Deeper into the mines, into something somebody clearly built rather than dug, and briefly into an area we had no business being in.
Straight into a death
The episode opens on Basket dying and Scoti greeting the news with the words we hate you, which is roughly the tone this run has settled into.
A bat then attaches itself to both of them in turn, described as being like white on rice, and is more persistent than anything else in the episode. The consolation is the furnaces nearby: half a stack of coal in each, thirty-two apiece, which for this map counts as a windfall.
The vein of arthropods
Cave spiders again, in enough volume that Basket starts calling the area a vein of arthropods. There is an enderman about too, and the pearls would be useful, but neither of us fancies the fight it takes to get them.
The area beyond that is summarised, accurately, as very bad, lots of creepers, very bad.
A wrong turn into the emerald twenties
The numbered signposting from last episode gets tested. We are looking for the Lumenspire route, six through nine, and instead end up at a junction labelled emeralds twenty through twenty-three.
Both of us react the same way. That is a bad place to be. We are nowhere near ready for whatever is behind numbers that high, and we leave promptly.
There is a good line in here about the shape of this map: the feeling that you are never going to find your way back once you have gone in, right at the moment you finally find your buddy.
Somebody built this
Then the mines open into a proper hall. Stone brick, wooden tables and benches, a painting hung on the wall, and a row of red beds made up along one side. It is unmistakably built rather than generated, and it is the most civilised thing we have seen in this map.
The beds do not work. Trying one produces the message that you may not rest now because there are monsters nearby, which given what we had just walked through is not a surprise, but is a little insulting in a room this tidy.
Revenge, and a shield at last
Basket dies again in a web, mid-fight, and loses his gear where he stood. Scoti hunts down the mob that did it and kills it, then reports the revenge back, which Basket appreciates more than the recovered inventory.
He also finally has a shield of his own and a better sword, four episodes after complaining about not having one. Food is still grim: beetroot, no cookies.
We finish by agreeing that the room ahead is the sort of place where you genuinely have to carry your things rather than stash them, which after episode three is a decision neither of us takes lightly.
