My friends and I started Minecraft server years ago as a way to spend time together and chat while chopping down trees, digging holes, and exploring this recent realm. It was my first time really getting into Minecraftand it unlocked something deep inside me. While my buddies figured out a way to mass-produce chickens, built a functional city full of villagers, and toiled to carve out mighty bridges to connect continents, I devoted myself to a much simpler pleasure. I dug and created a massive underground structure best described by the straightforward term Big Cube.
What led me to such an unorthodox playstyle? The answer is straightforward. Some people might love traveling across oceans in search of recent lands or climbing mountains in search of recent biomes, but I get lost easily. I spent many nights in Minecraft running away from ghosts, skeletons and spiders while trying to find some orientation.
So while my friends and I started a recent server and worked on building a lovely city above ground, I stuck to my isolationist corner of the map. They built above, and I went below. When I ventured into the world of wind and sky, I mostly built statuesque stone towers so I was less likely to get lost—as long as I could see the tower to aid me, I knew I’d find my way back to the tunnels.
Long after my friends moved on to other games and got bored with our Minecraft Realm, I stayed. I kept digging.
I’ve never been a particularly innovative builder; if you put me in a survival crafter game, I usually just build a large square house. While others create handcrafted wonders and carefully leveled mansions, I have trouble thinking outside the bounds (if I’m feeling particularly ambitious) of a rectangle. So maybe building tunnels, underground, appealed to me on some primal level. And at some point, those tunnels became an unnecessarily Big Cube.
I can’t say why, but it’s nice to have all that space. And as you can see, I’ve filled it in nicely. Brick is my residential area, full of villagers. They love living here, especially when I look down through the hole in the ceiling and throw in handfuls of potatoes and beets. I’ve created a giant aquarium-style area, a few storage and smelting areas, and a few train tracks to connect it all.
I play in survival mode instead of innovative, which some might consider an exercise in boredom. But for me, the snail-paced, steady work of digging and smelting is deeply therapeutic. Whenever I’ve been frustrated, depressed, lonely, or gloomy over the past few years, I dig. And then, when it gets too shadowy to see, I delve into the inferno and fill dozens of buckets of lava at once so I can pour it behind the glass for lightweight.
My Minecraft The land itself contains very little real terrain. I’ve barely explored beyond a petite section of the map. But I know my corner of the land like the back of my hand, because it’s an empty space, lit by lava stolen from gloomy pigs in hell. Some have zen gardens, others knit, and I miss mines.
My huge project is not the most productive way to play MinecraftIt’s not the most visually fascinating way to do it, nor is it even the way most people do it — but it was a way for me to cope with my brain issues and achieve peace through the power of the Big Cube.
