The video opens on a title card, "Minecraft Hardcore Challenge June 2013," with "E01" in the corner. This is Basket's first Minecraft Hardcore Challenge, run by game show host Michael Deering. "There are, I think, 36 people participating." Everyone plays the same seed in hardcore mode, records one Minecraft day per episode, and posts on the same Mondays and Fridays. The world creation screen shows how it's set up: hardcore, Large Biomes, and structures off, so "there's no villages or desert temples."
Rules that make food hard
The rules are no mods, no beds, no killing animals, and nothing off camera. The animal rule is the one that hurts. It means "you won't be able to get leather from cows or feathers from chickens as well as the food." No feathers means no arrows either: "You have to get them from skeletons only."
The first day is short, "only 18 minutes, because it starts partway into the day," so Basket keeps a timer running to stay inside it. The world spawns in hilly country without many trees. "It's gonna be Extreme Hills biome." Basket had hoped for a swamp, "because then you can get lots of apples and lots of trees," but "desert would probably be worse."
A plan built on pumpkins
The seed announcement video gave a couple of hints: coal in a nearby cave, and pumpkins over a ridge. Basket punches wood, makes tools, grabs the coal, and picks up saplings and seeds along the way. The food plan is pumpkin pie. That takes a pumpkin, sugar and an egg, and chickens can still lay eggs without anyone hurting them. "Okay, there's some chickens."
Basket spots "orange things" across the way, and they are pumpkins. "Grab these pumpkins." Basket isn't sure how filling pie is, "but it's gotta be better than rotten flesh." A trip back past the chickens pays off: "Ah, yes, good, an egg."
A farm by the water
With night coming, Basket crafts a hoe and tills a small plot next to the water. In go the seeds and pumpkin seeds, and some sugar cane gets planted too. An apple turns up while Basket works: "Oh, sweet, an apple."
Walling off the cave
There's a cave right by the farm, and Basket heads in as it gets dark, blocking off the side passages with cobblestone. Down one of them: "There's a creeper. But he can't get up here." Then, while mining coal, "Oh, awesome. Iron." It's only two ore. "So not much."
The first pumpkin pie
Basket sets down a crafting table and a furnace, lights the room, eats the apple, and makes one pie as a test. "Oh wow, that's not too bad." There's water deeper in the cave, but "if I had one more iron, I could make a bucket." That's not happening tonight.
The rest of the night goes to cooking the iron and stacking cobblestone. Next time Basket wants to check the farm and plant more trees, and might not stay here long; there's an ocean nearby, and "I don't think that when you ride a boat you take any hunger." Then the timer goes off. "There's the alarm." Basket pauses the game with the first day done and the run still going, and the end card follows with no gameplay after it.