The Minecraft Experiment, day 9: Making Waterfalls

Minecraft Diary - Beacon

When I first started playing Minecraft a few months ago, I played with a rule: if I die, I have to delete the entire world. This is the ninth entry in the diary I kept of that experiment - the first is here .

Day 8

Day 8

Day 10 >

Day 10 >

World 3, Deaths 2

I've built the tower on the cliff above my cove, so it's easy to hit the water and land safely - but briefly terrifying anyway. When I surface, I admire my handiwork, and immediately hate it. That is the most ugly, stupid thing I've built since the Millennium Dome. Forget navigation, I don't want to get home if it looks this shitty. It even undermines the prettiness of the waterfall I had my landscape gardener (me) install earlier.

Hmm. I think I nearly had an idea there. Waterfalls... pretty? Towers... ugly? Ability to create waterfalls... limitless? Nope. There's some kind of solution there, but I'm not getting it.

I go back up, building a second tower next to the first to get to the top. There, I very carefully build a stone platform, and a small scaffold to stand on beneath it. I use the scaffold to place torches on every side of the column, then build my way to the top level with a few extra blocks.

At the top, I empty a bucket of water off the edge of the platform. It forms an ever-flowing waterfall, spilling down over the treetops below and into the sea right next to my existing waterfall, forming a veil across the entrance of my cove. It looks awesome, even from up here.

I want the torches to glow through the water from all sides, because I think it'll look cool at night, so I have to make a waterfall on each side. For the left and right waterfalls, I can stand in a free square and tip a bucket out in the direction I want. But for the last one, facing inland, I want it to start from the only dry square left. Otherwise, my beacon will have a bald spot - one I'll never see, but one that will bother me eternally anyway.

I stand in the current of the first waterfall, fighting it to stay on the platform, then tip the final bucket out. I'm paranoid about falling backwards off the ledge, so I push forwards constantly. The second waterfall spills down, flowing inland, and suddenly I'm standing in it. Holding forward.

I'm swept violently over the threshold, flung clear of the falling water, and left mid-air, sickeningly high over dry land. My only hope is if the water somehow hits the ground before me, spreads out into some kind of pool and...

It doesn't.

A fountain of metal, stone, sand, torches and sticks explodes from me as I hit the ground, and the last thing I see in front of my dying face is the egg, still intact.

On Tuesday: FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU-