Beyond Epic Island

Last time, I had set off on my epic trek to the east and found Epic Island. Night was falling as I got there, so I quickly chopped down some trees and built myself a hut on top of the hill.

Epic Island shows some serious potential, both for building and doing a little spelunking, but alas! no snow to be found, and to the east, the open ocean:

I could stay and build a great fort, but my wanderlust takes me. So long, Epic Island! I'll be back. I try heading north, but again, more sand and ocean:

I swung back west, and spent an uneventful night in a dug-out. Moving around is refreshing, because instead of an easy life in your imposing stone fortress, it's like those first ever nights of Minecraft: cowering in a dug-out shelter while zombies moan around you. And when I say zombies, I mean lots of them. Here's what I saw the next morning on top of the hill I'd just spent the night in:

Frankly, the whole trip is turning into a bit of an anticlimax, until I see it.

Mount Impossible. Big chunks of rock, earth and sand floating in the air. The perfect place for my next great project. But before that, an experiment.

**

There it is: for a mere five blocks of planks, you too can own the most dynamic mode of transport in the Minecraft world. A boat!

As soon as I saw Mount Impossible, I knew what I had to do. As near as I could work out, it's roughly to the north of my tower, and probably a little west. If that's the case, then I know where my epic walkway simply has to go. With that thought in mind, I put together a boat, made my way back to my base, and set off on a boating expedition to figure out where exactly Mount Impossible is.

That didn't turn out to be easy. I should explain that a boat really is a great way to get around, because it goes like crazy. You can run your boat so fast that it'll shatter if you hit land, so caution is a must, but on the open sea, it really goes.

However, it turns out Epic Island is huge. As I set off, I saw this distinctive double peak to the northeast:

If that looks high to you, it's because it is. This is the view from the pinnacle on the right:

In the upper left-hand corner, you can see the foliage of a tree inside a cloud. That hilltop is almost as high as my tower!

The island goes on so long that night falls before I reach the eastern shore. I spend the night in my boat, wondering if it'll be safe or if some kind of underwater zombie will eat me or blow up my boat. And then, just when I've given up hope, I see it, illuminated by the rays of the rising sun:

Ice. Ice! That means snow! I carefully bring the boat to rest against the edge of the ice, and disembark. Sure enough, just a little hike over the ice away, beautiful white snow.

By my calculations, I'm going to need almost two hundred blocks of snow for my project. Digging a block of snow with a shovel gets you a snowball, and four snowballs make a snow block. So that's... eight hundred shovelfuls of snow.

I think I'll need to build a house.