Nyatali threw an axe at me.

It didn't hit me of course. Just landed near my blocky feet.

"Cut down some trees, Hashi. I'll help you get started with the mysteries of crafting."

I put the axe in my hotbar and start chopping down trees. About a dozen trees later, "Nyatali, I've got wood, saplings, and apples."

"Good! Now make a crafting table and some torches."

"I don't have everything for the torches." I just noticed Nyatali throwing coal at me. "OK, done." It's starting to get a bit darker outside. Wow, the days are really short here. I stick a torch in the ground. Cool!

Nyatali starts running. "Follow me, Hashi. Let's get to the mine entrance before the monsters come out." I run after Nyatali.

[The mine, remember not to dig straight down...] - a sign over the mine entrance.

Well, that mine entrance is pretty... rectangular.

We walk down what seems like endless stairs. The stairs are 6 blocks wide and the ceiling is 4 blocks high. Nyatali and I are 2 blocks in height. There are torches every 10 blocks or so going down.

Nyatali tells me, "Not much farther. Here we go."

Wow, This is a really big room. The floor is covered in torches. There are 1x2 holes in the wall.in the side walls. The room seems like it goes on forever.

Nyatali tells me to pick a spot on the wall and to start digging. "Place a torch on the wall whenever it gets dark or the mobs will start spawning behind you. Meet you back here in a while. Let me know."

Pickaxe in hand I pick a wall and have at it. Dig. Dig. Dig. I'm making a long tunnel. It's starting to get dark. Oh yeah, torches. That's better.

I look in my inventory and I'm accumulating a lot of cobblestone and some coal. I see some different color stone on the wall and dig it out.

I'm back near the bed. Some sort of green monster ran up to me and started hissing. I guess I died. None of my gear is with me. I hope it wasn't blown up.

Nyatali is standing next to a chest when I get back to the mines. There were monsters in the dark on my run over but they didn't kill me. Nyatali runs over and starts attacking a zombie that was chasing me. It dies pretty quickly and drops something. I look in the chest and find my equipment. It looks pretty damaged though.

Nyatali continues her lessons, "Ok, make a forge and smelt that iron ore. You'll need an iron pickaxe to mine some of the ores we'll find down here. After that we can explore some caves I found down here."

"Sounds great. This is a lot of fun."

-------

Armed with my new shiny pickaxe, I follow Nyatali down to the caves. These are kind of spooky. Dark. I see bats flying around and I can hear moans off in the distance. Nyatali is placing torches as we go. I guess that might make it easier to find out way out later. We occasionally find zombies and skeletons and the two of us together fight them off.

This is a little different from the other sort of mining as the ores can be seen on the cave walls. When we find pools of lava, Nyatali pours water over them turning the lava a very dark purple color.

"That's obsidian. We'll need diamond tools to dig that up." Nyatali throws me a bucket and tells me, "fill it with water when we see some. I put the bucket in my hotbar as well. Pretty soon we locate some diamond. Nyatali has me craft a diamond pickaxe.

"Let's go back and mine that obsidian now."

"What's it good for?" I ask her.

"Making portals to hell. Do you want to check that out?"

"Haven't been there before, Sure! Let's go."