I started the download of Assassin's Creed II on Xbox 360. I wanted to play it because I'm kind of studying the 16th century right now and want to see how they rendered Italy and the various famous characters in the game. While I waited, I played Minecraft with my friend, and well, I got really carried away with that, and it ate up the whole day. 

You know. It's really hard to navigate natural caves. They're so chaotic. They're full of passageways, some of which are dead ends, others connect with large rooms with more branching paths, and others loop around to bring you back where you started. It's maddening. I put up signs everywhere and I still got lost. I eventually started walling up dead ends and redesigning passagaways and rooms to make them easier to navigate. What a pain. But they are the best places to search for resources. I managed to get a good haul of just about everything you can find down there. Only problem was, it wasn't enough. 

I spawned into the game in the oposite corner to my friend. It was his world and I was near one of his old mines, so I set up shop there. I could've just used the map to find him, but I thought it would be fun to gather resources for a minecart railway I would build to his side of the map. Little did I realize how darn far he was. These maps are really big! Too big to make a railway from one corner to the other in one day of gathering resources. So I turned to the waterways, and bult a boat, and sailed (with one portage), to his big house. 

I discovered there a lot of horses. I figured out how to tame them, put a saddle on them, and ride them. This seemed the best form of transportation. I got a second one and put them both in a pen. Now we could travel from mine to mine, across the map, in really good time. There's just the matter of the jungle, and that hidden canyon my friend fell into and died with most of my hard won resources on him. I'll have to built a road, I think. 

And on and on.