Tracks finished!

I finished laying the tracks for my railway. I started building a railway station at my "respawn point" and devised an automated cart delivery system. In an ideal world, every time I respawn there will be a train waiting to take me back to my floating castle. However, this world isn't ideal.

I knew I'd have to do something about all the animals at some point. They seem to be abnormally attracted to the train tracks. Rather than being crushed if they're hit by my train, they just stop progress. This was my biggest worry as I took my very first train trip from beach to castle.

The sun was setting as I left, and by the time I reached the waterfall tunnel it was dark.

What comes out of the dark? Oh yeah, monsters. Skeletal archers, actually... about five of them.

I wasn't too worried at first. It seemed like they were having trouble hitting a moving target, but as I emerged from one of my many tunnels, an archer somewhere above me hit me with several arrows and killed me.

As soon as it was light, I ran out to where I had died. All my gear was gone, and so was the train engine - only the passenger car remained. I searched all along the track and didn't find it. I think I'm going to have to elevate my tracks and provide some sort of protection for myself.

Laying the tracks

I took a look at my iron supply and I've got enough to start work on my railway. My first step is to smooth the hill down the side of my mountain. I've seen other people's mine carts and it appears that tracks can only go up one block at a time. Here's my ramp:

After that it was pretty easy to lay down the first tracks and build a powered mine cart. I sent it up by itself just to make sure everything was good.

After that first set of tracks I realized I was going to need a lot more iron so I went investigating.

I eventually found a sandy pond where the water appeared to be flowing somewhere. I plugged up the source of the water and found a good-sized cave. I explored a little bit and eventually found some iron ore in the ceiling. Score!

I started digging it away paying no mind to the sand above my head. As it turns out, that was a very bad idea. Somehow the iron was holding the sand in place and when I took it out I was buried in a cave-in. Turns out that's not a very exciting screenshot:

Well. I survived that. Time to take my newly acquired ore home and build some train tracks. Oh... except it's night time and there's an army of skeletal archers outside! I'd have a screenshot of that but I didn't want to get killed.

I killed about 4 during the night, but by then my health was so low that I decided to let the sun burn the rest. In the morning I killed a pig for its bacon and walked home.