A+ often enjoys watching Minecraft videos on Youtube where streamers take on challenges like surviving harder, more realistic worlds. We briefly gave RL Craft a spin the other day, but I died to a dragon and that wasn't realistic enough for A+, so we checked out Underdog today.

We couldn't get Underdog to work under GDLauncher on her computer even when I changed the Java interpreter and memory settings as suggested in the Underdog installation instructions. I installed PrismLauncher on her computer and that worked fine.

As usual, when we started the world, we set it to peaceful and turned the day/night cycle off. The early progression quests went all right, except for the one about obtaining 32 balls of clay. We found a few, but I'm not sure if there were enough clay blocks near our spawn or maybe they were just hard to see under the water. I liked how the process of making charcoal involved making a pit and burning the stacked firewood blocks under a nonflammable material (I used dirt).

A+ wasn't a fan of how much work was involved in everything, though, so I'm not sure we'll return to this world. I think when she says "realistic", she's looking for something more like Total Animation than TerraFirmaCraft. Here's what Total Animation looks like:

(You can tell I built the house because it's a boring box-like thing made with whatever wood was handy.)

We last checked out Total Animation in October. It's a little too laggy on my Lenovo P52 laptop, so I usually play without the shaders and visual effects that make it special. A+ has more patience for that, and since she plays in Windows, her P52's (small) Nvidia GPU can accelerate it enough to be tolerable.

There are a ton of modpacks that focus on more realistic textures/shaders/etc., so she'll probably flip through a few of them. I might as well practise my journaling along the way.