Let's Mine Diamonds
Depending on which plugins you applied, Minecraft could play out any number of ways—but on the survival server that was Rena World, the path to getting stronger was crystal clear.
A full set of diamond gear, and then strengthening that gear through enchantments.
Higher-tier equipment than diamond would eventually appear on the server, but that was still a long way off. For the immediate reality, this was how things stood.
Yes. In the end, diamonds were the core of everything.
Making money meant diamonds. Getting stronger meant diamonds.
There was a reason Diamond CK had exploded in popularity across Rena World.
There had been a time when everyone went absolutely feral mining nothing but diamonds.
Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap has donated 5 Candies!
"First to mine a diamond on the server — 1,000 Candy mission, let's go"
"Ahh~ President! I'll mine them with my life on the line. Loyalty! Loyalty!"
As I pulled overwhelmingly ahead from the server's earliest stages, the viewers were starting to sink into the stream for real. It wasn't just my existing room regulars anymore—the hardcore competitive types were slowly latching on.
Missions began stacking up, quiet and unprompted.
Even without me saying a word, my loyal manager Je-yuk-sam-kki was already logging the mission contents on his own.
Good. So the missions I'd received so far were…
1. Get 3 kills with a wooden axe — 500 Candies
2. Drop a Rena Coin on the ground — 300 Candies
3. Scoop up lava and dump it on Mayo — 500 Candies
4. First on the server to mine a diamond — 1,000 Candies
Wait. Why were the mission contents like this?
Anyway, the law of toxic-viewer conservation—that as the audience grows, the toxic ones grow right along with it—had never been wrong.
Though number three was maybe a little tempting?
"Did you guys know? Diamonds spawn from Y-coordinate 16 all the way down to -64, but among those depths, they drop best from -54 and below. That's a tip. A tip."
All the work I'd put in was finally drawing real attention and pulling in buzz. On top of that, none of the Decrescendo members had logged in today, so even the server's floating audience was concentrating on me.
Before I knew it, the viewer count had broken past 1,800.
The virtual boom had cooled off considerably through that flat November stretch, and a solo number like this was something I hadn't seen in the virtual tab in a long, long time.
"For everyone who just got here, let me show you one more time. Behold—the First Blade of Rena, Seo-a, makes her entrance!"
Shing—!
With a special effect, my virtual avatar drew a Minecraft diamond sword.
The newly arrived viewers gasped in wonder.
Heh. For now, this is a spectacle you can only see in my room.
This is the technical power of virtual streaming, people.
"……."
Already, the ore-roaches were spawning in my room.
The suffix "-roach" had originally started as a derogatory jab meaning cockroach, but in Rena World it had settled into something almost everyday. If you loved meetings, you were a meet-roach. If you loved mining, an ore-roach. If you loved building, a build-roach—that kind of classification.
If I had to pick the most maniacal and terrifying of the bunch, it would be the build-roaches, who would torch the chat over the tiniest architectural mistake. But in sheer frequency of breathing down your neck, the ore-roaches were no joke either.
"Yes, yes, I'll work hard. Ore-roach-nims. So please, ease your wrath."
I swung my stone pickaxe diligently, digging down deeper and deeper. I mined iron with real effort, smelted it into iron ingots, and even crafted two iron pickaxes—but for now I had to conserve them.
Diamond ore wasn't something you stumbled on easily, and even when you did find it, you couldn't mine it without an iron pickaxe.
So the real tip for saving durability was to dig dirt and stone with the stone pickaxe, and only swap to the iron one the moment you spotted diamond ore.
Right now I'm living this pathetic, scrap-saving life—but the second I craft a diamond pickaxe and slap Mending on it, that's a full life turnaround.
Mending was the single most important enchantment in Rena World.
The enchantment repaired the durability of the gear it was applied to whenever you gained experience points.
In Minecraft, you could earn experience from almost every action—so once you put Mending on a piece of gear, you could use it nearly infinitely without ever worrying about durability.
Of every enchantment in the game, it was the absolute essential.
In the early days of Rena World, putting Mending on every piece of gear had even been treated as a kind of "graduation."
It's definitely not easy, though. To get a Mending book in Rena World, your only options are buying a Mending gacha book from a village secret-shop NPC, or fishing for one.
Nobody used those methods now, so people might not know—but both had been infamous.
The Mending gacha book had roughly a 2.5% jackpot rate and cost 50,000 Rena per attempt, which was a huge reason early Mending books had a market price of two million Rena.
And fishing for a Mending book was pure luck. There had even been a Mending-fishing contest with ten streamers, and it had taken twelve hours.
Do the math. Ten people. Twelve hours.
The hilarious part was that some people would just fish for thirty minutes and pull a Mending book on the first try.
It was, quite literally, a luck-based garbage game.
When you think about it, it's kind of funny. An item worth a mere two million Rena got treated like royalty—even the big-corp streamers were obsessed with Mending books in the early days.
In practice, the Mending book had been the endgame item that ruled early Rena World.
The drop rate was low, but the real point was that demand was enormous.
Just count the number of equipment slots in Minecraft.
Helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots, sword, trident, elytra, axe, bow, shield, pickaxe, fishing rod, hoe, shovel—and so on.
Even if you set aside lower-priority pieces like the shield, axe, and bow, the thought of putting Mending on everything else was already enough to make your head spin.
But later on it came out that there were ways around it. The Mending market price dropped by half… and then even lower than that.
That was still a long way off, though.
And I had no intention of leaking that information this early.
If I did, the future I knew and the story itself would diverge far too much.
The good intel had to be locked away tight and monopolized.
So for now—just mine diamonds hard.
"……."
Soothing the rampaging ore-roaches, I finally reached Y-coordinate -54.
From here on, this was a depth where diamonds dropped relatively well.
But there was one thing you had to watch for—one of Minecraft's iron laws.
You had to remember that lava almost always lurked near diamonds.
How many Minecraft newbies had vanished into lava while mining diamonds and lost their lives?
And it wasn't just newbies who died.
The terror of lava came crashing down the second you went, Ah—.
Looking away for a moment, or rushing in a hurry—deaths like that were common.
And those streamer clip videos would go viral and brand them with a permanent "trash-tier" image.
Come to think of it, Lucy was pretty trash-tier herself.
She liked variety games, but she'd never claimed to be good at them.
Lucy's game sense wasn't quite at the level of hopeless, but it was a little low.
Especially every time she played League before the regression—it had been a stress test for my molars.
Ugh. Just imagining it made my teeth grind.
That was the first time I'd almost thrown a log and rage-quit her stream.
"Huh?"
I'd been mining in a blank, empty-headed state when the chat window suddenly erupted into chaos.
I jolted and whipped my head around, scanning every direction.
Wait—where?
Front, back, side? Had I missed a diamond somewhere?
I scrambled around hunting for it—and then the entire chat started howling with laughter.
Looking at it now, they'd all baited me as a group.
"……."
These toxic ore-roach bastards.
Just wait. The second a real diamond shows up, every last one of you is getting purged.
Through the flood of chat messages, the darkness of the underground only grew deeper.