water has frozen the lava, and little pockets of all ore types peeking out everywhere.

Mine! Mine! All mine!
This cavern is massive, and that's not counting all the side-chambers and tunnels into it. There are about a dozen lava- and waterfalls, and I've done some experimenting with diverting them and plugging them. I now have more cobblestone and obsidian than I know what to do with. I've found something of everything, including about a dozen diamonds. Haven't bothered mining the obsidian yet; Not much use for it, and except for the blocks I made from lava, there's more lava directly underneath, so mining the floor is pointless. Dug a spiral staircase emergency exit straight up from this level; It comes to the surface on a separate island with quite a few sugar-cane plants. With the redstone and iron I've mined, I'll make a map and start charting the world around me. I'll have to build a boat.

Sailing on a Sunday afternoon.
=A digression= Created a superflat creative world to start fiddling with redstone circuits. Built a seven segment display, with switching logic to generate 0-9. Have it hooked up to some detector tracks on a minecart loop for testing, so it counts from 0-9 and repeats. I think I want to make one with bigger segments, and set up 3 or four in cascade with shift registers to act as a calendar. I have no idea how many "days" go by while I'm here. ..