The title card reads "Minecraft Hardcore Challenge June 2013," with "E08" in the corner. This is the last day of the challenge, "the one where everybody tries to... finish whatever sort of projects they're working on, to do the cool things to hopefully win in the end." Basket has a plan worked out from studying another entrant's episode. If it fails, there's still a fallback: "I still have the cool chicken coop and the armor."
Up through the gravel
Day eight starts where day seven stopped, deep in the new cave. There's no time for a long pillar, so Basket digs straight up, short on cobblestone and without a shovel. The trick is a torch placed underfoot: "if there's any gravel... the gravel breaks and doesn't kill you." Basket is in a hurry. "I have a lot I want to do and only 20 minutes to do it."
About three minutes in, Basket breaks out onto the grass, checks the position, and works out that the base is off to the west.
A room full of trouble
On the way, Basket stops at a spot picked out ahead of time and digs in. The mobs are already there. Zombies come through the tunnels, and a skeleton in gold armor stands in an opening with its bow out. "I'm hungry, so I'm not healing."
Basket fights through with the iron sword, torches the place up, and blocks off a passage while low on health. Behind it all is the goal: a small dungeon room of mossy stone with a chest and a monster spawner, skeletons standing around it.
Plan record
"This is going to be hopefully a record maker." A creeper killed by a skeleton's arrow drops a music disc, and that's the target. Basket walls the spawner in with oak planks, runs water across the floor, and builds a narrow shaft up to the surface. "This is kind of ambitious."
The idea was for a creeper to drop down the hole and land between the skeleton and Basket. The skeleton shoots at Basket, hits the creeper instead, and the water carries the disc to a corner.
Creeper hunting
Up top it's night. Basket is out of water buckets and fills them again, says "Hello, Mr. Cow," and then runs out of wood. Signs are needed to hold the water back, "otherwise the creeper won't jump into the hole," so it's a crafting table and a few signs first.
"Alright creepers, this is the one rare time where I actually want you." Skeletons show up first. A creeper does come close, too close: "I got all flustered because the creeper almost killed me."
The water channel is the weak spot. Basket usually builds it five wide to funnel mobs into the middle but made this one three wide, and the creeper that gets pushed along just climbs back out. "Looks like plan record didn't quite work out."
The buzzer
With two minutes left, Basket tries the old-fashioned way, leading a creeper toward a skeleton's line of fire. The creeper blows up next to Basket instead. "I didn't consider that part that he'd blow up my face instead." Basket survives it.
As the sun comes up, Basket goes back down the shaft to the plank room to look at where the creeper was supposed to fall. "There's the buzzer." It ends with no disc. "The creepers were too smart for my quick plan." Basket thanks Michael Deering, the game pauses, and the end card follows with nothing after it. Basket finishes the June 2013 challenge alive, with the chicken coop and the diamond armor.