My first post on this blog was about a style of house most players are familiar with. Most of these posts won’t be like that, though. Most of them will be talking about specific things I’ve built and why I built them the way I did.

This is a recreation of one of my first Minecraft houses from around 2011. I wish I had screenshots of the original version to compare, but unfortunately they were lost several computers ago. You’ll have to trust me when I say that I recreated it as best I could.

It wasn't my first house, but it was the first one I kept for long enough to become accustomed to it. It was also the first one I spent considerable time expanding. "Considerable time" was probably only 10-20 hours over the course of a few days, which pales in comparison to the time I've invested in other video game-related endeavors since then, but back then it was a lot to me. I experienced a lot of Minecraft's progression for the first time inside this house. The first time I ever found a diamond was in the caverns underneath this house.

The original house was dug into the side of a hill that had a nice, flat stretch of land in front of it. I was looking to build something monster-proof, and doing it this way meant the house would be impenetrable from three sides. I could have made it impenetrable from all four sides if I had dug it further into the hill, but never mind. We'll say I wanted to let some natural light in.

Locating a similar patch of land to build my recreation on was surprisingly difficult. Perhaps Minecraft’s world generation algorithm has changed enough in the intervening years that natural structures like the ones I encountered back then don’t exist in the game any more. Or perhaps it’s my memory that has changed, and the version of the house that I recall isn’t accurate to reality any more. Either way, eventually I found a hilly area that was close enough.

The house has stone walls and wooden floors. Stone walls were the default choice because I had an abundance of stone by the time I was done digging out the hole, but looking at it now, I also like stone for other reasons. When I try to imagine the same house with the walls built out of wood I start thinking about the environmental conditions. Wood that spends a prolonged amount of time in contact with soil and rock will warp and rot. It might soak up moisture out of its environs and grow mold, or bugs might burrow inside. These aren’t things you have to worry about in Minecraft, of course, but they’re not mental images I want to be having while I’m trying to do some escapism in my video game house.

I did still allow for the wooden floors, though. I don’t think the original house had wooden floors—it was probably all stone—but it looks nicer this way. A house built entirely of stone is cold and uninviting. Counterbalance it with a warmer material like wood and it brightens right up.

The interior design isn’t much to write home about. There are the standard utility blocks, some chests, a bed. My customary stairway down to the caves in the corner is here too, with a little fence to section it off from the sleeping area. In my present day builds I try to put some thought into the interior design, but when I’m recreating a house I built in the past, I have to restrain myself from getting too fancy with it. The fact is that for years I didn’t put much thought into the interiors of my houses beyond utility. It would defeat the point of doing a recreation if I approached the build with the same mindset I do my modern builds.

The pond out front is a tricky detail, because I don’t know if that was really there or not. I have the impression there was a small body of water outside the front of the original house, but it might be a detail my brain added in after the fact. If it was there, it probably wasn’t there when I started building the house. I might have blown a hole in the ground with TNT and then filled it with water a few hours in. All my early attempts at playing Minecraft eventually descended into blowing things up with TNT.

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve realized the rub of this whole post is that I don’t actually remember this house as well as I would like to. I’ve pointed out the most significant things I’m not sure about, but if I highlighted every single detail that’s unclear to me now, half of everything I just wrote would be couched in disclaimers, and that’s not even counting the parts I exaggerated on purpose. That thing I wrote about it being the first house I found a diamond under? That was a lie. I did find diamonds under this house, but I don’t know if they were the first I ever found. They could have been. I can’t say for certain that they were.

The truth is that my old house probably didn’t look much like this at all. What I have here is a facsimile of a half-remembered dream. But that’s OK. It's pleasant to look at and comfortable to live in, and who could ask more of a house than that?