Your first rescue never goes well.
I’ve been working on a lighthouse on a peninsula during the days, but at night I continue exploring the maze of tunnels I’ve made, and while working on a fairly plain straight path, I suddenly saw…a chest? I’d stumbled onto a treasure room, and was able to grab the goodies (including a record and a saddle) with no risk. I could see where the mob spawner was in the room, and having heard a few tips before, I dug down and then directly up under it, letting me destroy the spawner with impunity. The rest of the zombies hanging around were then fairly easy to dispatch.
It turns out it was just the tip end of a vast cave network down there, and although I hurried to slap torches down, I could already tell I was not alone. I fought a few zombies, a spider, and a couple creepers, discovering that I still needed to work on my timing with them. When I met the skeleton, though, I panicked a bit and he managed to pump quite a few arrows into me as I struggled to get close to him, having fallen into a pit that was actually easier to get out of than it seems when you’re panicking… I did survive with a couple hearts left though, having used up all of my pork chops. And then a damn creeper exploded.
I knew exactly where to go from my spawn point this time, but I quickly realized that I hadn’t really thought my in-case-of-death plan through. I was still using a stone block to barricade the entrance to my mine, so I had to rapidly assemble a wooden pickaxe just to get back in (there’s now a proper door in place). Unfortunately all of my sticks, coal, and torches had been on me at the time, and I wanted them and the ore that I’d picked up along the way back, so I grabbed some iron, made a sword, and headed back down. I found the area I’d died in, and it looked like there was only a zombie or two down there with my stuff and I could just jump in, grab it and, run, but it was dark in that area, I’d lost some health to another couple of zombies on the way back, and had underestimated how much the armour I’d been wearing before had helped. I got hit a couple more times, and then there was ANOTHER DAMN CREEPER. BOOM.
Now I really wanted my stuff back because as I respawned, I realized that after making my sword for the first rescue, I’d left the iron ingots in my inventory. ALL OF THEM. The best I could manage was a stone sword for now, but I stopped by my second chest in my central mining cave and picked up some torches and pork chops at least. But this time the rescue was rather anticlimactic as the monsters were all gone, perhaps all taken out by the creeper’s explosion, but I quickly lit up the area and hurried back to stash my stuff. I did manage to get most of my stuff back, except for the initial suit of armour (only the almost-broken pants were left), a flint+stone, and maybe some miscellaneous stacks of ore.
Yes, we really do have to learn things the hard way.
