My First Minecraft Hardcore World

At the beginning of December, I decided on a whim to boot up Minecraft for the first time in a decent while. I've spent an ungodly amount of hours playing Minecraft (as have most people who grew up with some kind of gaming machine in the 2010s), so much that I could beat the game in an afternoon without breaking a sweat, but I've never actually beaten the game on its hardest vanilla difficulty, Hardcore.

For the six people who don't know anything about Minecraft, Hardcore Mode is when the game is locked on Hard Mode with permadeath enabled. Back in the day, a death would delete your world, but now adays it puts your profile in a "permanent" spectator mode that lets you roam around as a ghost. It's significantly easier now to cheese the "permadeath" aspect of the game, but it's still itself a fun and rewarding challenge.

Normally, I don't like playing on this playmode because it incentivizes not getting attached to a world. One mistake and it's all over. I have the same issue with almost any game or challenge run with some sort of permadeath mode. But I figured if I don't put effort into anything (no special builds, no hours spent grinding the best gear, no overly complicated farms), I should be good, right?

That all changed when I found wolves in the woods nearby and looked for a reason to rationalize them. I could build an army of them. I could always have at least three wolves around to deal with any mobs I can't see.

Over time, I found myself spending less and less time actually trying to beat the game and more and more time rationalizing every tiny piece of the world. Spending time taming and breeding wolves soon turned into me expanding my small box of a home into a two-story estate. That two-story estate soon turned into upgrading the tiny, "it works" farm into a large, somewhat decorative series of farms for each food I'd need for different tasks. I still wasn't playing through the game as I normally would (nothing was optimized and automatic yet), but it was slowly but surely becoming screenshot worthy.