The year is 1971. The recently elected Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi has been found with a knife in his throat. Precisely how this came to be the case is a story for another day.
The important thing is that Eric Underwood wakes up, after what feels like just a couple seconds later, in -
A strange forest, where the grass and trees are made out of perfect cubes.
(For anyone who wants to follow along, the seed is "glowfic" on Minecraft 1.21)
What in the hell.
He's dreaming. He was probably knocked unconscious - no, he was just stabbed, he thought he died - but he's too aware of his surroundings right now to be dying - he needs to wake himself up right now.
He does not wake up!
Suppose he Tries Very Hard to wake up?
Nope!
Also, in the process of Trying Very Hard to wake up, he might notice that his body is also made of blocks!
Are you serious. What happens when he, say, clenches his hands and jumps up and down?
Nothing seems to happen when he clenches his hands! He can sort of feel his hands forming fists, as if he had a phantom limb, but his visible arms remain non-clenched rectangles with no visible fingers.
He can jump up and down, though!
Fantastic.
Well, on the bright side, if he's dreaming now, he might not have actually died; that could have been a dream too. Or these are just the sorts of hallucinations you have when you have lost all connection between your brain and your heart for several minutes.
He'll walk around in the dream world, then. Is there anything besides blocky trees and blocky grass?
There are some flowers, and some exposed stone in the ground. There also seems to be a snowy area with a different kind of trees in one direction.
He'll walk over to the snowy area, then.
The snow and trees are on top of a hill with a cave in it!
He is not feeling particularly cold, despite the snow around him. He's not warm, either, just... standard nondescript temperature.
Dream brain doesn't understand how gravity works, apparently, unless that dirt is somehow packed really strongly. Maybe it's partially rock? There are flecks of grey in it. But that doesn't explain how that one cube of snow is sticking to the wall.
He'll venture into the cave.
It's actually a tunnel! It just loops around and comes right back out of the hill.
He'll just keep walking around outside, then.
What happens when he picks up one of those big yellow flowers on the ground?
His hand doesn't pick it up so much as swing at it, and there's a sort of crunching feeling coming from the place where the flower is. It then disappears from his sight, and a smaller version of the flower lands on the ground, before zooming towards him and appearing in his hand.
He can now feel some sort of... area in his mind? A new sense of sorts? He can clearly see - though not with his eyes - a sort of array of square slots in his mind, with a larger grid above it, and then a small 2x2 grid above that. The flower in his hand occupies the first slot in the first array of slots, which feels closer to him somehow than the rest of the grid.
And if he... uses his mysterious new senses to put the flower in a different slot?
It moves to the other slot! He can also concentrate on the slot that the flower is in, and have his hand be holding it again - although that only seems to work for the bottom row of slots, not the larger grid.
What if he picks up another flower?
It goes into the same slot as the first one! They're sort of stacked on top of each other within his mind.
What if he walks back over to some of the other flowers, the red flowers, and picks one up?
It goes into a different slot. He can't seem to stack the red and yellow ones together.
(Also, while he's walking, he'll notice several other tunnels in the ground, including some which seem to have black and green minerals exposed in the stone.)
What about the smaller 2x2 grid in his mind?
When he puts the red flower into one of the slots on that grid, he sees a sort of apparition floating in the air of a... red object, which doesn't resemble anything in particular.
If he reaches for that object, it appears in his hand, and the red flower disappears entirely. The object feels sort of pasty in his phantom hand, like paint or dye.
Can he do the same with the yellow flower?
Yep! That makes yellow dye!
And what happens if he puts one of the dyes into the 2x2 grid?
Nothing seems to happen.
Sure.
What if he tries to scoop up a handful of dirt off the ground?
The crunching sensation lasts for a second, this time, and he can see small cracks appear in the grass. His hand is never actually making contact with the ground, it's just breaking it from a distance with his strange new senses.
One cube of the grass disappears, and a smaller cube falls and appears in his inventory. This one seems to be solely dirt, with no grass on it at all.
