Day five of the Lorax Challenge, Michael Deering's September 2014 Minecraft Hardcore Challenge. The goal is a nice stone castle with a melon farm, and no breaking trees or leaves to get there. Basket starts in the little walled yard by the lake from last episode, with a stack of cobblestone and no real plan for what the castle should look like. The guest voice is back on the call, building in a separate world on the same seed.
A castle with no blueprint
The episode opens with the question nobody has answered yet. "We're making castles. Right?" "Yep. One each." Then: "I don't really know what my plan is for what the castle is going to look like." "Yeah, I don't know either."
Basket answers it by building. A single line of cobblestone heads out from the old yard across the grass, then turns, then turns again, until it marks out a space far bigger than the first walls. Then the rain starts. "Oh, it's raining." "Yeah, that sucks."
Walls in the rain
The outline grows into real walls. Basket crafts more torches from coal and sticks and sets them along the tops and around the yard, then keeps stacking cobble higher. By sunset it is a wide grassy courtyard with tall gray walls and torchlight on every side.
Talk on the call turns to a trick from another builder's video: set lava on a pillar just above water, and it makes a smooth stone base on its own. "I can like have it pour the walls in for you." Then night comes in with a storm. "It's night, there's a lightning storm, that's great."
Melons in a storm
In the dark Basket heads out to the farm by the lake and finds it grown. Melon blocks sit between the stems, and Basket breaks them one after another. The melon slices in the hotbar climb from 12 to 22 in a few seconds. For a challenge that only allows fish and zombies from the animal side, that is real food.
A bucket goes into the lake for water, and Basket heads back up to the walls.
Digging out the floor
Back inside, the plan comes out on the call. "I'm gonna dig this spot. I'm gonna actually use the smooth stone lava trick. So I'm gonna dig out my floor, cover it with water, and then do the lava thing."
First a stone shovel, then a fresh iron shovel from the crafting table, and the grass inside the walls starts to disappear. The rest of the night is dirt: row after row of it, scooped out and hauled around, with torches set down as the pit spreads. "Digging up the dirt." Before long, flat gray stone shows through along one side of the hole.
Gray skies at the end
The rain never lets up. By the end the sky has gone from black to gray, and a switch to third person shows Basket in iron armor, standing among the torches on a floor that is half dug-out dirt and half gray stone.
Basket is alive with full hearts at experience level 20 when the credits roll, with the hunger bar down by about a third. The hotbar holds a water bucket, the lava bucket and 25 melon slices. The walls are up, the floor is half dug and the lava trick has not happened yet. Nothing follows the credits.