Stuff I Enjoy: Minecraft

Welcome to the first installment of Stuff I Enjoy! I was going to postpone this to next week but decided against it.

This installment is dedicated to Minecraft, a game that shaped my entire youth. I started playing Minecraft in 2011, around the time that Beta 1.7.3 dropped. It wasn’t until Beta 1.8 that I actually started getting more into it. Why? When I first booted it up, I created a survival world but didn’t know how to break blocks. I was trying to get wood by spam clicking it instead of holding the mouse button. Which, in hindsight, doesn’t make sense at all, but younger me thought it was the way to do it and was so confused that it wasn’t working to the point of closing the game in a fit of anger.

A while later, Youtube Let’s Plays started showing up in my recommended feed. That pushed me back into playing the game, only this time I decided that I wasn’t going to play alone. I had seen countless videos of Survival Multiplayer (SMP) servers and wanted to join one to interact with other people and make friends.

And, so I did. I joined a server called Oporto SMP, which at the time was the most active Portuguese public server. It was not a vanilla server, there were towns that you could rent plots in and build your home, but you could also construct it in the wilderness(at the risk of getting griefed). I remember spending all my days there, even going so far as to sneakily use the computer while my parents were sleeping to play a little more. I had a blast. I made friends, made enemies, and even managed to show up in some youtube videos, which kid me thought was the coolest thing ever. As time passed and as the server wasn’t being updated to newer versions of the game, the server population started dwindling down until there were consistently only two or three people online at any time.

It was time for me to find a new server. This time around, I decided that I wanted to improve my English and play in a foreign server, so I joined a russian/english server called Slaandcraft. That server is the one that I have the fondest memories of. It was the first time I made online friends that I’m still in touch with to this day.