Can he make anything by putting the dirt in the 2x2 grid?
Nope!
What if he tries to set the dirt down on the ground?
It springs back into place, full-sized! It's still missing the grass, though.
...sure.
He picks the dirt back up, grabs a few more pieces of dirt, and then turns back around and keeps walking.
He'll encounter a blocky animal! Perhaps a sheep?
Keep walking.
Actually, can he use his new psychic powers to collect some of the leaves from the trees?
Nope. He can break them, but the leaves don't appear in his inventory.
(Also, more of his surroundings are now visible, including what appears to be an ocean.)
He'll back up far enough that he can get out of the way if the tree falls over, and then break the wood of the tree.
The tree does not fall over! It just stays there, floating in the air!
More dream physics. Great.
Can he turn the wood into any type of dye?
He can turn it into four wooden planks, each of which is the same size as the original piece of wood.
And the planks?
He can turn a plank into a little wooden button. The button does not turn into anything else.
All right.
It occurs to him to try putting two planks into the 2x2 grid.
That makes what appears to be a little plate of wood, like flooring.
He won't actually make it yet; what are his other options? Two planks vertically, two planks at a diagonal, all the possible permutations of three planks - what do those make?
Two planks, one above the other, make four sticks. The others don't make anything.
He'll collect all the rest of the wood from the tree, make the plate and the sticks, and then start trying more permutations of all of his objects, including four planks together.
Four planks make a wooden table with intricate designs on it. None of the other combinations he tries seem to do anything, except for red and yellow dye making orange dye.
He saw some blue and white flowers; can he make blue and white dye, plus the obvious combinations from there?
Yep! Red and blue makes purple. White and blue makes light blue. White and red makes pink. Pink and purple makes... a sort of purplish pink.
Strangely enough, there does not seem to be a way to make green. (Or brown.)
Also, while he is walking around and collecting flowers, he may notice that some of the leaves from the tree he broke are slowly disappearing.
Makes about as much sense as a floating tree.
All right, he'll turn and start walking through the plains. Does he see anything else interesting?
Keeeep walking.
He walks past some more trees, caves, and a different color of sheep. He eventually encounters a chicken, next to which are some floating eggs.
(No, there are no obvious ways to craft anything with eggs.)
After a bit more walking, he will see that it has suddenly started to get dark out.
Strange; he hasn't been here more than ten minutes at most. He must have arrived right at sunset. Wait, why is he expecting this oddly realistic dream to make any sense?
(He's still trying to wake up every minute or so.)
Does it feel cold out? He might need shelter soon.
Still not cold.
Well, he'll get started on shelter anyway. He'll mine another couple trees, build a little house, and hope gravity doesn't reappear and make the roof fall on him.
A little shelter!
(By the way, he will have accidentally picked up another stick and some little tree saplings, which seem to have fallen out of the disappearing leaves.)
Can he craft anything with the saplings?
While he tries to find out, he will be attacked by this guy!
It hits him, knocking him backwards, and he feels a jolt of pain. It then continues shambling towards him.
What is this, Night of the Living Dead? He runs away from the zombie to the other side of his shelter, breaks the blocks to get in, and then replaces them once he's inside.
Hopefully the zombie can't break blocks?
It's very dark in here. He can hear groans from the zombie, but it doesn't break the walls.
Is he seriously hurt?
No, not at all! The initial pain he felt seems to have gone away entirely.
Great! He'll get back to trying crafting combinations, keeping an eye out in case the zombie does end up breaking through the walls.
He doesn't find anything new in the next couple minutes.
What can he do with the items he has? Can he place the saplings, the sticks, and the table?
Saplings and table, yes, sticks, no.
It's still dark, but he can see that the table has a 3x3 grid on top of it.
Ah, is this a box to store items in? He tries to put a plank in the box.
Floating illusory button!
Oh, this table is for crafting. Probably more complicated patterns that take more than four slots. He tries a few simple permutations of planks.
He can turn three planks into six slabs of wood that look a little larger than the plate in his inventory. He can also make six planks into either three doors, two trapdoors, or four stairs!
