The Story of Steve the Hermit.How It All Began(The Book 1) Read online



  A Minecraft-inspired book:

  "The Story of Steve the Hermit: How It All Began"

  Table of contents

  Table of contents

  Chapter 1: The Creation of the World

  Chapter 2: Steve's Life

  Chapter 3: Steve Builds His Home

  Chapter 4: Steve Finishes Building His Home

  Chapter 5: Steve Decides to Start His Own Farm

  Chapter 6: Steve Obtains Food and Shears Sheep

  Chapter 7: Steve Goes Hiking and Enjoys the Scenery

  Chapter 8: Steve Survives a Thunderstorm (And Its Consequences)

  Chapter 9 . Steve Meets the Monsters

  Chapter 10. The Start of a New Life

  Chapter 11: Steve's Spider

  Chapter 1: The Creation of the World

  In the beginning, “God” created matter, which had six faces, and he called this matter “cubes”. Then he made a smooth surface from these cubes – infinite, in fact – and he called this world “The World of Minecraft”. Afterwards, He decided that this flat, uniform world was boring, so He put many cubes on top of each other in a particular place in the world, creating an elevation in the process. He removed cubes from another part of the world, which resulted in lowland. “God” distributed all these changes across the world in a random order. His next task was to paint all those cubes in different colors and to give them various properties. And thus all kinds of cubes were made: stone, earth, sand and others. Then, “God” created different kinds of vegetation, such as trees, grass and flowers. As a result, the world became more beautiful and diverse, and more fit to be populated with living creatures. But before that, the creatures had to be gifted with all that they would need for life – and so, by His command, a fluid cube of water quickly began to fill the majority of the lowlands. Then, “God” decided to create the air, without which none of the living beings could hope to survive. And so another special cube had to be created - air, transparent and imperceptible. Finally, He could start the creation of animals. But something went wrong: his creatures were all very aggressive, vicious and ugly. Consuming each other, they multiplied, producing offspring even more terrible than their parents.

  And so “God” decided to create another world, located beneath the normal world. He named the upper world “Heaven”, and the lower world - “Hell”.

  After a number of failed attempts to create normal animals, He nevertheless was determined to try again, and this time he succeeded. He populated the upper world with a few successful animal species, and sent the vicious and aggressive ones to Hell.

 

  Afterwards, “God” started the most exciting step of developing his world – the creation of humans. He created them, gifting them with a part of Himself in the process, and then placed them in various parts of the world. In order to hide the humans from their creator, “God” created the sky, the Sun, and the clouds. With time, “God” started to forget about that cubic world, focusing on creating something new, something which remains unknown… eventually, almost all of the humans of the World of Minecraft found each other, in spite of their different places of origin. They started to live together, in harmony and friendship, but a few of them could not find the others; and so they lived alone, ignorant of the existence of their own kind. The human named Steve, who was born much later than the rest, belonged to those few.

  Chapter 2: Steve's Life

  It was a warm, windless morning. Sun rays were slipping on a sprawling tree, illuminating everything around with the warm, soft and beautiful light of dawn. When Steve finally opened his eyes and tried to get up, he saw that the sun had already come out of the clouds. He managed to get up quickly and without any issues, and started to look around. A large lake was next to him, inhabited by some kind of animals with long tentacles.  

  In the far distance there was a stretched-out valley, covered in thick grass and various flowers. The forest surrounded the valley from all sides: front, back, left and right. “I have to get to the valley; it looks far more appealing than all this endless and bleak forest,” thought Steve. But to get to the valley, he had to cross the lake. It was of considerable size, and circumventing it would be very time-consuming and quite unwise. Steve started thinking, trying to come up with a plan to get to the cherished valley. It was impossible to swim across the lake – first of all, it would be way too tiring, and second of all, the monsters, with their long tentacles, were pretty unnerving. What if they attacked him while he was swimming? The solution dawned on Steve once his gaze fell upon the trees. He went over to a tree and struck it, again and again. Soon, cracks started spreading across the whole tree block, and after a few more hits the block was broken. The block immediately turned into a tiny log cube that Steve could carry with him. After gathering six blocks this way, he tried stripping bark from them; he got something resembling planks from this primitive treatment process. By fastening four tiny plank cubes together, he built something like a workbench, which could be used for woodwork. A few blocks of wood were used to make the necessary resource-gathering tools.

  Now he had a wooden pick, an axe and a shovel. After cutting down a few more trees, he started making a boat, which he was going to use to cross the lake. It was obvious to him what he had to do – after fastening the cubes in a shape resembling a washtub and testing the durability of his new product, Steve took his workbench with him, went to the lake, lowered his boat into the water and carefully took a seat. He had to use his hands to row. Steve s looking at the creatures in the water the whole time, but they had no intention of attacking him. They were just swimming at the lake’s bottom peacefully, lazily moving their tentacles about. After reaching the shore, Steve docked carefully and got out of the boat. He was right to choose this place – it was beautiful and fit for living; well-worth the trouble.

