Minecraft was my first exposure to a proper sandbox game. I first heard about Minecraft back in 2011 or 2012 when YouTuber paulsoaresjr uploaded a series called "To Survive and Thrive" which was basically a tutorial on how to survive in Minecraft. I showed this game to my friend we both fell in love with the game. We couldn't afford the game at the time, so we both pirated the game and hosted our own cracked server.

I still remember the first world we truly survived in. It was me and 2 of my friends and we built a house on top of a mountain. One day, one of my friends, let's call him V, got mad at us and decided to build his own house down below the mountain. He had the bright idea of building his whole house out of glass because it is "modern". He soon realised how bad of an idea that was when night approached in-game and he got bombarded with hostile creatures who could see him through his see-through house. We made up after that incident and soon, we build a roller-coaster connecting the two houses.

We studied together in the same school for years but all good things do come to an end. My 2 friends from the Minecraft server had planned to move schools. They were gonna study in a PU college hence a lot of things weren't allowed (computers were one of them) so that's were our Minecraft adventures ended. I look back to that day and I remember it being one of the saddest days of my life. I felt like I was truly alone that day.

They always came back once a year for vacations during which we would play on the server again. So it went on and off like this for many years.

Fast forward to 2020, we are all in college. A life-threatening pandemic doomed us and everyone is encouraged to stay home. And my friends and I made the realisation that we can play together again. And thus began our newest survival adventures in Minecraft with two more friends from my friends' colleges to boot.

By now, Minecraft had updated around 10 to 12 times. The first time we played, the game was in version 1.2.5 and now it is 1.16.3. The game is truly different now and it felt like we were playing the game for the first time. The picture you see along with this article is our current survival base. We build a Japanese-style tower as the main base on top of a small hill and we farmed and cultivated a cascading wheat field surrounding the house. The highest floor of the main base had an observation deck where we could climb up to and shoot hostile mobs down below. We captured villagers and slaved them and traded with them to earn riches (I am aware of how horrible this sounds out of context)

It truly felt like we were those young children again for me. And for me, it was a really good time to catch up and ground myself. And I managed to make a couple of new friends in the end so it all worked out.

As the year ends, so will this little group of friends until the next pandemic (just kidding). But this time, I don't feel sad about it. I feel happy that we all got to come together and play games like the old times all over again.