He only has 28 planks and no logs, and he doesn't want to go outside with the zombie there, so he won't make any of those yet.
What can he make with sticks?
He doesn't find any combinations yet.
The table has a drawing of a hammer on it; can he make that? With... sticks and wood?
No, but he can make a shovel! And if he tries more combinations, he can make other tools - an axe, a pickaxe, and a hoe, it looks like.
He'll make the shovel and the axe; they both seem useful.
What happens when he uses the shovel on the ground beneath him?
He can mine the dirt slightly faster!
He'll put the dirt back; he doesn't want zombies coming out of the ground from inside his house.
While he's at it, can he place the wooden plate and button?
Yep! They make little clicking noises when he steps on and presses them.
He'll pick them back up, and then get back to finding combinations of his items.
He is briefly interrupted by the zombie, who has become much louder. It screeches and wails a few times, then becomes silent.
Keep looking for combinations!
After an hour or so, and many combinations tried, the only new things he has found are a wooden sword, signs, a wooden chest, and two things that look like fences.
He's mostly been spending this time getting grimmer and grimmer about his chances of being alive. A normal dream wouldn't last this long; this is some sort of hallucination he's having while dying. Although how he managed to survive his wounds for even an hour is still beyond his comprehension.
He'll eventually break a block in his house to check on the zombie -
It's daytime!
It's only been an hour! Does dream world not have a normal daylight cycle?
He'll head outside his shelter, then, and get started on mining more trees. He wants to build everything he's found crafting recipes for so far.
The axe helps him mine the trees! Although he gets a feeling after a while that the axe is about halfway used up - not that there's any visual indication of this on the axe itself, of course.
Does he discover any new recipes after crafting all the items he's discovered so far?
Not yet, but it might take him a while to try all the many, many combinations, now that he has so many new items! He can no longer just brute-force it!
Well, he'll use the items he does have so far. He'll put the chest inside his house, and put some of his materials in there. He'll add doors to his little house - come to think of it, he should make the house a little larger; there's only two blocks of space left for him.
He's starting to get very hungry!
Well, what does he eat in the dream world? He doesn't have any way to cook meat yet, even if he successfully catches an animal - and the crafting recipe for "fire" is probably something stupid like "2 oil and 3 lightning, alternating in one vertical line on the 5x5 super-crafting-table made from solid gold."
Well, maybe he'll try out this pickaxe on one of those caves.
The stone in the caves doesn't drop itself, but rather a strange sort of stone covered in bumps and scratches, as if many small rocks were haphazardly glued together to make a single cube. The stone with little black flecks in it drops what appears to be coal. Little green orbs also appear, but they don't seem to be visible after entering his inventory.
There's a light source in the cave! It appears to be some kind of glowing moss?
When mined, it drops nothing at all, and the light goes away.
It doesn't matter! He has coal, which is clearly going to be one of the ingredients to fire, the ultimate light source!
He'll head back to his house and start finding things to craft!
He's able to craft stone versions of most of the wooden things he's crafted so far, including tools. The stone version of a chest appears to be some kind of box with only three slots, which seem to be picky about what sort of items can be placed in them.
Coal can be used to craft torches! Strangely enough, they don't shine while in his hand, but when placed on the wall, they immediately provide light!
The torch light reminds him that it's getting dark outside.
Already. So the day must only last... eight minutes, maybe, plus another eight minutes of night? He's not sure about the exact numbers. He can certainly handle another eight minutes without eating.
He'll experiment with the little grey box.
When he puts cobblestone in the top and coal in the bottom, a piece of coal disappears, the box lights up, and the cobblestone begins slowly transforming back into the smooth sort of stone that was in the cave.
This is what he can use to cook food! Once he has food!
It looks like the stone gives him more options to mimic his wooden items, such as stone buttons. There's also apparently a way to make stone bricks. It doesn't let him make tools, like with the cobblestone.