  Chapter 3: Steve Builds His Home

  Having chosen a suitable location, he made a small wooden pole to mark the exact place where he wanted to build a house to live in and to enjoy the view from his window. Steve placed the workbench near the pole and used it to make a chest from the remaining wood planks.  He put his shovel inside and went to his boat in order to gather the resources necessary for building a house. After crossing the lake once more, Steve started cutting down the trees one after another, gathering logs and breaking the foliage with his hands. Soon he accumulated a huge pile of untreated logs.

  Steve loaded the logs into the boat, brought them near the pole and stored them in his chest. Suddenly, he saw a small hill near the shore; he noticed a small cave inside it. He came closer and saw a peculiar stone with black patches. Steve broke it with his pickaxe unhurriedly, and something dropped from the stone, something black. It was coal. Behind the broken stone there was another, with the same black patches. “A-ha, looks like a coal deposit!” thought Steve. “Well, I suppose I’ll come by later to mine some more, but right now I have to get some regular stone material for the main part of the house.”

  And so he got to work. Plenty of time had passed already, and Steve started to feel the darkness coming. “I don’t want to spend the night outside, in the darkness…I don’t know this place at all, and I can get lost! So I should start building the house right away,” thought Steve. With this thought in his mind, Steve started mining faster and left the cave with his hands full of stones. After removing the grass near the pole, he started building his house. He used planks for the house’s foundation. Steve constructed a rectangle out of them and started assembling the walls near its edges, leaving some space for the windows and the entrance. He chose
to make a wooden roof, because he wanted to build a second floor (an attic), where his bedroom would be. He moved the workbench and the chest into the house and started constructing a wooden door. After installing the door in the appropriate place, Steve assembled a furnace and placed it near the rear wall of the house. Although it was already almost completely dark, Steve decided to go to the shore and dig up some sand in order to melt it and produce some glass. After coming home with the cubes of sand, Steve realized how extremely exhausted and sleep-deprived he was. He put the sand, the tools and the remaining stone parts in his chest and went to sleep right on the floor.

  Chapter 4: Steve Finishes Building His Home

  In the morning, Steve was awoken by some kind of noise. With a mixed feeling of fear and curiosity, he opened the door and stepped outside. An animal was running around him, making noises that strongly resembled oinking. For the sake of safety, Steve took his pickaxe from the chest and came closer to inspect the creature. Once he got close enough to the creature to get a good look at it, he realized that it was just an ordinary pig. He threw his pickaxe away to the side and started trying to catch the pig with his bare hands.

  After a brief chase, he drove the pig into the pit near his house. “Fine, to hell with it; I’ll think of something later,” he thought, and with this thought in mind he picked up his pickaxe and went home. Once inside, he immediately took his axe out of the chest and went to the forest to gather some wood. After getting just enough for the construction of the house’s roof, he was going to go haul the logs back home, when suddenly he saw some more animals. There were four of them, all of them fluffy, with white fur. They were walking around the trees peacefully and, from time to time, they would cast a glance at Steve with their little black eyes.

  Having realized that he had nothing to be afraid of, Steve came closer to them and found out that they were sheep. Their fur was so fluffy and soft that he wanted to cut it off and use it for his bed. A floor wasn’t very comfortable for sleep, after all. But in order to cut off the fur, he needed something sharp. Not having found anything sharp on his person, Steve decided to leave all the convenient things, like a bed, for later, and after returning home, he started constructing a roof.  First, he made steps out of wood, using his workbench – he wanted his roof to be triangular. Having made many steps this way, Steve decided that it would be enough, and started assembling a wooden ladder out of sticks so that he could get to the top of the house. After finishing it and attaching it to the wall, he climbed to the top and started building the roof. One carefully put wooden step after another and his attic rooftop was growing rapidly. Now that the house was finished, the only thing left to do was decorate it, and surely it would feel like the nicest and coziest place in the world; the perfect place to live. Steve fired up the furnace and threw some sand blocks in there. Having melted them into glass, he put it into the window openings.

  Chapter 5: Steve Decides to Start His Own Farm

  As Steve was cutting down the trees and foliage, little sprouts were falling out; he gathered them and brought them home, too. Now that he had all kinds of different sprouts in his chest, Steve could start planting trees near his house – and so he did exactly that. Now he started thinking about how he could get that little pig out from the pit and start a farm. He came up with a cunning plan; if, as the pig was running away from him all the time, he could dig a trench in the pit and bring the animal home. After which he could put a fence around the place, suitable for a farm. And so he did just that: he made a whole network of trenches and pits, being the resourceful person that he was. He could see other pigs wandering about his house, so he dug trenches and pits across the whole perimeter and then linked them to the main tunnel. “There will be many pigs wandering into the tunnel during the night, and in the morning I’ll drive them all to the farm.” He made a porch and the remaining steps so that it would be more comfortable to enter the house.

