My friends and I began a Minecraft server years ago as a way to hang out together and chat while we chopped down trees, dug holes, and explored this new realm. It was my first time truly delving into Minecraft, and it unlocked something deep inside me. While my buddies figured out a way to raise chickens en masse, built a functional city full of villagers, and worked on forging massive bridges to link continents together, I dedicated myself to a much simpler pleasure. I have been digging, and creating a massive underground structure that can perhaps best be described by the simple term Big Cube.
What has led me to such an unorthodox playstyle? The answer is simple. Some people may love taking off across the ocean in search of new lands, or climbing mountains in search of new biomes, but I get easily lost. I’ve spent many a night in Minecraft fleeing phantoms, skeletons, and spiders while trying to find some kind of landmark.
So when my friends and I started a new server, and they worked on building a beautiful city above ground, I kept to my own isolationist corner of the map. They built above, and I delved below. When I did venture up to the world of wind and sky, I mostly just built tall stone towers so I’d be less likely to get lost — as long as I could see a helpful tower, I knew I could find my way back to the tunnels.
Long after my friends moved onto other games and got bored with our Minecraft Realm, I remained. I kept digging.
I’ve never been a tremendously creative builder; if you put me in a survival crafter game, I usually just end up building a giant square house. While others craft handbuilt wonders and meticulously aligned manses, I have trouble thinking beyond the limits of (if I’m feeling particularly ambitious) a rectangle. So perhaps building tunnels, down beneath the ground, appealed to me on some kind of primal level. And at some point, those tunnels turned into an unnecessarily Big Cube.
I can’t say why, but it feels good to carve out all this space. And as you can see, I’ve filled it up nicely. The brick is my residential district, full of villagers. They love living here, especially when I look down through a hole in the ceiling and throw in handfuls of potato and beetroot. I’ve created a giant aquarium-style area, some storage and smelting areas, and a few railroad tracks to connect it all.
I’m playing in Survival mode, instead of Creative, which some people might see as an exercise in tedium. But to me, the slow and persistent work of digging and smelting is deeply therapeutic. Every time I’ve been frustrated, depressed, lonely, or sad over the last few years, I dig. And then, when it becomes too dark to see, I delve into hell and fill up dozens of buckets of lava at a time so I can pour it behind glass for light.
My Minecraft Realm, as such, covers very little actual ground. I’ve barely explored past a small section of the map. But I know my corner of this realm like the back of my hand, because it’s empty space, lit with lava stolen from sad pigs in hell. Some people have zen gardens, other people knit, and I yearn for the mines.
My massive project is not the most efficient way to play Minecraft, nor the most visually interesting way, nor even the way most people do it — but it’s been a way for me to deal with a bad brain and achieve serenity through the power of the Big Cube.