This feels like a silly thing to blog, but that has never stopped me before!

Background

My early days of playing minecraft were spent playing a free light weight creative only version of the game through a web browser, a version that is today known as “minecraft classic”, some time later (bare in mind I was around the age of 8 or 9 years old at this time and my memory of the passing of time from then is not fantastic) a newer version of minecraft of the game was announced, one that would require a paid account (This version of the game is called Indev). Some classic childhood parental begging occurred - a joint effort between me and my older brother, and some time later they agreed to buy an account for the 2 of us to share (best day ever, thanks mum and dad).

This version of the game was special as not only would it receive all future updates at no additional payment, but it contained Survival mode, if memory serves, I had a couple of survival worlds across different minecraft updates, however at some stage I started playing on just the one survival world across all updates, and this was my “forever world” which I played in whenever I could, including update features as they came, I remember I had a furnace minecart railway that led to an island near the main land I did all my building, which I named “redstone island” when a the redstone update was released later and I used it for all of my redstone testing. I went on to play on this world for many years, however it met a “tragic” end as the old family laptop I played on got a virus, and the world could not be recovered.

The in between

I was saddened by the loss of my forever world, however I still played the game often, though around this time I turned to playing modpacks more often, some of the modpacks I look back on fondly include the “technic” modpack (not to be confused with “tekkit”, which I also played and loved), the hexxit modpack, and others that were available across the FTB launcher and technic platform launcher.

As largely a modded player I was no longer playing version of minecraft as they released, I was often on which ever version was most popular for modding at the time, i distinctly remember 1.7.10 to 1.12 being a large jump I a large jump in modpack version popularity. I did of course still play on these vanilla updates to the game in smaller worlds, and later on servers my friends hosted, however never to the same degree of “forever world” that I had with my original world.

I continued to play minecraft for a long time, all the way through primary and high school, and continue to play it today (with notably large breaks from the game as is regular for most long term hobbies I’m sure.)

Today

Today (or rather yesterday night) I have found myself deciding to start a new world, a forever world once again, I had considered starting this world in an earlier version of the game to recapture some of the charm of older terrain meeting new terrain, but have decided that a playthrough on the latest version of the game will feel the most organic as time goes on. in this play through I will only use client side modes like sodium and oculus for performance and visuals, but I am avoiding mini-map mods and things of that nature as I am trying to recapture some of the simplicity of minecraft.

I have decided it might be fun to document my playthrough a little, I don’t feel super keen on creating a let’s play or anything as it is a lot of additional work for what is just a hobby, but a blog post every now and then just catching up on what I have been doing in the world sounds nice.

You can read the whole Tales from Alumantia series here