Canopy Inception

I'm not entirely sure what possessed me to try out a custom map including "Super Hostile" in its title.  As you may have gathered by now, I'm not a very brave video game player.  I don't run around at night blithely taking on Creepers with my bare hands.  Chuck Norris, I am not.  I like to play things fairly safe, and keep dangers at long range (where I can happily stick them with lots of arrows.)

Maybe I was lured in by the gorgeous scenery of Canopy Carnage.

Maybe I was having a sudden delusion of greatness.  By all accounts my playing is quite average or below.  For whatever reason, I decided to try it out.  This map was designed by vechs, one in a series of custom maps.  There's a link up in the header in case you'd like to check it out for yourself.

You start off with a busted nether portal, a whole lot of netherrack, and some supplies.  Oh, and rain.  Lots of it.  If you're fond of rain and storms in minecraft, this map might be just your thing.  While I do enjoy rain (soothing) storms are not quite so calm (sudden loud noises!)  

The presence of so much flammable material in a tropical rainforest biome is also something of a concern.  Speaking of concerns, the instructions for this map recommend not using fancy graphics - hah, I know all about non-fancy graphics and what it does to leaves.  It makes them into solid blocks, and guess what spawns on solid blocks in darkness?  I will happily take a bit of lag to avoid having arboreal creeper natives, thank you very much.  Turning down the render distance is pretty much mandatory though.

The first order of business was to make my way down to the ground.  Okay, maybe the second order of business, the first was nervously exploring the starting location and torchspamming it up as much as I could, with the limited torches provided.  Never had a stack of cobblestone seemed so desirable as right now - stone tools, a furnace, non-flammable roofing material.  I was going down.  The trees here are so big, you can hollow out the inside and head down in comparative safety.  The torches just about lasted, though I had to head back up and steal a few from the aborted spiral staircase I had made to the top of the tree.

Dirt! At last, I could have kissed you.  The sudden sound of spiders convinced me that continuing down was a *far* better idea than breaching my slim wooden defences.

Cobble! As much of it as I wanted, though from the bedrock a scant five blocks down, it looked unlikely there would be any caves, coal or iron here for the plundering.  I'm not worried - there's a layer of sand just under the dirt, and besides cobble that's the resource I most wanted to see.  Glass windows, here I come!  The spider sounds seem to be getting more numerous...

This ... could be a problem.