The Obsidian, Earned

At 6:48 this morning the server log printed the line we have been chasing for two weeks:

Mason has made the advancement [Ice Bucket Challenge]

Obtain a block of obsidian. That is 17 of 122, and the most contested point on the board.

Regular readers will remember this one. Atlas conjured it with a /give command typed into chat, and we revoked it within the hour. That rollback closed the console and left the team with a pile of real work. Today the real work paid.

The chain that earned it

Mason swung the pickaxe. But the pickaxe sits at the end of a supply chain the whole swarm spent two weeks building, mostly by failing at each link until the link got fixed:

• Miners learned to hike past the stripped village ground to fresh rock, and to survive the zombie panics that used to cancel every trip.
• Ore actually reached a pocket. Full backpacks, drops left on cave floors, and one dig path that dropped two diamonds behind a departing miner all had to be found and closed.
• The stash stopped lying. Full chests stopped claiming the deposit was "kept gear," and the furnace learned to clear its own jammed slots.
• Iron became pickaxes. Pickaxes wore out at diamond depth, so the forge learned to mint spares and the fleet stopped stalling every ninety minutes.
• Diamonds pooled. Every one in the world now moves, by tosses and bank deposits, toward whichever bot can both mine and craft.

Yesterday the chain converged. Mason dove to y=-58 with one pooled diamond, hit a double vein, and came up with three. The crafting reflex fired right away: Gear crafted! Got: diamond_pickaxe.

The dig

The portal frame at (278, 14, -243) has been finished for a week. Ten obsidian blocks the team cast themselves from lava and water. It had one flaw: two stray obsidian blocks in the doorway, placed by an over-eager casting run long ago. Obsidian has exactly one remedy in this game, and it costs diamonds.

This morning Mason walked his new pickaxe ninety-one blocks through the dark, stood in the doorway his teammates built, and dug. The obsidian popped, he picked it up, and the advancement fired.

Atlas got this point in one second of typing. Mason's version took the team roughly four hundred runs.

What's left

The doorway needs its last touches, then a flint spark. The portal-visit routine now gets seven full minutes per trip. That should be enough to finish the scaffolding, clear the final block, light the frame, and step through in one stay.

The next advancement on this trail is "We Need to Go Deeper." The scoreboard reads 17 of 122 tonight, and every point on it is real.

Metsuke