Minecraft (Hexxit) – The Curse of the Albatross – 6. Is This Real Life…Or is This Final Fantasy…

Early efforts in chocobo breeding were hair-pulling exercises in frustration.

Oh, I tempted the three chocobos I had seen earlier along the red mountain ridge home without problems with gysahl greens.

They kept hopping the fenced pen I had nicely set up for them outside the cottage.

(Now converted into a cow pen, along with a stray sheep who thinks it’s a cow.)

I also realized that all of them were females.

Which prompted another surroundings-spanning search for the rare, elusive male chocobo.

I eventually found one in the snowy taiga, and figured out that males had a colorful feathered crest. Bringing it back, I bred it with one of the females using a rare mutant version of the gysahl green I was farming.

The baby chicobo promptly ran out of the pen when I opened the fence gate to leave.

By the time I herded and prodded it back inside, another two chocobos had hopped the fence again.

It was about then that I realized a simple fenced pen wasn’t going to suffice, and that I had drastically underestimated how much space I was going to need to breed the birds.

—

Efforts in chocobo breeding were abandoned for a week as I patiently sawed, smelted and mined, amassing large quantities of red cobblestone to turn into brick, fir planks and lots of glass panes.

There were nights of balancing precariously on high, sniping back at skeleton archers who thought to knock me off, and taking out creepers before they ruined construction efforts.

Finally, the chocobo barn was complete.

I moved the by-now-entirely-escaped birds into their new home even before the final finishing touches of glass were complete, whereupon the baby chicobo again tried to drown itself by getting stuck in the cauldron for drinking water.

Patience with the avian brain eventually paid off with the birth of the first non-wild type mutant, a green-feathered chick.

This variety, according to the Chocopedia, which had now become my reference for all things to do with the chirping creatures, was supposed to be more adept at climbing than the regular yellow ones.

I guess it was just as well that they now had a new climb-proof housing.

—

I grew more and more gysahl greens in the search of the lovely and golden variants that would tempt them to breed. Plenty of bonemeal fertilizer got involved.

I was starting to drown in regular old gysahls. There were only so many gysahl pickles I could cook and eat.

I was starting to drown in chocobo feathers.

I was starting to drown in chocobos.

Then came the day they refused to breed.

I think they ran out of space. The overpopulation made them unreceptive to approaching their mates. Oh, they ate my rare gysahls, but refused to move after, or give birth to more babies.

I debated slaughtering some of the ordinary yellows for food.

But… they were all named already, and I didn’t have the heart to kill them in front of their fellows, or to lead them out unsuspecting only to cut their throats.

There was only one thing left to do.

They got a second barn.

The birds were living in a bigger space than I was.

—

It was around this time, during one of the mining trips in between mad chocobo breeding, that I met the shade with purple eyes again.

It did not look happy.

It was not a pleasant meeting.

We exchanged furious blows, with it teleporting in and out, and me relentlessly chasing it down.

I could have sworn at one point that I struck a killing blow, but then it healed, that strange twin-lived being and again vanished before I could strike it down once more.

—

On a second trip, I had the fright of my life when I thought I saw TWO pairs of purple eyes in the dark.

Surely there cannot be two of them…

Tell me I did not create a second shade in that earlier fight…

—

A night or two after that, there was yet again a resounding crash-thud in the dark.

Unsuspecting, I walked along the northeast path, my usual path, the path I had always walked… to the tower, to Weisferd, the albatross path…

…to find that there was something entirely new.

Minecraft (Hexxit) – The Curse of the Albatross – 5. Domestic Interlude and Dungeoneering

I was starting to realize that I was going to be stuck here for possibly a long haul, and that the cottage was now home, modest as it was.

I spent a day or two adding more storage space with shelving and lockers.

One of the yellow secretary bird-like creatures – chocobos, they were called, according to the book I found – appeared to take a liking to the root vegetables I was carrying. Gysahl greens, said the book.

It followed me home, seemingly hoping for more treats, and appeared docile enough, so I converted the ground floor’s stables to house it.

Using the fruits of my smeltery labors, the sliding door to accommodate its height and width took a little longer to install.

It even let me saddle it up and ride it, though I kept banging my helmeted head against the ceiling when moving it in and out of the cottage. Not much I could do about that though, raising the ceiling or lowering the floor was going to affect other already built up areas.

Having cleaned up the cottage some, it was time to clean up elsewhere.

I now had plenty of iron to reinforce my modest wooden bow, and even jury rigged two iron bows together with a mechanism that let me fire two or three arrows at once.

Traveling northeast again to the strange tower, I weathered out a nasty blizzard.

There was an awfully loud crash-thud that night, and later, along the way to Weisferd, I found the source of it.

A large meteor had struck near the plains by the abandoned blacksmith’s.

(The horse had proven quite uncooperative to ride – Olive was far more maneuverable and agreeable, though she kept shedding feathers all over the house.)

In the morning, with better visibility, the golem and I traded off firing projectiles at each other.

There were moments where I had to back off and find a nearby water source to put my flaming armor out before I got roasted alive, but ultimately it fell.

And so did the tower with it.

There was no way I was going to get up to the top in time. That ship had sailed when the golem took out multiple floors of stairs much earlier on, but at least I could walk by without feeling its one eye always watching… and fearing a fireball in the back.

Later, I  found a smaller meteor site by the river near Weisferd, most of it submerged underwater.

The frequency of meteor landings was getting a bit disturbing, and I hoped there was no alien intelligence behind them.

The last meteor I found on the trip back didn’t allay my fears any, for a strange alien creeper appeared as I was mining the meteorite from it and exploded in my face. My armor caught the brunt of it, fortunately.

There was also an odd chest deep in the meteor’s very center, containing glowing red gems that did not look like they were from this land, or any earth, for that matter.

It was along the journey back, along the flight path of the albatross, keeping my eyes peeled for any sign of what it might have been indicating, that I found the stone stairs.

Climbing it for a better view of the surroundings, I spied a curious floating island in the sky. Was this where the albatross laired? A place where only fliers could get to?

Dropping down behind the stairs, it turned out that it was also a grey stairwell leading downward into what turned out to be a dungeon, complete with chest mimics and minotaurs.

That last chest has legs and thinks I can’t see it. I could.

On the return trip home, pondering various ways to get to the floating island – a bridge or tower would work, but be terribly inelegant and not very mobile…

Eventually, I decided I was going to need more than just Olive.

I was going to need a -lot- of chocobos.