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Comment by thorax | Hacker News Reader

The best I can sum it up: I can barely remember anything that has happened in real life since I started playing Minecraft on Saturday. All I have are Minecraft memories and I can't believe the clock now says it's Thursday.

Very dangerous if you want to stay productive. But I'm happy because I just made my first lava fountains outside my home (after spending an hour scouring the land trying to find where I had left my huge mine/home).

About the only hope I have is that Minecraft doesn't yet have a compelling co-op mode for anything other than massive building. The "survival" aspect seems not to work multiplayer yet, but if it did, my wife, kid, and I would be playing in there all the time. Because it doesn't work, I have to come up for air to spend time with them.

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  after spending an hour scouring the land trying to find
  where I had left my huge mine/home

1) build a structure at your initial spawn point that points to your castle.

2) make a compass with 4 iron, 1 redstone (it always points to your spawn location)

     I
   I R I
     I

Yeah-- I've been very paranoid about getting lost and had only died once before (but found it quickly somehow).

So I determined that I wasn't going to have that worry again. So I set off on a little quest after a lot of mining. I built a compass and was using it to dig tunnels and place markers all the way back to my spawn point.

About half-way there I got assailed by two spiders which I dispatched after they jump-kicked me down to 3 hearts. Of course, afterwards, a creeper had secretly locked onto me and dropped on my head, blowing me and my supplies and compass to smithereens.

So I respawned and my worst fears were realized... I was then hopelessly lost and couldn't find my way back to my town. I "found" some absolutely gorgeous rock formations and lavafalls in my travel.

Eventually I gave up, downloaded cartograph and drew a map of the level so I could get an idea of where my towers were. That worked out well and now I know the route back home. But I'm going tonight to finish the route markers.

tldr: I had a compass and a plan to mark my respawn route, but I got killed on the mission. I'll try again. :)

Completely there with you man. Initially I started playing and didn't understand why I couldn't use that weak shale you can dig easily with your hands for a pick and why the harder stone wasn't yielding anything. Once I figured out how to make all wood tools to get better resources, It was over man. I've now made like 5 different homes, and learned how to mark them from the spawn point. My memories of exploration and mining trump those of my daily duties in real life. My latest story was of mining a sub basement of my home, and discovering a vast underground cavern with zombies. I died, and lost that homes location. In the effort to find it, I discovered new land, with more features that replicated the movie Avatar. I have picked the tallest mountain in the clouds for my next project. A case of beer or mt. dew, and a free night, and I will conquer that mountain...

This game makes me want to start mining out of my basement in real life. However my landlord won't let me.

I'd also like to point out that this is the exact success story I needed to boost my ego for my day job and daily projects for startups and indie development.

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