Playing with Fire

 Today the time came for me to build a more permanent light fixture in my log cabin. After all, those torches on the walls were beginning to look a little out-of-season. After many hours of gaming experience, I figured I had the adequate know-how to build a fireplace. Wrong.

Sure it looked pretty enough, with a dark stone border and fire guard, but what I hadn’t accounted for was the fire’s ability to spit. Pieces of my floor and walls were suddenly ablaze. I tried to delete the affected blocks but it was a futile effort. Very soon my whole cabin was on fire and I had to retreat outside to avoid losing health points. I watched in dismay as all my hard work blackened and I was left with only a few stone blocks, the only non-flammable components of the cabin.

I’ve since learned that a player’s first fireplace is seen as a sort of right of passage within the Minecraft community, with seemingly most players going through a similar experience.