Since the Xbox 360 Edition of Minecraft does not have Creative Mode (yet), everything we build is much more special because we have to harvest the raw materials one block at a time. If you want a cobblestone house, you need to dig the stone out of the world. That of course changes when you discover glitches, or "features" as I call them, that allow you to do things you shouldn't be able to do. In this case, it's a duplication "feature" that allowed us to duplicate any block we wanted, and we had a blast doing so.
It started in my brother's world last Saturday morning. It had been a few weeks since I've seen what he had been working on, so I was looking forward to seeing his projects. I spawned in his main base and noticed something was different when I went outside. His base had doubled in size and all the walls were made with Iron blocks. My jaw dropped. That was a TON of iron! I walked around the corner and stood there speechless for a minute. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There before me was a tall tower of solid gold blocks.
By this time, he was laughing hysterically and proceeded to explain his "research" of a duplication feature using a Furnace. I had done something similar myself with a dispenser and diamonds, but nothing to this scale. A little ways away from his base was another project of his, a floating platform in the sky made out of gold. Amazing. We had to stop playing, but agreed to get back on later that evening in my world.
About 10:30 that night, we joined back up in my world and I showed him what I was working on. One of my side projects is a massive tree structure with trees growing on top of trees as high as they can go. I had gone monster hunting earlier for bones to make bone meal, but had only collected about 20. Let's just say with his help I now have about 2 large chests full of bones to continue fast growing trees.
My first thought of what to try duplicating next was gunpowder. TNT made mining so much faster and with a lot of gunpowder, I could make a lot of TNT blocks. But then it struck on me, why not just dupe TNT itself? I had enough gunpowder to make a few blocks, so we proceeded to create a ton of TNT. I don't know how many chest fulls we wound up with, but it was a lot. With an inventory full of TNT, we were off to "experiment" in my world.
We blew up ice and created a hole that quickly refroze a layer down. We blew up sand and made a massive crater. We discovered that TNT doesn't detonate under water unless it's buried. Then we set our sights on a mountain and played around with larger quantities of TNT. About an hour in, most of that mountain is gone. I was worried a few times that the game would completely lock up as it nearly froze at times. We also lost count of the number of times we blew ourselves or each other up. Like I said, it was a blast!
With the mountain mostly gone, we began going downward and discovered another natural cave which we proceeded to explore and blow up. As we were doing so, we discovered yet another dungeon. This makes the third one I have found on my map so far. On the other side of the dungeon, we found lava and this is where the real fun began.
By now, it was getting close to 1AM and we were getting a little tired and goofy, but we played on anyways. The little lava pool that we had discovered soon became a lava waterfall after we blew away most of the blocks around it. In doing so, we discovered a water source and more lava, so we blew them open to expose them. This exposed even more water and lava and the cycle repeated. We blew the tar out of this area until we hit bedrock.
After a lot more playing down here with lava and TNT, we eventually were left with a path that was a single block wide through the lava falls. It was treacherous and nearly killed us many times, but we kept going and detonating more TNT.
Past our new lava falls, we created a small chamber which we would line with TNT and detonate to create a larger chamber. We would then repeat this process with more TNT and keep going until we had a huge cavern at bedrock. At some point around this time, another good friend of mine hopped in my world and began playing with us. That was awesome too because now we had 3 of us with TNT blowing stuff up.
My brother needed to take a short break, and I decided to tunnel off in what I thought was East and see if I could find my existing minecart track. It didn't take long. I didn't realize just how close we were to being directly under my house and castle. I was more excited than I probably should have been, but it was close to 3AM and we were getting tired...
Did the tiredness stop us? Of course not. In my 3x3 tunnel that I blew out to connect everything up, I hit a dirt spot about half way through which made a wider hole. That was apparently the perfect spot to keep blasting outward, and thus another huge chamber was created. That got us to another lava patch (which is now a freestanding lava blob) and eventually got us to the bottom of "The Hole". It's a 1x1 hole that my brother dug straight down one day from surface to bedrock. He was just goofing off, but I left it there in his honor and named it after him too.
By the time 4AM rolled around, we were exhausted and ready to call it quits. I don't know just how many thousands of TNT blocks were detonated that night, but it was a ton of fun. I still have a lot of TNT left for future mining and plan on using it too. Mining just isn't going to be the same now that I've experienced that.
Last night, I connected my minecart track to the new chambers and created another remote base with furnaces and crafting table. I don't know what I'll ever do with this chamber, but it's there now and it was a lot of fun to make. It reminded me just how much fun Minecraft can be, especially when playing it with friends. It truly does make all the difference in the world.
To my brother, thank you for teaching me the duplication feature.
To my good friend, thank you for standing there while and allowing me to blow you up. :-P
To both of you guys, thank you for the good time and memories. I look forward to playing and exploring more.
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