04 – A hole for a house

There was a small hill next to where he was, a short distance from the edge of the forest. It was solitary and lonely, the only one of its kind for several kilometers, surrounded by flat terrain everywhere. Jacob reached the gently sloping ground, the daylight dying around him, the darkness encroaching by the second.

He crouched down, and looked at the dirt that composed the ground. He punched it, his bare fist making contact with the dirt and displacing a few small pebbles. A tiny crack appeared right under his fist, and expanded with each subsequent punch until it occupied the whole square meter area of the block he was breaking. Then, it disappeared and appeared in his inventory.

There was a one-meter cube of missing dirt in the ground now, exactly below him. The disappearance of the mass made him fall down, but again he didn’t feel pain or strange sensations.

He smiled. “Okay, let’s dig down then.”

A few minutes later, he was inside a hole in the ground next to the hill, the only entrance being the meter-wide vertical tunnel above him. This was his standard first-day shelter in Minecraft, and the idea of doing it for real was still very odd in his mind.

He disabled the realistic physics and placed one dirt block to close off the entrance to the tunnel, shutting himself in. Immediately, what little light there was before left the place to total darkness, utter and complete.

He felt the room close in on him, the walls emit a pressure and the air itself become heavy like water. The oppressive atmosphere of knowing he was trapped underground in a room barely larger than himself, with tonnes of dirt over his head that were not falling down only due to some strange phenomenon that made them behave like a game.

Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the low light, and he found out that he could make out some of the shapes and the different textures and colors. There was stone on the floor, and dirt above and all around. He was glad that this Minecraft feature was present, because he had no other way to see in here and didn’t want to spend the night in total darkness.

The next logical thing to test was the crafting system. Going by how many elements were similar to the game, it made sense that crafting would be here as well. The problem is that his inventory did not work following an interface like it did in Minecraft, but rather only gave him a sensation that something was there, and he roughly knew what it was and how it looked like. When he concentrated on one of the stored items, then a blue box manifested and told him a brief description.

He concentrated on the many blocks of wood that he had stored.

He felt that he was getting closer. If there was a crafting system, with all probability doing this was a good first step. There was no tutorial to follow either, so it was all trial and error.

The recipes, as well, were nowhere to be seen. There was no recipe book, no wiki entry, nothing. He tried many times to manifest other interfaces, a menu maybe, or even the debug screen but to no avail. All he had was his health bar, his hotbar and his inventory.

Hoping that the recipes were at least similar to the ones he knew so well from the countless hours spent playing, he tried to mentally manipulate the wood into planks. He felt that one of the blocks, impressive pieces of trunk and bark that almost filled the meter-large cube of space that was one block, changed.

“Yes!” He exclaimed, loudly, the sound disappearing in the walls without echo.

He tinkered with his items for a while, until finally his inventory was looking very much like something, he’d have at the very beginning of a serious playthrough.

So far, so good. He manipulated four planks, hopeful that he could get what he was looking for, and when it happened, he stared at the resulting item for a while.

The implications were many, and he liked them. It meant that, if he followed the game mechanics rather than the regular way of doing stuff, he could simplify the process of making items by a thousandfold. Already when he made wood into planks, he knew that it was only one of many methods of doing so, the others all being conventional ones that required tools and knowledge he didn’t have.

This one of crafting with his inventory and now with his crafting table, however, was a novel method that by borrowing from the game it was taken out of, removed the need for tools time and effort.

He scratched his chin. The planks, he realized, were held in place by nails.

“What if I took them out? They appeared out of nothing, so maybe I can create resources just like this?”

He placed a block of planks, filling one cubic meter with solid wooden beams. Already by looking at the impressive thing, he had the vague sensation that what he was trying to do would not work. It would be too broken a mechanic, and indeed he found out that he could not take the nails out in any way. He could manipulate the block, break the wood, chip it, change it, but not create things that were not there before. The wood was perfectly fine, because it was the log only transformed into planks, but the nails were off limits.

It made sense. A perfect integration of game mechanics and realism would have created too many exploits, and therefore had to be nerfed.

“I wonder who is responsible for deciding what works and what doesn’t…”

He placed the block back in his inventory, by punching it until it broke. He noticed that now that he was punching with the intention of collecting the block, and not breaking it like it would have in a normal world, the cracks appeared once again. When they covered the whole surface, the thing went into his inventory, but it was no longer a normal plank.

It was just as he saw it, retaining the broken configuration it had due to his experiments.

“Okay, time to get serious.”

He placed the crafting table, also called workbench he almost said to nobody in particular, and studied it.