Minecraft Continued: the Desert Challenge

I am still a few months behind on my Minecraft activities, but will describe my second foray into vanilla Minecraft. I liked the game and wanted to do something different and came up with the "desert challenge". This was a game started on a flat, all desert world with sand and sandstone all the way down, so no other resources except from villages and desert temples. The first thing to do was find a village for food, then find one with a sapling in a blacksmith chest, then use lava from a smithy to make a stone generator, then get more lava to turn into obsidian to make into a nether portal. The stone generator and portal are shown below. One of the subtle lack of physics things with Minecraft are that you can make infinite amounts of water with just two water buckets spilled into the right pattern. Two buckets and you can flood the world! The other one is that one bucket of lava spilling on to water can make as much stone as you want. 

So then I settled into a particular village and began building places for new villagers to live. If you build houses, they will come. In terms of game mechanics it is all about the number of doors so I made door heavy apartment designs.

Then, to get better gear I set about trading with the villagers. I fished for them, grew food for them and had a tree farm to make charcoal for them.

However, there was always some wise guy that would only trade me for chicken, and there had not been such a thing on this world for thousands of years. They say the sands of the village echoed with the screams of the dying after the stranger came to town. I couldn't just kill them outright, because by that time the village was full of protective iron golems, which then became a source of iron ingots after they were suffocated by sand.

At this stage, I got bored. As a mathematician, I had proved I could win the game and therefore didn't have to actually finish all the details to be satisfied. I later realized that the ongoing appeal of the game was not the "game" but the architectural design, which I pursued later as I moved on from vanilla Minecraft and on to the game with additional elements (mods) written by fans. I left this world when I finally found an abandoned mineshaft, which I had been searching for the whole time.