Minecraft, a lego simulation with zombies as some have called it, is a game about building things out of simple blocks.

Everything in the game is made of blocks, more or less. The trees are made out of blocks. The mountains are made out of blocks. Even you are made out of blocks. Surprisingly, however, the game is quite complex (and resource heavy), despite it's simple graphics.

The Beginning: Every story needs one.

You start, generally, in the middle of nowhere, in a pale blue shirt, jeans, and nothing else. A castaway in a strange land whose size is reportedly 4 times the surface area of the planet Earth. Your first task is to gather wood, by punching a tree Chuck Norris style, until it yields. With your new wood block, you can craft wooden planks, and from these planks, a crafting bench.

This bench, much like almost every other item you can craft (including the planks and wood) can be placed in the world anywhere you want. Though I wouldn't recommend placing it in lava (you're free to try, and report your findings ) By interacting with this crafting bench, you will be able to make larger items, though initially, you'll generally still be working with basic materials, like wood. Crafting your first wooden tools, such as the pick, sword, and shovel.

With these implements of creation, you can begin to fashion the lands around you, harnessing their raw power to create... a hole in the ground, with a dirt roof so you can wait out the night while zombies roam around for your brains.

Seriously. That's pretty much what you do your first day. Get a shovel. Dig a hole, then hide like a girl while things groan and gnash their teeth outside.

On your second day, you rush out, with your new tools and a sense of impending doom, to hunt for a suitably exposed cliff (or create one, with your shovel) to mine for stone, and if you're lucky. Coal!

Now, with stone, you can upgrade your tools, and maybe even your hole in the ground. But ahh, blessed coal. With this sweet nectar of the mountain, you can create TORCHES. And torches prevent zombies, skeletons, and other evils of the night from spawning. At least within a few tiles of where they're placed.

After a few trips around your immediate spawn location, harvesting goods, maybe even beating up the peaceful wildlife (again, as Chuck Norris, you must punch sheep until they give up their wool. Punch cows, until they vomit up their leather, and punch pigs until they explode in a shower of bacon,) you'll probably have decided on a better location for your home. Or maybe you're the committed sort, and rather than move on to better location, you're focused on improving what you've already got.

Either way, by day 5 or 6, you'll probably be living in a stone fortress, complete with killing holes, a courtyard, and decked in a suite of resplendent iron armour. Or gold armour, if you're a tard and didn't read the wiki.

This is generally how these stories start. You wake up, you make something out of wood. You hide from the bad guys. Then you build a giant skull fortress.

Traps and gadgets.

Now, I've skipped a lot up there. Like the first time you encounter a creeper, hiding among the shrubbery. The second of confusion as you hear a soft susurrus, like the whisper of nature. Or a slow gas leak. Or a TNT fuse. Then BLAM. You're dead, if you're lucky. Because if you're not, then you're now staring at the smouldering ruins of the last 5 hours of your life, laid to waste at the hands of a kamakazi hedge.

I've also skipped the joy of finding your first set of diamonds, and the woe of promptly falling in a pit of lava while carrying them. (This, like the skull fortress, is pretty much inevitable. Just accept that you will find diamonds, and you will die horribly before you get back to the surface with them.)

However, all that stuff pales in comparison to the wonder of red-stone. Minecraft's equivalent to electrical wiring. This wonderful stuff allows you to do all sorts of crazy things, if you've a mind for it. You can create automated doors, rig up intricate melodies to play when someone enters your house, or, as is the most common use: traps.

Red-stone is a tricky thing to work with, until you understand its intricacies, but people have done amazing things with the stuff. From creating secret entrances to their lairs, to killing pits, to TNT mines, and every gadget and gizmo in between. Some of the more OCD among us, have even made functional calculators, and one industrious person has gone a long way to creating a fully functional (and programmable) computer, within Minecraft, out of red stone... Honestly, I think that's a bit crazy, but it's still impressive for as long as it takes to realise that to do something like that, you have to be single, and live in your parents basement.

But the bottom line is, if you care to put in the time to learn how to make red-stone work for you, you can do some amazing stuff. Take our very own JCB, for example, who has created (on the multiplayer server) a self repairing house, whose red-stone circuitry will detect any damage to the walls, and immediately rebuild them!

The Server.

That leads us, very conveniently to the topic of multiplayer. Now, assuming that you haven't been living under a rock for the last year, and don't pride yourself on being able to resist peer pressure/avoid trends, you likely already own minecraft. In which case, you probably already have a few single player worlds that you've painstakingly explored, in between hiding from zombies and creepers. However, eFragz, the glimmering jewel of the cyber sea that it is, has a community server.

The connection details are:

briffynet.co.uk:25565

You will need to be whitelisted before joining us there, because we're crotchety old bastards and don't like new people. We tend to sit on our porches and wave sticks at them when they ride by to deliver our newspapers. But should you wish to brave the wilds of our server; the dangers of Pokeylope and his TNT fetish, the horrors of Briffy running around naked, or the agonies of being brow beaten by the plot police, then feel free to ask either Extro, Rhys, or myself, and we can get you added to the whitelist.

Once on the server, there are all sorts of common sense rules to follow, like not stealing from anyone but GrumpyYoungMan, and not blowing up anything, unless it resembles Pokeylope's Inn. But on the whole, the only real rules that you have to follow relate to building inside the main town that we've all built up around the spawn area.

It's taken many nights, and days, of hard labour to build that place. It's walls high enough to keep spiders out, and enough light on the streets to ensure that no one need fear suicide shrubberies. Everyone has a plot in the main town, a little place to call their own and build a house. However, most of us eventually feel the need to build something bigger (a skull fortress) and eventually wander away from the town, some arbitrary distance, where the rules on buildings no longer apply. A place where we can build as high, or as obnoxiously as we want. But we always have our town house, a safe haven to return to during times of trouble, or when Briffy decides to flood your Victorian villa with liquid hot magma.

It also serves as a great place to gather up, ready for one of our epic spelunking adventures, in search of diamonds, dungeons, or just lulz. These adventures ALWAYS contain lulz, usually centred around the person with the most diamonds falling into lava.

So, if you've got Minecraft come join us. Join us even if you don't have it, actually, get off your arse and buy it. It's only a few quid and without exception, everyone who's tried it has enjoyed it. Even the traditionally FPS focused, adrenalin junkies. Ask GrumpyYoungMan, and while you're at it, ask him where my diamonds are!