BEFORE TOYS TO LIFE There are plenty of physical Minecraft toys—Legos, HotWheels, 3D printed fan pieces—even if players can’t bring them into the game. Kal spent hours playing Minecraft on and off the TV “Why are there chests full of uncooked meat and weapons?” “In case we come back as survival.” These are the conversations I had with my small child. Survival is going to be like Tutorial—you will need real tools and fuel and a furnace. You need a farm with irrigation. You have to protect it from Creepers (because there are no real world problems like flooding or a drought). Your farm and your animals need to be accessible. You can’t live on a beach or at the top of a mountain cliff and just zip over to the farm in survival. If you are going to slaughter animals, you ought to breed more first. And then you need to feed and shelter the new animals. Real animals are not spontaneously spawned. You can make puppies if you feed the wolves first. It’s hard to whip up a cake in survival mode. Kal knows all the parody songs about mushroom stew but he’s not helping me write the recipes for how to go farm to table. There are many kinds of farming in Minecraft: Mob, Experience, Food, Block, and Item Farming, according to Minecraft Wiki. Books have been written about all of it. Animal husbandry goes to the mob section because you slaughter them the way you would slaughter spiders or zombies. Although, it is entirely possible to not slaughter your animals and instead wait for them to drop wool blocks, pork chops, steaks, eggs, and milk. You will need to grow wheat, carrots, potatoes, pumpkins, and melons to pull this off. You can also farm mushrooms in order to create mushroom stew. Kal planted small sections around some of his houses, but he was more concerned with having a beacon so he could find the house again. He wanted to go to the Nether to fight Zombie Pig Men and Ghasts. Then he was obsessed with getting to The End. All of his play was offline, so watched videos about Hunger Games, but never actually played on other people’s creations. —MV
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Art Department Weekly • October 27, 2020
