The title card reads "Minecraft Hardcore Challenge June 2013," with "E02" in the corner, and then Basket talks over the pause menu, still in the cave where Episode 1 ended. First comes a thank-you to game show host Michael Deering for the invite, then a correction. Every day is 20 minutes, not the 18 Basket used last time, "so I'm going to actually do 22 minutes this episode." Watching other entrants play the same seed has turned up two leads: a spider spawner near spawn, and "a really gigantic pumpkin patch."
Nothing grew
There are about two minutes of night left, so Basket makes stairs and grabs cobblestone while waiting. Out in the morning light, a zombie in gold armor walks the field without catching fire, "'cause he has a helmet on." Basket goes at it with a stone sword. The farm is a letdown. "None of this stuff grew because there's no torches out." Basket puts torches around it so it can grow at night, and tills more ground, having heard that more tilled soil around pumpkins helps them grow.
Waiting for the world to load
Heading west past the first pumpkins, parts of the world won't load in. Basket picks up more sugar cane on the way, then stops the timer and pauses the game until everything catches up. Then it's on to the pumpkins, and an axe makes short work of them. "Yep, that's pretty quick." More keep turning up. "I don't even need to really worry about growing them right now."
Three eggs
Pie still needs eggs, so Basket follows the river to the chickens. "Oh, there's an egg, oh good. Three eggs." Then a new idea: "Actually, I can probably breed these guys." Basket pairs them up with seeds and checks on the couples: "You guys find each other? Good."
Basket also eats some rotten flesh and gets away with it: "didn't even get any hunger effect, that's pretty lucky considering I ate two." Back at the farm, "that grew up a little bit. But otherwise, not a whole lot of change." As the sun goes down, Basket plants more sugar cane and the last seed, replants trees and blocks the door.
A branch mine for iron
The night goes to a ladder shaft and a branch mine. Basket fills parts of the shaft back in, remembering an earlier hardcore series where a fall "really far down" ended things early. Michael Deering has also said not to kill bats, so "I will do my best to not kill bats," even with one flapping through the tunnel. The digging pays off. "Oh yeah, nice amount of iron here." A pumpkin pie fills hunger by four, so one goes down mid-shift.
A dead end has lava in it. Basket covers it instead of clearing it, "in case I wanted to get some lava," but doesn't count on it as a wall: "I don't trust that the lava will totally protect me."
Two furnaces by sunrise
Back up top, Basket builds a second furnace and splits the ore between them, with armor and a pick planned once it's done. Next time Basket wants to climb up for a look at a spot to build a house, and lure the chickens closer. "I think my base is going pretty good." Then: "Oh, somebody wants to come in." The alarm goes off, Basket pauses with day two done and the run still going, and the end card follows with no gameplay after it.
