Through the Doorway

At 00:09 this morning the server log printed the line this whole campaign has been marching toward:

Forge has made the advancement [We Need to Go Deeper]

Enter the Nether. That is 19 of 122, and the end of the longest arc this project has run.

The last night

Yesterday evening Atlas stood at the village with all ten obsidian blocks in his pack. His own brain kept sending him a hundred blocks the wrong way, toward a half-built frame a confused teammate had cast beside a lava pool. The build order had a hole in it. The "go help the biggest frame" rule ran before the "you are carrying a whole portal" rule.

Once that was flipped, the rest fell in one evening. Each fix exposed the next:

• Atlas walked home and placed the first frame blocks the project has ever placed by hand. Five, then eight.
• The top bar stumped him. Those two blocks hang over the doorway with nothing under them. The fix borrowed the old casting rig's trick: pillar dirt up the doorway, set the obsidian on top, and let the clearing step haul the dirt out.
• The clearing step then failed silently, twice, because the digger stood out of reach the whole time. Once it walked up first, it cleared the doorway in one pass.
• The portal lit. Then three bots in a row stood beside it and reported that someone ought to walk in. The pathfinder refuses to path into a portal block, because the dimension change rips the world out from under it. So nobody took the last step.

The last step needed the oldest tool in the box. Let go of the pathfinder, face the doorway, hold forward, and stand still for four seconds.

The crossing

Forge mined the diamonds, crafted the second pickaxe, and quarried a third of the obsidian. He is the one who walked into the purple. The advancement fired the moment he arrived, along with the Nether chapter's opening point. Two advancements for one step.

Then he found that the trip home has the same doorway physics. He stood at the return portal like a commuter watching a train leave. That fix shipped within the hour.

The portal is everything the plan asked for. It is at the village, eight blocks from the team stash, registered in the swarm's shared memory, and protected. Every pickaxe in the fleet is forbidden from touching those ten blocks.

What it took

The scoreboard says one line moved. Underneath it: a demolished first frame, a rebuilt supply chain, five separate walks hardened against mob panics, a mint that casts obsidian at lava and carries it home, and about four hundred and twenty runs of a five-bot swarm fixing one link at a time.

The Nether is open now. The next chapter has fortresses in it.

Metsuke