Day four of the Lorax Challenge, Michael Deering's September 2014 Minecraft Hardcore Challenge. The goal is a nice stone castle with a melon farm, without breaking a single tree or leaf. Basket starts on the surface beside the lake, on top of the cobblestone pillar from last episode, with melon seeds in the inventory and not a block of the castle built. The guest voice is back on the call, playing the same seed in a separate world.
Planting by the lake
Basket heads down off the pillar and gets straight to farming. A stone hoe turns a strip of dirt by the water into farmland, and the melon seeds go in. The talk on the call drifts to how nice it would be to just cut down a bunch of trees. "No, I can't do that. Well, I mean I could, but that would be no bueno."
Then comes the bone meal. "We've got lots of bones so we can at least mature these vines." A few clicks and the stems shoot up.
Walls, with no plan
The castle is the part nobody has thought through. On the call: "All right, so we're making a castle now, right?" "Yeah, that's the part I haven't thought about." Basket crafts a couple of furnaces and starts laying cobblestone walls around the farm. "I don't know if I like this, but this is what we're rolling with, kids."
On the call: "What kind of castle are you gonna build?" "Really bad one apparently."
A melon at last
After a trip below for more stone, Basket comes back up to find a full melon block sitting between the stems. It gets broken, and Melon shows up in the inventory. For a challenge built around a melon farm, that is the first real piece of one.
The walls keep going up, with the furnaces set into them, while the sun drops toward the horizon. "The sun is working its way down, FYI." "Melons is the most important thing right now."
A night of cobble
By dark the yard has torches on its walls, a crafting table and a ladder shaft leading down into the ground. Basket sets a chest down inside the walls and fills it, music disc and all. The castle needs a lot more stone than this, so the plan for the night is mining. "Alright guys, hope you're ready for the exciting gathering cobble."
So that is the night: a long, dark stretch of tunnel with an iron pickaxe, one block after another, while talk on the call wanders and the cobblestone piles up.
Back up in daylight
Near the end Basket checks the sky. "Oh, it's daytime." Up the ladder, out into the walled yard by the lake, and a switch to third person for a look at it all: iron armor, iron sword, standing on the crafting table with the chest beside it.
Basket is alive with full hearts and a full hunger bar when the credits roll, at experience level 20. The melon farm has started, the walls are low and the castle is still mostly a plan. Nothing follows the credits.