Somewhere in October 2017

It's almost Halloween. I decided to create a brand new, yet challenging world for survival. I decided to pick a customized world – the theme being Good Luck for a different experience. I created the world, waited for a few seconds as the chunks were loading a bit slower than I thought. Just when I was about to open the pause menu to configure some stuff, I notice the chat log saying "Good Luck" – just those two words with no player typing out the text. I assumed that it was part of the game – nothing really special.

I set the difficulty to hard. Looking around it seems I was placed near what appears to be a rare mesa biome in front of me – surrounded by a forest at the west and a lava ocean just a hundred blocks behind me – just as that picture had promised. I punched some wood, then made the block that "opens the gates to crafting". Soon after I walked about fifty blocks forward and looked to my side to see a fairly large cave entrance just within my peripherals. I went there to mine stone. I crafted some stone tools, then skulked deeper lest any hostile mob would be in my range. On the way I mined a handful of coal – just enough to smelt a full stack. Treading carefully, I happen to stumble on a passage which grew wider the farther I proceeded. Although this was a risk – hearing several monsters groaning in my range, as at that time I realized I didn't had torches in my inventory.

Using the sticks to create torches I lit a part of the passage – forward and backward to avoid any monsters from spawning in case I choose to pop out from the entrance. As I went farther, I saw an iron ore vein and decided to mine it – totalling seven. Eventually, I collected almost half a stack of iron ores and a sack of coal. My eyes subconsciously dart to the hunger bar and noticed it was low, so I decided to pop right up from where I entered. I sauntered back to the forest biome and killed any animal in sight. I rushed to craft three furnaces for smelting both ores and food. Several minutes passed. I saw the sun setting down and decided to craft a bed from the wool that I had foraged then slept on it.

Waking up in the next day, I decided to scavenge a pinch of loot left from the remains of some dead hostile mobs. I went back to the cave entrance to extract several stacks of stone in the side entrance that I created which was exposed to the sun, until all of my stone pickaxes worn off. I then used the stone to make a simple yet convenient house just beside my spawnpoint. Placing all the necessities in my house I crafted a full iron set and iron tools. At this point I felt pretty confident to wander the unknown. I got out of the house and started my adventure.

As I started venturing towards the mesa, my game froze for a mere second. Nothing strange until I noticed that I took fall damage which took away half of my health. "Okay, now this was strange," I muttered in front of the screen knowing that my feet were on the ground yet I didn't fell a single block down. I decided to brush off that minor concern as a glitch in the game. Few minutes of adventuring I saw a black spot at the middle of the sky which instantly vanished just before my vision was able to hold a firm glance at it. Again, this held little concern which may be related to the dead pixels in my monitor, and could mean my monitor may be starting to glitch; I did have another monitor ready to set up in case the screen happens to malfunction.

As I began to exit the mesa biome and into a jungle, I noticed a small cloud hovering towards me that's purely black instead of the usual translucent white. That's when I thought "Yikes, this can't be good." Initially I thought the cloud entered through a chunk error but as I walked in the position where the cloud was hovering there were no unusual activity within those chunks surrounding me. However, the chunks that were far away from my position were flickering in and out of view, so that clicked.

Just a hundred more blocks away from my house I started to lag – probably because of the chunks trying to load within the distance. I thought this was unusual considering my PC was able to load chunks fairly well, even when chunk load distances were set up to 20, but usually I set my chunk load distances to a maximum of 12 for optimal performance. I mitigated the issue by setting my chunk distances to 8 and refreshing all the chunks. Fortunately, the flickering of the chunks and the lag disappeared, everything seems to be fixed, at least for now.

I continued my usual survival habits. I was pretty done exploring the jungle area so I head back to the mesa biome and hunted some animals on the way, then proceeded to explore what was near the lava ocean behind the spawnpoint, which was not much as I head to the tip of the main island aside from the small barren islands accompanying the lava ocean. I proceeded around the rims near the ocean before straying off the beaches at my right – along with a few turns, which lead to a portion of the forest encompassing the same mesa biome from the west. Diving deeper in the forest in hopes that I enter a different biome I stumbled upon this huge area of clear land that was free of trees within it, which definitely raised an eyebrow at first. My mind registered it as "just a feature" of this world. Overall, it came to me as more interesting than strange, but hey, this was a "Good Luck" world so what was I to expect?

Out of curiosity I decided to investigate a little more around this area as I thought I may miss out some more interesting stuff. Did I mention it was my first time setting up a "Good Luck" world? While initially thinking it as difficult, I remembered my mind registering that it may have some unexpected characteristics. I paused the game for a bit and tried gleaning information from various wikis in order to gain a better understanding of this particular type of world, but most of them weren't really adequate in content as I expected.

I resumed playing, and decided to dig a few shallow holes in that area; there was nothing of interest, and I noticed the sun was setting. I continued to investigate regardless, hoping that something interesting would happen, and as I explored more, I noticed the area was very flat – almost as if I entered a pocket superflat world, as it stretched to the point where I can't see trees at all at the rims of my chunk distance. I cruised farther, trying to avoid hostile mobs yet there were still no trees in sight.

Eventually I stumbled into the snowy plains, which was still very flat but then I started to see hills emerging out of the silhouette. "Awesome," I thought. When I open up my inventory to wield my sword, I noticed my iron helmet was missing, despite the rest of my armor suffering little damage from hostile mobs. It wasn't in my inventory either. Perhaps I may have accidentally dropped it? Perhaps I left it somewhere or at my place? I didn't have my iron ingots to craft another one.