It's not clear what eight stone in the same formation as the chest and furnace makes, because he only has seven stone left by now. (And no cobblestone.)
After ten minutes have passed and the morning has come, Eric ventures out and mines some more cobblestone and coal with his new pickaxe. The torches should help him see in the little cave.
The cave seems to have a lower level that goes deeper into the darkness! There appears to be a bat flying around, and some sort of orange flecks in the stone on the ground.
He probably can't eat a bat. He'll head back up and try to kill one of those sheep with his sword.
This might be difficult; he's so hungry he's having trouble walking!
He doesn't find a sheep, but he finds a chicken and a pig. Upon striking the chicken with his sword, it flashes red, falls over, and disappears, leaving a piece of raw meat in its place.
The pig also flashes red, but doesn't die, and instead starts running away. When he catches it and hits it two more times, it will disappear and leave three pieces of pinker meat.
(Both of them also leave the disappearing green orbs.)
He'll head back to his house, then, and cook and eat the meat.
He is successful! It takes two pieces of cooked pork before he is no longer hungry.
Does he discover anything interesting after cooking up some more stone?
No. It seems the cobblestone is what's used to make most of the interesting things.
Well, he'll go back outside and gather some of the other materials he's been seeing around here - sand, gravel, and the thin green reeds growing by the river.
In the process, he'll learn that the water - which has somewhat unusual physics - makes it harder to mine! Also, it appears that sand and gravel do obey gravity, but only some of the time?
He picks up sand, gravel, and reeds. Most of the gravel drops itself, but some pieces drop sharp-looking black rocks. At some point, seeds appear in his inventory, although it's not clear when they got there.
Can he craft anything interesting with these new materials?
The reeds let him craft sugar and paper. The sand, when cooked, produces glass, and six blocks of glass produce sixteen thinner windows.
He'll add the windows to his house, then! And then go back into the mine, to check out that orange stuff in the stone.
How, pray tell, will he get down to the orange stuff?
Jump? It's not that far, and besides, it's just a dream anyway.
A brief flash of pain, and then it gets better again.
There is a growl from behind him.
Zombie. Wonderful. Can he try hitting it with his sword?
Yep! It takes a few hits, and the zombie scratches him once, but it eventually dies, leaving behind what appears to be rotting meat.
He is then shot by what appears to be a skeleton holding a bow and arrow.
Great. Okay, he's going to go back up now. He uses some wood to build himself a staircase, while dodging (or trying to dodge) a continued barrage of arrows, and then goes back up and breaks the top of the staircase.
He has several arrows sticking out of his back, and he is feeling weak (and, again, hungry) - but he can make it back to his house.
Can he pull the arrows out?
No.
He'll start by solving the one problem he does know how to solve, then, and eat the last piece of pork.
At once, his pain begins to ease away, and he feels stronger again, though not quite at full strength.
In just a few seconds, he starts to become hungry again.
Magic dream food, great. He'll eat the chicken.
Heals him up all the way, and this time, he stays fully nourished afterwards.
It's getting late, so he'll get back to testing crafting recipes for the next ten minutes.
Once morning comes, he ventures out from his house to explore the surrounding area, looking for new types of blocks. He won't go back into the cave, not yet.
Can he make anything interesting from the darker type of wood?
Darker versions of the light wood objects!
Also, here's a pool of lava!
He won't even try to mine that.
Here's some more of those orange/blue rocks, this time visible from the surface!
Is he attacked by zombies, skeletons, or anything else while mining them?
Nope!
(They drop little globs of mostly orange metal.)
Maybe he should go kill some animals now.
He kills several sheep, which drop not only meat, but also blocks of wool that match their colors - two white, one brown, and one grey.
Ooh, orange blocks in the distance!
What sort of orange blocks?
Does he mine them?
You know he mines them. This is a selfthread; we don't need to do this back-and-forth thing between Eric and the Minecraft world.
Sorry.
They're pumpkins!
Well, he'll go back to his house now, and see what he can craft with all his new items.
