Chapter 3: Steve Builds His Home
Having chosen a suitable location, he made a small wooden pole to mark the exact place where he wanted to build a house to live in and to enjoy the view from his window. Steve placed the workbench near the pole and used it to make a chest from the remaining wood planks. He put his shovel inside and went to his boat in order to gather the resources necessary for building a house. After crossing the lake once more, Steve started cutting down the trees one after another, gathering logs and breaking the foliage with his hands. Soon he accumulated a huge pile of untreated logs.
Steve loaded the logs into the boat, brought them near the pole and stored them in his chest. Suddenly, he saw a small hill near the shore; he noticed a small cave inside it. He came closer and saw a peculiar stone with black patches. Steve broke it with his pickaxe unhurriedly, and something dropped from the stone, something black. It was coal. Behind the broken stone there was another, with the same black patches. “A-ha, looks like a coal deposit!” thought Steve. “Well, I suppose I’ll come by later to mine some more, but right now I have to get some regular stone material for the main part of the house.”
And so he got to work. Plenty of time had passed already, and Steve started to feel the darkness coming. “I don’t want to spend the night outside, in the darkness…I don’t know this place at all, and I can get lost! So I should start building the house right away,” thought Steve. With this thought in his mind, Steve started mining faster and left the cave with his hands full of stones. After removing the grass near the pole, he started building his house. He used planks for the house’s foundation. Steve constructed a rectangle out of them and started assembling the walls near its edges, leaving some space for the windows and the entrance. He chose to make a wooden roof, because he wanted to build a second floor (an attic), where his bedroom would be. He moved the workbench and the chest into the house and started constructing a wooden door. After installing the door in the appropriate place, Steve assembled a furnace and placed it near the rear wall of the house. Although it was already almost completely dark, Steve decided to go to the shore and dig up some sand in order to melt it and produce some glass. After coming home with the cubes of sand, Steve realized how extremely exhausted and sleep-deprived he was. He put the sand, the tools and the remaining stone parts in his chest and went to sleep right on the floor.