Day one of The Zero Chunk Challenge, Michael Deering's March 2015 Minecraft Hardcore Challenge. This month everyone has to live in the zero chunk, the area between -16 and 16 on the X and Z axes, and blocks can only be placed inside it. It's a team game: Basket plays with technascribe, MomofMiners and Frank_n_Honest, in hardcore on Minecraft 1.8.1 with Large Biomes and structures turned off. And it's a second try. "This is take two. We had technical difficulties and we're starting again."
Heading for the zero chunk
The four of them spawn together in a spruce forest, wolves wandering between the trees, and nobody can build anything until they get to the right chunk. So the walk becomes a shopping trip. "Lots of mushrooms if you see them. Red and brown." Basket swims along a river and pulls sugar cane from the bank. "We can make pumpkin pie if we find some pumpkins." Seeds are scarce in the ferns, and the tools haven't caught up yet: "I found coal, but I can't mine it because I can't make a tool."
Marking the corners
Once they arrive, Basket cuts spruce, sets down a crafting table and makes a wooden axe. Then comes the job of knowing where the edges are: "make more fences, mark off the corners." Basket walks the boundary, dropping spruce fence posts so the team can see where building is allowed.
Stone, a furnace and a farm
Basket digs down into the stone for cobblestone and swaps the wooden pickaxe for a stone one. At the base, a crafting table, a chest and furnaces stand in a stack. The team has bigger plans for the little space: "multi-layer farming. That's our challenge for this month," plus "some spectacular building." There's one pumpkin, too. "One and only pumpkin." By dark there's a tilled wheat farm with water in the middle and torches on its edges.
A zombie with a shovel
Night falls fast. "Time passes so quickly." Basket heads out with a stone sword, and a zombie carrying a shovel comes straight in. Basket's hearts drop from full to about half. "He took down half my health with the shovel." The mushrooms from the walk pay off: Basket has mushroom stew in the hotbar, and there are more bowls in the chest.
A fence in the dark
Something has to keep the mobs out. "We're gonna do the dirt wall, or like a fence. We have plenty of wood." Basket crafts a stack of spruce fence and spends the rest of the night setting it out between the trees, stopping to swing at zombies and creepers as they come. "Basket's making fences out of wood." Spiders mean string, and string matters: "Our challenge, too, is to get an enchanting table." The plan is to fish for leather or a book.
Sunrise
The sky turns pink. "Here comes the sun." "Skeletons burning up over there." Basket picks up rotten flesh from the night's fights, a chicken gets cornered ("I trapped him"), and the team gathers by the base before calling it.
All four players are alive at the end of day one, with no death on screen. The end credits follow, with no gameplay after them.