Wool can make carpets, and pumpkins can make pumpkin seeds. The orangey metal - which might be copper? - can be smelted into metal bars and used to make various familiar objects, like blocks and doors. It can also make a thin metal rod, which doesn't seem to do anything.
Cool. Next morning. Let's venture out into a different direction this time.
There's lava flowing out of a mountain! It seems to have broken a tree?
And more lava, actively in the process of burning down trees!
And... whatever the hell this is?
Can he mine all those blocks?
He can mine the red stuff, the orange stuff - which hurts him when he steps on it - the metal bars, and the bricks. The gold takes a while to mine and drops nothing. The black blocks take so long to mine that he'll probably give up before he can finish.
There's also a chest!
Can he put on the shimmering golden pants?
He sure can! He immediately feels stronger, as if nothing can hurt him when the GOLDEN PANTS are there to protect him.
He'll head back home now.
He encounters a sort of inky object on his way back.
Crafting recipes he discovers in the next ten minutes include: using the ink to make black dye, smelting the red blocks to make red bricks, and a permutation of wood that lets him make a boat!
Cool! Can he plant the seeds he got from the pumpkins and grass? Possibly with help from his hoe?
Yep! The saplings, too! Although not the sugar cane.
Let's venture out in another direction in the boat!
His only new discoveries are pink flowers, and leather, which is dropped by cows.
After he runs out of coal for cooking food - which happens later that night - Eric considers going into the cave. On the one hand, he might die. On the other hand, he's dreaming, so it doesn't matter.
Back on the first hand, it could still be pretty painful to keep getting shot by skeletons. Back on the second hand, he's Eric fucking Underwood; he eats pain for breakfast. Back on the first hand again, he's been here for at least two hours so far without any signs of waking up, so maybe this is actually real somehow? Back on the second hand again, that's ridiculous. And on his legs, which is really the deciding factor, are the magical golden pants. So into the cave he goes.
Is he attacked by any zombies or skeletons?
Nope! Just a giant spider!
And can he kill it?
Yep! Oh, now there's a skeleton.
Eric kills it too, eats some meat to heal himself, and then places some torches so that he can look for more interesting minerals.
The only notable type of block is a slightly different-looking type of grey stone, which simply drops itself.
He'll also encounter another skeleton, zombie, and spider, and by the time he finishes killing them all, he will have picked up a total of three pieces of string, one red eye, two arrows, two bones, and another piece of rotting meat. His pants feel somewhat broken now - although they do seem to have made the arrows stuck in him hurt less.
But once he's put up the torches and started mining, no more monsters seem to come out.
Ah, are they scared of the light? Well, he'll mine some more coal to make more torches, then. (And go grab some more meat from his house, too.)
It's raining outside!
Unless he can mine water, he doesn't see how that's relevant.
As he goes further into the cave, he will encounter some pinkish rocks, some green minerals that don't seem minable with a stone pickaxe, and some more of the same types of monsters.
There's also this area!
He'll try to mine those tan things in the ground, and then venture into the plant place.
The blocks in the ground drop another sort of blob of metal, and some of the plants are minable too.
Also, he finds blocks which drop balls of clay, and one of the skeletons attacking him drops its bow!
Can he shoot with it?
Yes! And it somehow hits his targets! Although he has very few arrows.
The area also has some other interesting things! There are fish swimming in a pond, which drop fish meat and a strange white substance when killed. There are also strange plants that hold your weight for about a second, before dropping you.
Useful for making a trap, perhaps.
He'll keep mining until he runs out of food, and then head back up for some crafting.
In the process, he will discover that he can only stack at most 64 pieces of cobblestone in one slot in his inventory.
And look, his little farm has grown some trees! Right next to each other!
Sure.
There are a lot of new things for him to craft! They range from boring things, like stone with moss on it, to exciting things, crafted with the smelted iron! It looks like he can make all the same tools he has so far, but out of iron! There are also ways to make what look like scissors, an iron boat, and iron clothing!
Great! He'll start with just the sword and pickaxe, though; he doesn't have unlimited iron.
