Well...I'm starting to figure out where the stories come from. I started my new world, did the usual first few days' worth of punching trees and digging a survival hole, and started figuring things out. I'm set up in a fairly low hillside, next to a couple of lakes and what looks like some swamp-type land a bit further off. The first notable event involved my stepping right outside my door at night and running smack-dab into a Creeper, which exploded and dug a nice crater in my front yard. So that was fun, though it didn't do much more than freak me out. What did do more was when I decided to expand my hidey-hole a bit, and punched through one wall to discover a small cave with a seemingly-bottomless pit in it. Me being me, I walk over to investigate...and fall into oblivion. There goes everything I spent the start of my game making. And even better, I respawn in the middle of the pitch-black night and immediately start getting attacked by something, so I ran around wildly until I managed to find my room again. I was basically back to square one. Guess I learned the lesson about keeping backup supplies in a chest nice and early.
Oh, and the really fun part now is that I can't remember where the hell I mined the coal I used to make my torches, so I'm down to whatever's on my walls at the moment. I did just stumble across the existence of charcoal in the wiki, so I guess there's always that.
