Justin sat inside as the monsters approached on his suddenly unstable-feeling hut. The moans of zombies, the rattles of skeletons, the hisses of spiders, and the eerier silences of creepers ("Better than the other sound creepers make," Justin thought) all made themselves known to me as they went towards him, the only player in the vicinity.
"It was better than being exposed," he thought, but not by much. He tried to access some sort of difficulty setting mentally, but saw nothing. What he wouldn't give to switch the game difficulty to peaceful, or even to switch the gamemode to creative and fly away.
He felt awfully unsafe standing near the edge of the hut (could creepers sense through walls and explode there? They could in the survival test), so he jumped on top of his crafting table to be further from the outside world. This had the side effect of moving him marginally closer to the spiders on his roof, making their hisses even louder, but he considered it an acceptable tradeoff.
All of the sudden, an idea came to Justin. "If I mine a one-block-wide hole in my house, I'll be able to hit the mobs but they won't be able to reach me!" He mined out the hole using his wooden axe, and a zombie walked in front of it, being jostled around by the swarm of nearby mobs all trying to rip Justin apart.
He swung at the zombie with the wooden sword and heard and felt it connect, the zombie flashing red and flying backwards, its backwards trajectory quickly arrested by the zombies surrounding it. He struck again, and again, until the zombie was dead, its body dissolving into rotten flesh that the nearby zombies picked up.
He dug another hole, in the roof of his house, and started striking at the spider on top of it. It died, its string and eye falling through the hole. Justin picked them up when they fell as his feet.
"Genius!" he thought, before he was interrupted by a skeleton's arrow flying through the window and striking him in the body. It was painless, beyond an awareness that something bad was happening to his health, but very worrying.
In a panic, he grabbed the blocklet of wooden planks that had popped out when he mined the hole (fortunately it had landed on his side) and replaced it, sealing himself off from the dangerous world outside once more, and removing the hole in his roof for good measure. Didn't want to risk it. He checked his health. 18 half-hearts, and not healing.
He turned around to his door, and it looked cracked.
"Thud. Thud. Thud," went the fists of the zombies. One was wearing an iron helment, another wearing a golden chestplate.
"Thud," the door went, once more.
If this world was in hard or hardcore mode, the door would not hold.
"Thud," as the wood started to perform a pixelated facsimile of a splinter.
"Thud," and the door broke, and the flood of zombies started pushing their way in. And, beyond the zombies, a creeper.