His top priority right now is making a book, in which he can write down all of these combinations before he forgets them. Hell, he already forgot how to make stairs and had to rediscover it. What can he make with paper?
He can make a book out of paper and leather! But... he can't seem to write in it.
Fine. He'll expand his house once the morning comes, and make a room full of signs with recipes on them.
It takes him about a week (two hours), but: enormous wooden book!
(He has also grown and harvested wheat in the past two hours, and learned that it makes bread.)
Time for some more mining!
He'll find some more iron, and then an area with a darker sort of stone. (It's minable, albeit in a cobbled version.)
Even deeper, there's this area. (The dark blocks only drop the little green orbs.)
There's also a blue kind of ore, which drops little pieces of dark blue dust.
The green orbs disappear and are therefore useless. He'll go back up to a different area of the cave.
Purple cave!
He finds more of the familiar types of ores, plus a new one that drops red dust.
He's also attacked by this person!
He now feels very sick.
Can he talk to the person?
Sure!
Do they respond?
Oh, no, they just throw something at him that hurts him even more.
Run.
The sickness doesn't take too long to go away, although he has to eat most of his food to heal himself.
He also finds some gold ore in the area he runs to.
He's going to make a new furnace right here, and turn some of his iron into armor. He nearly died there.
The iron hat, shirt, and pants seem to protect him more than even the magic golden pants! Although he doesn't feel completely safe.
He'll go back up to his house, then.
It's nighttime. There is a green monster next to his house.
Hit the green monster with his sword?
It explodes.
Also, he is now being attacked by flying monsters.
Those were his crafting recipes.
He'll go inside and plug up the hole in his wall.
Overnight, he'll mostly just discover new types of blocks made from the new types of rocks. The gold can make tools, the blue dust can make blue dye, and the red dust can make a different kind of torches, which don't provide as much light.
Eric spends the next couple hours remodeling the area surrounding his house, creating a moat so that no green monsters will get close enough to blow it up. Unless they can fly, which is a very real possibility.
And he'll also make a new farm.
After that, he's going to spend more time exploring. He probably has strong enough gear that he can travel even overnight; he's just going to head off in one direction and see where he ends up. And he'll be careful to head only straight in that one direction, with the block-based grid as a guide; he'll need to be able to find his house again when he's done exploring.
Sounds great! He'll discover a new cave, complete with green monsters!
Pass. He has a cave back at home; he's looking for something he hasn't seen before.
Do purple flowers count?
They do not.
There are also some pink trees, but his enjoyment of them may be hindered by the return of the flying monsters!
He's not going to stand and fight yet; he's feeling too hungry. Run. (In the direction of the pink trees... damn it, he's getting off course, but he still knows roughly what direction his house was.)
The flying monsters are very persistent.
Then he'll barricade himself inside a mountain if he has to!
Reminder that he's out of food.
He does not need reminders.
also his body really really hurts -
Shut up. He will sit here for another ten minutes if he has to.
Next morning. Go outside, kill animals, collect meat, cook meat, eat meat, and then look at the trees.
They're pretty much just a different color of trees that drop a different color of wood. There are also mineable pink flower petals on the ground.
Then he'll head back to where he hopes is approximately in a horizontal line from his house, and keep travelling.
He'll pass an even larger cave, or perhaps just a hole in the ground, and another night will force him to seek impromptu shelter in the dirt.
But after that, he'll stumble upon this!
In the back of his mind, there had been a part of him wondering if this whole thing was somehow more than just a hallucination, wondering if he was actually going to be stranded here for the rest of his life, and that part had been growing steadily louder and louder as the hours ticked on by.
But this was a manmade structure. If he was stranded here, he at least wouldn't be stranded alone.
"Hello?" he calls out, and louder, if needed, "HELLO?"
No response.
But he does seem to attract a little attention.
The thing shooting arrows at him can't be like the others; it's clearly intelligent enough to build structures - or were the other monsters sentient, and he had just been killing people before - no, don't be ridiculous, this is a dream -
"I come in peace! I come in peace! Don't shoot; I surrender - here - " he switches from his sword to his steak in what is hopefully an offer of friendship.
