Sorry for the delay (honestly it's becoming more the standard route than Mondays, innit?). Monday was ... well, I went to bed at 5:30 AM after working on a problem with my Minecraft server all night. Turns out you have to set up build permissions for the Nether specifically even if you have global permissions set all over the place. ._.
If I'd thought about that before 5:30 AM I wouldn't have stayed up that late.
Also blast mining with /fireball is amusing.
So ... hm.
The Nether, why not.
Let's review: Minecraft is a world where there are less than a thousand people or so left alive on the entire planet (which has about eight times the surface area of earth, and gets really weird toward the very edges). That's on the massive servers. In single player, or on smaller servers (like mine, my internet connection can't handle more than like five people), you're looking at less than an average nuclear family remaining ... or even just one dude.
The other humans? Appear to have died and become zombies or skeletons, which coincidentally happen to combust on contact with sunlight.
The only animals to speak of that have remained are pigs, chickens, cows, wolves, and sheep.
There is a creature here that hunts humans, wandering the world endlessly with one goal in mind: to explode, thereby to destroy the last survivor.
This is a world of perpetual fear and suffering, and the main character seems to have survived specifically because he cannot permanently die.
So now picture that world's hell.
Here the stone itself is twisted and brittle, cracking easily under minimal pressure. It burns fantastically, and never quits burning. The sand drags at anyone who sets foot upon it, trying to hold them in place, and lava replaces water. The only lighting comes from an eerily-glowing rock that clings to the ceiling in stalactites ... and the aforementioned lava, spread in massive oceans as far as the eye can see.
There is no day, and there is no night. It is a place outside of time.
There are only two types living things that have survived this place ... for some definition of survival.
The most common creatures one will encounter are the zombie pigmen - tribes of them wander the broken landscape, and though they will watch a human warily, they will not attack you if you do not attack them. If you do foolishly attack a pigman, the rest of his tribe will rip your body to worthless shreds - they hunt in packs and will rarely, if ever, stop attacking.
These are the friendliest creatures the player ever encounters, apart from wolves.
They are also the only source of sustenance naturally found in the Nether - if one of them should die, it is possible to scavenge cooked porkchops from the corpse. Given the most probable cause of death (the player kills them), it will be necessary to eat the meat.
The other kind of creature is an unavoidable monstrosity. It is a massive thing, a floating, white spirit that wanders the Nether aimlessly. Its face is twisted into a pained expression at all times. It never chases the player, exactly ... it just floats, roaming without end. In this place there are waterfalls created from flowing magma, and it bathes in those without being harmed.
Should the player get too close to the Ghast, it will briefly open its eyes to stare at the intruding human. Then, it will loose a blast of flame that explodes on contact, destroying the fragile stone where it hits and sometimes igniting it.
The Ghast cries like a damned child, and there are more than one. Anywhere there is room for a ghast, a new one will eventually spawn.
All in all, the Nether successfully conveys the idea of a hell world, even by Minecraft standards.
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