Day one of the Lorax Challenge, Michael Deering's September 2014 Minecraft Hardcore Challenge. The special rule is the whole problem: no punching, cutting or chopping trees, and that includes leaves. The goal for the month is to survive and build a nice stone castle with a melon farm. Basket plays alone in this world, with Scoti Garbidis along as a guest voice on a call, playing the same seed in a world of their own. "I wish you could be in the world with me," one of them says. "We should have made a world together."
No trees allowed
The episode opens on a plain full of sunflowers and sheep, with a heading to follow. "We can't punch, chop down, or cut down trees." Basket crosses the grass, passes some sand by the water, and comes up on a ravine split open in the middle of the field. Down the far wall are the wooden beams of an abandoned mineshaft. "Is it a mine shaft?"
Planks instead of logs
Basket drops into the water at the bottom and climbs onto the mineshaft walkways. Opening the inventory earns the Taking Inventory achievement. A mineshaft is built from planks and fences, not trees, so this is wood the rules allow. Basket breaks planks for a crafting table, then a wooden pickaxe, and soon stone tools.
Chickens wander the walkways, which starts a rules debate on the call, since the only animals anyone may eat are fish and zombies. "Why can't I eat the chicken? It was natural causes." The answer comes back: "You're vegetarian in this thing."
With a stone axe, Basket keeps tearing out the planks that hang across the ravine, up against the open sky. "Wood will not be a problem." Then the other half of it: "Food will be a problem."
A night in the tunnels
Through the night, Basket stays underground and works through the mineshaft by torchlight. There's iron ore in the walls, lots of coal, cobwebs across the corridors and pools of lava further in. Basket's hearts stay full all night. Not every line on the call is about this world, though. Somebody is down to "half a heart" and "in a real bad way," and the talk turns to skeletons and creepers that never show up on Basket's screen.
Morning with no food
By the end of the night the haul is 42 iron ore, 59 coal, 38 oak planks and 43 torches, with no food anywhere in the inventory. At the crafting table Basket makes four furnaces, with all that iron still unsmelted, then turns the camera around for a look in third person.
The call signs off at the end of day one. "And this is BasketMC. I have no food." Basket is alive and unhurt, still in the mineshaft. The credits roll after that, with no gameplay after them.