Continued arrow fire, several of which hit him. It doesn't seem to react to anything he's saying.
Just because it doesn't speak English doesn't mean it's not a person. But it's clearly hostile. He draws his bow and arrow to shoot back, but he's running away from it and trying to circle to the building, in case there's really a human inside and this is just a monster attacking its house.
There are several more of the angry creatures with crossbows in the vicinity.
Then it is time to run away.
He'll run through a jungle filled with all sorts of interesting new flora, but the gray creatures are persistent enough that he won't be able to stop and smell the, uh, plants.
But once he gets to the end and turns back, he can at least mine the unusually tall trees, which drop yet another kind of wood.
He's not stopping for long, even once it seems like he's shaken them off. If they're intelligent, then they might be tracking him - so he's going to travel some distance, loop around, and hope to hell that he remembers where his house is.
Take a look at all the cool stuff he'll find!
These all look like worryingly manmade structures! If he approaches them, is he attacked by more of the grey people?
The first one looks like some kind of a... capsized ship? It's empty except for two chests, which contain feathers, a map, empty books, paper, wheat, and moldy potatoes.
So these are absolutely intelligent creatures. And as for why they're attacking him... hell, they might just think he's a monster in his own right, like the zombies. (Those certainly don't seem to be intelligent, although he's not quite sure.)
What about the other structures?
There's one structure made of black rocks and stone similar to the one he saw before, although it's arranged differently. The chest here contains black rocks, bits of iron, an orange and black orb, and shimmering golden tools and pants.
There's also a rather intense thunderstorm going on by now.
The final structure is made of sand, and doesn't seem to have a chest at first - unless he mines a few blocks to find it.
This chest contains wheat, coal, rotten flesh, and what seems to be a shimmering fishing pole.
That'll be useful someday if he makes it through the night which he is not sure he will. He will keep going until he makes it back home.
He miraculously evades being struck by lightning, despite being the tallest object in the middle of the ocean. After a great deal of backtracking and increasingly desperate searching, he will eventually happen upon his house, by which time the storm will have cleared up.
So. What have we learned today?
To never go on any sort of adventure?
We have learned that there is an alien species here and that it is actively hostile where by hostile he means "attacks outsiders with crossbows"! We have learned that they are intelligent enough to build houses, giant boats, and bizarre black rectangles with chunks taken out of them! More importantly, they have learned that Eric is here!
And he's pretty sure he remembers the first structure that was made out of that black stone being in a different direction of his house! Meaning that they have previously travelled near his house and can easily do so again! It will not take long for them to find him!
So... what does he do about it?
Hell if he knows.
He's going to take a few minutes to regroup, and take a look at all of his new supplies.
Most of it is pretty straightforward. The new types of flowers make new types of dye, the new types of wood make new types of planks, etc.
What about the sparkly golden pants? Do they also feel magical?
Not really? He tries on the first pair, and they don't really give him any particular feeling, and even seem weaker than his previous iron pants. He tries on the second pair, and they also feel like nothing special. He goes to -
- um. He can't actually take off the second pair of golden pants.
What does that mean. Are they too tight or something? Does the armor not come with zippers?
He just can't take them off! Must be part of their magic!
That is the worst possible magic to have on a pair of pants!
Hey, he's the one who decided to try them on!
So now what, he's just... perpetually stuck wearing this pair of golden pants, which probably aren't even as strong as the iron pants he has in his inventory?
Yep!
What about the fishing pole, then. If he tries to fish with it, does its magic powers hook him and prevent him from ever letting go of it?
Nope! Without even having any bait on the hook, he catches a fish within ten seconds.
...wait, no, that's not a fish. That's a saddle.
A saddle. Like what you put on a horse.
The dream is getting stranger and stranger at such a fast rate that he's even more worried than before about his real-world self, but fine. He'll keep fishing while he thinks about what to do.