Day one of the Hostile Mob Museum, Michael Deering's April 2015 Minecraft Hardcore Challenge. The job this month is to catch hostile mobs and keep them in cages at a base, with different mobs worth different points. It's a team game on the GopherCraft server: Basket plays with Max_Writer, PaisleyPlayfully, pikerize, PsychoSFK, Sayulily and Scoti_Garbidis, in hardcore on Minecraft 1.8.1 with Large Biomes. There's something new on the call, too. "We're using the positional audio mod for 1.8."
Seven on a snowy hill
The team spawns together on grassy hills under snowy slopes and spruce trees, and the chat fills with join lines and first achievements. "Okay, everybody's grabbing some wood." Food needs a plan, since the passive mobs are off limits. "We can't eat meat in this one, right?" "Yeah, just fish." Basket chops a tree, sets down a crafting table, and makes a wooden pickaxe and a wooden sword.
Walking to the dungeon
The month's announcement told everyone where to find a dungeon, so the first trip has a destination. "Luckily everybody has the coordinates." Basket picks up coal and cobblestone along the way, then digs down through the stone toward it. "So what's the plan?" "We're gonna wait and find out what this spawner is."
The spawner room
Basket breaks into a room of mossy cobblestone with a spawner in the middle, and zombies are already there. Basket takes one down with the wooden sword, with pikerize in the fight close by. One rule gets repeated more than any other: "Don't break the spawner." Torches go up around it, a crafting table goes down, and Basket swaps the wooden sword for a stone one. Where to live is still open. "I say we make our base on the surface and make a nice staircase down here." Then, a little later: "Yeah, this is our base."
Creepers in the tunnels
Caves run off in every direction from the dungeon, and the creepers find the team fast. "Creeper! Creeper!" One waits in a little alcove right behind PsychoSFK. From somewhere else on the call: "I just got blown up." Zombies keep wandering down the tunnels, and Basket meets them with the stone sword.
Iron, and a pit of lava
Basket sets a furnace next to the crafting table, smelts the first iron and makes an iron pickaxe. There's gunpowder in the inventory by now. Past a pool of water, another creeper wanders up. Deeper down, Basket finds Sayulily in a cave with a lake of lava and redstone in the walls, and the chat shows Sayulily earning Monster Hunter. Basket mines gold ore with the new pickaxe.
The night runs out underground. "It's daylight." The last shot is Basket digging down a narrow shaft with lava glowing at the bottom, at full health. No death lines show up in chat for anyone, and no mob has gone into a cage yet. The end credits follow, with no gameplay after them.