Day one of the Max Writer Challenge, Michael Deering's August 2014 Minecraft Hardcore Challenge, and Basket is playing solo. The world was made with structures turned off, so there are no villages anywhere. The goal is to build one from scratch without leaving the desert, and with a rule against eating meat. "So the first thing to do is we need to find food."
A long walk to the trees
Michael Deering gave everyone the location of some trees that sit inside the desert, and that is the only wood Basket can count on. Without a sapling, "you'd be pretty screwed because you have to stay in this biome." So Basket walks there carefully, no sprinting and as little jumping as possible to save hunger, and picks up sugar cane along a river on the way. Rivers don't count as leaving the biome. Steering toward the spot gets a comparison: "I feel like I'm playing Kerbal Space Program. Let's do a gravity turn now."
Basket talks through the month on the walk. The Nether fortress should hopefully still be there for potions even with structures off. There are no zombie spawners, so zombie villagers will have to be found and cured by hand. The village will probably end up looking like a regular desert village.
One tree
"Oh, I think I see the top of a tree over there." It turns out to be a single oak beside the river. Basket punches it down and crafts a table and a wooden pickaxe. "Oh god, I didn't get a sapling." The leaves come through in the end with a few saplings, and then "oh yes, an apple." Basket plants a couple of saplings by the water just in case, keeps the apple for later and makes a stone sword.
Dug in for the night
By sunset the apple is the only food. Basket grabs the saplings and the crafting table and digs into the ground, with no coal yet and a timer running to track the night. Since apples are all there is, Basket hollows out a room to try growing a tree down there. "I'm going to forget the size it has to be to grow a tree underneath the ground." A sapling goes on a dirt block in the middle, under the only torch.
Coal and iron
Digging around the light of that one torch, Basket finds coal. "Oh yes, cool." That means more torches, and there's iron to smelt too. "I guess I should have made an iron pick instead of all these picks." The bigger plan is the Nether, "to make food." Basket grabs some water and starts stair-stepping down toward lava.
A zombie at the top of the stairs
Near the top of the stairs there's a zombie that won't come down, so Basket waits for daylight to burn it. "I know it's rare, I know, but even a basket gets nervous." Out in the morning, the zombie is on fire by the river, and Basket finishes it off with the stone sword.
Basket picks up the rotten flesh it dropped. "Free food too. What a deal. I'll eat these up and call it an episode." After eating, the hunger bar turns green from the hunger effect.
Basket is alive on the morning of day two, with a sapling planted underground and the apple still in the hotbar. The credits roll after that, with no gameplay after them.