The video opens on a title card, "Minecraft Hardcore Challenge August 2013," with "E01" in the corner. This is game show host Michael Deering's August challenge: everyone plays the same seed in hardcore mode on Minecraft 1.6.2. The world creation screen shows structures on and Large Biomes. It is also Basket's fourth try at this first episode. The first attempt "didn't work due to lag," Endermen killed Basket in the second, and in the third the island "filled up with monsters quickly, and a creeper snuck up behind me and took me out."
Stuck on a small island
The world starts on a small island in the ocean. The first part of the challenge is food: "three fish, three apples or three something else." Once Basket has three, the plan is to "hop in a boat and you go east," and the boat time "doesn't count against your episode length." Basket picks apples, which means cutting trees and replanting every sapling. The mainland waits on the far side, and "we'll be in a jungle."
One animal a day
The rules are no mods, no beds and nothing off camera. One rule is looser than in June, when no animals could be killed at all. "On this one you can kill one a day, so one chicken or one cow." The change came "because it was otherwise too hard to really get any enchanting going because you couldn't kill any cows."
Torches and saplings
Basket digs down for cobblestone, picks up iron ore along the way, and builds a furnace and tools, plus a second sword "to be safe, because it gets crazy." The worry is the 1.6 zombies, which "track you from super far away." So the job before dark is light. Basket plants torches across the island, burns through all the charcoal by mistake, and digs out the ground near the base so that anything spawning there "won't be able to get up." Saplings go in right next to the torches so they can grow overnight.
As the sun sets, the first apple drops. "Oh right, an apple." Basket decides not to eat it, since "otherwise it doesn't count for the three."
Watching the night
With six iron, Basket weighs buckets and armor, says "Gonna make boots," then thinks better of it: "Maybe I'll hold on to it for now." From one spot Basket has "a pretty good view of everything on the island." A zombie starts walking over from far off. "That zombie is tracking me from all the way over there." A creeper ends up in the water, and Basket isn't too worried: "if he did blow up it wouldn't be a big deal." Part of the night plays sped up, and Basket goes after a spider that gets inside the lit area.
A second apple at sunrise
Near dawn, "the zombie villager wants me," but "he's stuck on the water." The sun comes up, the night is over, and Basket goes back to breaking leaves. "Oh, another apple." That makes two of the three. Basket pauses the game alive, one apple short of the boat, and the end card follows with no gameplay after it.