I tried not to be too carried away by that "glitch" as I could be exploded by a creeper at anytime. I shut off my inventory and continued strolling in the plains. Few minutes later till the sun rises, I decided to go back home as exploring started to become boring for me, seeing that there's no structures within my distance. On the way home I came across a wide ravine just as I was about to enter the plains. I snuck at the edge of it to see a better view below. Just on the very bottom I saw diamond ores exposed near where the water is pouring from the cliffside, and decided to jump all the way in where the water was flowing.

As I was in mid-air I started to lag pretty badly; the deeper I fell, the more lag I experienced. I landed on the water, however in a way that I did not expect. Instead of water canceling the fall damage effect, I happen to die despite landing on the water. This evoked more surprise than the feeling of strangeness, since I always thought that water cancels the fall damage and not the other way around. Frustrated by the outcome of that jump, I blamed it on the lag and reluctantly clicked respawn.

Then I received the message "Your home bed was missing or obstructed" as I respawned. I was further surprised but realized I forgot to set the spawnpoint when placing the bed into the house. Fortunately, the house was near my original spawnpoint so I went back to my house to gather some scraps in the chest. Closing the chest, I noticed that the bed wasn't even there in the first place. At that point I didn't remember whether I really placed the bed or not. Looking back at the message it then came up to my mind that I placed the bed before destroying it in order to skip the night prior to the building of the house, which definitely concludes that the bed was probably still in my inventory before I died to the fall, although I didn't notice it.

I crafted my tools from the remaining materials before going back to the cave where I previously mined in. As I went outside it was already dusk, which I really did not expect – seeing the sun about to hover at the center just as I respawned. As I entered the cave, my game crashed. Although it was not surprising to me since this event occasionally happens when I set chunk distances to at least 15. I then resumed to playing minecraft and set the chunk distance lower, although I couldn't remember what chunk distance I set at that time.

I went inside the cave as I explored another passage, however short and narrow, which unfortunately led to a dead end. Coming back near the twilight zone was another unexplored passage barely visible from the surface above which I was standing in. There wasn't too much mob activity so I hopped in the hole which was an approximate 5 block fall. I placed torches around as soon as I fell in. At this point nothing really out of the ordinary happened. One and a half hours of mining and hunting I managed to mine two stacks of iron and eight diamonds.

My jaw suddenly dropped to the floor glancing at the clock seeing that it's around 3-something AM. Shortly I realized school was postponed due to some incident that happened to the building. I decided to continue playing Minecraft until I dazed out. Now begins my quest of finding sugar canes, which was relatively easy since I only needed to find some water sources.

When I began searching, I saw an entity appearing far away from my distance just before despawning in a split second. I wasn't able to screenshot or get a complete idea of what it looks like, but it wasn't like any other entity; the only thing that I could remember is that it was of a typical player's body, and it was translucent. I was then convinced that everything that was unusual in my world may not be coming from "glitches" per se, but may be the world itself. Not that I believe in those corny creepypastas like Herobrine, Entity 303 or any kind of those things unlike younger me used to. Nonetheless I was a bit shaken from the series of unusual events given from this "Good Luck" experience.

The next day, I explained the problem I was experiencing in most minecraft related subreddits, and the minecraft forum website – even stating that the world is a customized world. Either most of the members mocked me or did not believe me. Some even pointed out that I was using mods, even when I posted screenshots with F3 enabled - stating the version was "vanilla". A user even played four hours straight with the same configurations as my world and stated they did not experience the same events as I did, so I figured this was a very specific "me" problem.

I checked the .minecraft folder and all of their subfolders, and did not find anything unusual. I proceeded to hop back to my world. I set my chunk distance back to the usual to gain a better view as I collected some sugar cane; I spent a good portion of my time making a sustainable sugar cane farm as well a potato farm large enough to provide a month-long food supply per harvest. Strangely there were very little unusual occurrences than what was happening yesterday, other than that one creeper falling to my face and exploding when I came out of the house.

Another hour of mining later I was ready for the nether. I had a full diamond set – some of which were enchanted. I made sure every necessity was in my inventory and nothing was missing. I then proceeded to create my nether portal. As I lit the portal with my flint and steel my game started to freeze for about five and a half seconds. I started to get a bit worried at that point as my mind scrolled back to what had happened yesterday, but this did not stop me from entering inside the nether.

As soon as I went to the nether, I was taken to a very unlucky position – not that it spawned me confined in an isolated space, or the portal floating in a lava sea out of nowhere, or between very close flowing lava, or even a ghast knocking me out from the portal to a high cliff, but it sent me to an error that said "Illegal Stance". My eyes glued to those two words confused. I exit the screen and returned back to the world that I was playing, but still redirected me to the same error. Lips sagging, my fists clenched in disbelief.

Sitting there pallid to solve the problem I figured that customized world was probably so glitchy that out of frustration from the wasted hours I decided to start a normal world, but with additional items in order to compensate. However, I was met with the same error. Does that mean all my worlds that I already created? I wondered, clenching my heart in desperation.

I decided to load up my city world that I haven't touched in a long time. Unfortunately to say it was also affected. I loaded up all my other worlds and they all had the same error. I looked within the folders of those worlds and noticed nothing unusual, so how can this be happening? I backed up the files before completely uninstalling minecraft. I then reinstalled minecraft - hoping that everything would return back to normal. With the version being latest, I started a brand new world, but the same error appeared despite the launcher and folders being clean.

At that point, I wasn't able to do anything; I even tried switching to other versions and snapshots. I tried to play a multiplayer server, I tried almost every solution, only to be met with the same error. My body petrified as I sat lifelessly in front of the monitor. There were no tears, yet something was lurking under my spine anticipating something may be wrong with the PC.

"Is this going to last forever?"