A couple of days ago, I began anew in a fresh Hardcore Minecraft World.
I had started with a small safe hole and commenced mining, finding just enough iron for my first iron armour set, sword, shield, and tools, and found my first few diamonds! Woo!
Unfortunately, those were the only diamonds I've yet to find.
With the new Minecraft update came a whole lot of new world generation, and the height/depth of the world now goes all the way down to a -64. I'm under the assumption that maybe more diamonds and things will spawn lower down, so I began digging deeper.
First though! Unlike every other time I've played Hardcore Minecraft! I wanted my house first instead of around about the time I die.
So I started terraforming.
Which mostly involved removing tonnes of dirt, and filling it back in to cover a giant hole in the ground and to close off one side of a cave -- the other side of the cave is behind the waterfall. A much more fitting place for a cave to hide! 😅
In order to terraform, I was constantly going back into my hidey-hole at night time and waiting forever for it to go back to day-time so I could continue my work in safety.
After a while I got the jack of it and went on a trip around my forest in search of sheep to shear so I could make a bed to fast-track the night.
With my new bed sorted and placed in my hidey-hole! I kept up the work on my new house. Working rain and shine until at last...
...it was complete! Except windows. There is no sand around here.
But I even decorated my pond! I grabbed some stuff out of the lush caves and surrounded my pond with it.
That wasn't originally a pond -- the waterfall just fell on top of a couple of trees and spread out from there, so I removed the trees and dug out a nice hole and filled it with water. I need to find a swamp somewhere so I can retrieve some lily pads and beautify it a little more. 😊
Now that I had my home all built up, I needed a few cows for beef and, more importantly, leather.
I hadn't found any cows yet on my short explorations, like when searching for sheep for wool, so I went up into the snow. Only to discover that if you go up into the snow these days, you almost freeze to death!
I have no idea how long that's been in the game for. I had no idea this was a thing. Terrified for my Hardcore Life I threw some torches everywhere in case they were a "heat source" and jumped around a lot and ran, ran, ran until there was no longer any snow.
(A later Google Search revealed that you need to wear leather armour in the snow these days to prevent freezing. I had NO idea. That sucks. Leather is for BOOKS not for clothes! xD)
Out of the snow, I eventually stumbled upon some cows and lured two of them home with some wheat, and made them make lots of babies.
Unfortunately, because I don't have glass windows yet, I had to fill one of my windows up with dirt to prevent the cows from escaping and then made a plan to go on the hunt for some sand to transform into glass.
I decided to just travel in one direction so I wouldn't get lost and if I didn't find anything by the time the sun was high, I would return home, go to sleep, then go off in a different direction. I mean, I could just take a bed with me, but I didn't want to get tooooo far from my base just yet.
I started going West first. And that was a good choice! I went through my dark oak forest, entered a birch forest, then stumbled into a savannah with a deep water source.
It's funny.
I was so excited about no longer having to swim to acquire clay... only to find myself having to swim to acquire some damned sand.
I rushed my newfound sand back home, melted it down into some glass and crafted some glass panes for my windows. And there was much rejoicing! No longer did I need dirt in my windows to keep my cows in place! 😁
With my house sorted, at last, I really needed to find some diamonds. I need diamond armour. Diamond tools. I dug down waaaaay past my normal diamond-hunting-grounds of y11 and found myself in the deepslate darkness of y-24.
Now I definitely needed diamond tools. Deepslate is soooo slow to mine through.
Surrounded by zombies, I killed them in a more safer manner than just rushing in, waving my sword, and screaming RAWR!
Approached by creepers, I slowly backtracked and took them out carefully, determined to not be exploded. Luckily none crept up behind me as I was backtracking, as happens sometimes. 👀
So I'm at a depth of -24 now and going to start diamond-hunting along this axis instead of my usual axis.
This is really slow going. Deepslate is terrible. I think they've done this deliberately to slow down diamond acquisition and to use up more diamonds while mining in search for more diamonds. The audacity.
I'm hoping in my next update I'll actually be wearing diamond armour!
And by the looks of things, I'm going to need some leather armour too in order to acquire that blue ice upon my mountain peak so I can have zoomy footpaths. Sigh. Bookshelves first! Snow-protection later!
All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, 
