05 – Satisfactory crafting

There was a 3x3 grid on its surface, as he expected. It worked, he found out after many tries, by simply thinking about what items had to go there, and then they disappeared from the inventory and appeared as miniatures inside the grid.

He placed two sticks and three planks, and on the right hand inside the empty square, a wooden pickaxe appeared.

He started mining stone, digging a small stairway that went downwards. He only had to swing the thing casually at the wall, and cracks appeared until the blocks were removed from the world. He didn’t even get tired, as long as he mined with Minecraft mechanics in mind.

As an experiment he tried thinking about regular mining, and the sharp end of the pick lodged itself in the hard stone. The hit reverberated back to his arm, and his hands were shaky for a few seconds. Just the one hit, and he was already sweating. He went back to the other way of doing things, definitely easier.

While he mined, the repetitive task made him think back to his old world, where he had all sorts of things and equipment. How exciting it would be, to have them here and try them all himself.

Perhaps there was a way. There was a thing that he could try. Among the many mods there was one that allowed him to store an ungodly amount of items in a digital storage. The best part of that mod was that after completing a series of very expensive items, he could then access the contents of his storage even from other worlds.

Building the necessary things would not be easy, but it was certainly worth trying. The potential benefits were just too good to not try.

He had a new objective now.

As soon as he had three pieces of cobblestone, he made a stone pick. But, he was not one to waste resources, so he kept using the wooden one for the normal stone, only using the stone one when needed.

After a while, he felt the wooden pickaxe was nearing its limit. Curious about what was going to happen, he kept mining until the tool went up in splinters. It almost exploded, and all that was left of it was a couple wooden splinters in his hand and a small pile on the ground.

He picked one up, and examined it. Just broken wood, nothing worthy of note. Still, he decided to store them in his inventory, promptly punching them until they were gone.

Examining his inventory, he noticed that the splinters were there, and that the stone had piled it all up in one stack that was greater than the old limit of 64, something that he did not expect but that was also very handy.

Almost running, he rushed back to his trusty workbench and placed the usual eight cobblestone blocks along the edges of the grid. He plucked the resulting furnace out of the right-hand square, and placed it in the world.

In the darkness, he barely recognized the two holes where the ingredients had to be put, but as soon as coal and iron were in, the whole room lit up in a pleasant a warm light.

The first thing he noticed was that both the workbench and the furnace were nothing like he remembered. The workbench was a long table filled with tools and equipment like hammers and rulers, with a central grid that he could use to do Minecraft style crafting.

The furnace was a tall, two-meter construction made of small stones with a chimney and a warm fire that radiated a pleasant heat all around the room. On the right, liquid metal poured down and solidified in a stack of ingots, while the fire at the bottom consumed the large amount of ore that was in the top section.

There were supposed to be eight cubic meters of ore, but inside there they looked much smaller than that. The ingots too stacked one on top of the other, small and already cool to the touch. The smoke coming off the top disappeared before building up in the room as well, Jacob noticed. It was good, because otherwise he realized that he would have been smoked to death with all probability.

He had this inkling that if he used the furnace without the game mechanics, the smoke would linger instead of vanishing. He had no intention to try that here though.

While the iron slowly trickled down, his thoughts went back to his situation. It was definitely absurd, but at the same time something he knew was probably the dream of many. Even his dream, because so many times did he fantasize about being spirited away to some other world. Now that it was real, though, it felt so strange and odd.

So lonely. He missed his family, he missed his home. It didn’t matter how bad he felt there, it was still his home and family.

Still, he could not say that he was not enjoying this. He was having a good time, he was living the dream. He was basically doing what he always wished he could do, and now that he was here he wanted to enjoy. His mind, like all minds, didn’t seem to like the fact that he could enjoy his situation, reminding him constantly of his family and such. But, he didn’t want to think about it.

He didn’t.

They were probably looking for him now, or maybe his body was there, dead. Maybe this one was another body, given how strange it all felt it could even be that.

But he was here, and it was no use lingering on those thoughts, right?

He grabbed the small stack of ingots, and smiled softly when the notification he was waiting for arrived.

The first thing he did, was crafting a sword. He placed one stick, and two ingots inside the grid. The ingredients disappeared from the table and as soon as he picked up the small picture of a sword it went in his hotbar.

Selecting it with his mind, the sword appeared in his hand. It was a longsword, like the medieval ones he saw in the documentaries, but felt light and comfortable in his hand. It was made of iron and wood, perfectly sharp and polished. Deadly.

A slight sensation of hunger began to crawl its way up from his stomach. He realized the he had not eaten since he arrived here, at least a full day and some of the night, without even noticing. Now, however, he was starting to feel it. Also, the half heart he lost was still missing.

He collected all his things and, sword in hand, prepared to go outside. It was time to hunt some food.