  Dusk was coming… He needed torches for attracting animals and for in-house lighting. He managed to make torches by attaching some charcoal to sticks. Steve knew how to create fire the natural way: he needed flint, and flint, obviously, could be found in gravel.   Luckily, he had noticed some gravel next to an ore deposit of some kind while coal mining in the cave. He took his shovel, his pickaxe and some torches and went to the cave. “I could find what kind of ore that was, too,” he thought. After harvesting some flint and gravel, he started striking the walls of the cave with flint while holding the torch in his other hand. After a few failed attempts, a spark flew out, falling on the torch, which immediately lit up and illuminated a part of the cave. The cave’s hidden depths did not tempt Steve, at least for now. He attached the torch to the wall and started mining the yellow ore. He found four cubes behind just one. There were two deposits at once there.  Taking only two samples with him, he hurried home, but without forgetting to take his burning torch with him. After he came home, Steve immediately placed the torches in the corners of the first floor and lit them up with the burning one, stored the harvested resources in the chest,  then went upstairs to the second floor and quietly went to sleep, turning his back to the wall. Pigs slowly approached the house, gazing at the light produced by the torches. It meant that the next morning a small present would be waiting for Steve: his own pig farm.

  Chapter 6: Steve Obtains Food and Shears Sheep

  The next morning, Steve woke up being tormented by hunger. Somehow, he got up from the floor, feeling that he definitely needed a bed to avoid getting cold and sick. But he needed to eat something first – after all, he didn’t set up all the pig traps for nothing. He got out of the house and went to check the traps. They were all filled with pigs, who were trying, unsuccessfully, to get out, as if they didn’t notice the one actual exit: the trenches. Once Steve got down to them, they immediately noticed it and started running. After driving all the pigs to his farm, he filled the trenches and the pits. After returning home, Steve noticed that all the wooden tools were slightly damaged – the pickaxes head, the axe’s edge, and the shovel’s blade. He decided against using them and simply threw them in the lake, after which he started crafting more durable tools. This time he used cobblestone instead of wood. After making the stone tools and a stone sword, he started looking around for a pig to stab. He didn’t have to chase it very long, as the paddock was pretty small. After cornering his target, Steve swung at it with his sword and struck it a few times. Having picked up the pieces of meat, he went inside the house to cook them. He loaded up the furnace with firewood and meat and ignited it. He needed to craft a table and a seat to eat comfortably. In order to do that, he put a few blocks of wood near the window – and the table was complete. He made a seat from one half of the block, which he got from simply cutting a tree in half. After dining on very tasty pork, Steve decided to examine the ore samples that he got from the cave the day before. It is a well-known fact that in order to get something out of ore, you have to melt it first. And so he heated up the furnace again and put the blocks of ore there. Soon, the ore had been completely melted and Steve took pieces of something white out of the furnace. Those pieces were iron, which was a few times more durable than stone. Because this material was one of the most suitable for sharpening, Steve decided to craft something sharp with it, something that could be used for shearing sheep. He crafted a pair of scissors by attaching two pieces of iron to one another and sharpening them against the walls of his own house. He went outside and started looking for sheep. He got lucky very fast; the same exact sheep that he encountered earlier were now taking a bath in the water. He approached them and then sheared all of them, gathering enough wool to craft a bed. After he brought the wool home and put it into his chest, Steve, being a curious and restless person, went outside to explore the area.

  Chapter 7: Steve Goes Hiking and Enjoys the Scenery

  After taking everything he needed – his tools and torches – he went hiking to the mountains that surrounded the beautiful valley. Walki
ng on grass, Steve was thinking about how beautiful and full of wonder the world around him really was. Flowers, grass, animals – everything seemed so nice and appealing.

 

  Struck by all this beauty, Steve was approaching the mountains when the view got even more breathtaking, thanks to the multitude off small waterfalls, with water pouring right off the cliff and flowing to a small pond. There were many birches growing near the pond, and under them there were mushrooms of two kinds: the grayish-brown ones and the red ones, with white specks. Carefully harvesting them with his scissors, Steve put them in his pocket, feeling excited about making a wonderful mushroom soup out of them later.

  Suddenly Steve felt a strong desire to take a bath in the pond. He removed his clothes, arranged his hiking gear on the grass nearby, and went into the water. It was very warm, almost hot, because of the great amount of sunlight heating it up during the day. After swimming across the pond a few times, Steve got out of the water.

 

  Lying down on the soft, dry grass so that he could get dry himself, he thought about adding the finishing touches to his house. He had to insert some glass into the window opening, craft a chimney, construct a bed, and finally, complete the porch by adding a canopy to it. He started thinking hard, trying to figure out the types and amounts of resources that he needed, because he wanted to start gathering them right away so as not to waste time and effort. After a while, Steve got a headache. He got up, put his clothes back on, and gathered his things, and then started walking toward the mountain a little to the left of the pond, intending to conquer it. As he was climbing higher and higher, he was carving out little steps along the way, to make climbing up and down a little easier. After reaching the top, he sat down to catch his breath next to a small oak that was growing there, and started looking around. He saw a completely different landscape before his eyes: a mountain down below, and the sea behind it that was surrounding the valley as well as the mountains. After getting enough of the wonderful and unusual view, Steve decided to climb down.