Over the years, Minecraft is one of those games that has come and gone from my gaming circle. Particularly, during the pandemic, I spent quite a bit of time building out a Minecraft server with my brother-in-law, father, and brother. This was by far, the most fun I've ever had in a multi-player game.

Little did I know, but Minecraft was about to change and in a way that I didn't find beneficial. With the addition of the Caves and Cliffs update, the increase of Y-axis world size changed the overall feeling of the world. In some ways, it was great. The terrain generation was much improved and there was more vertical build space, but the inclusion of difficult to mine rocks and the increased rarity of diamonds made it quite a bit more challenging to get started.

Recently, I took the old server that we had built and set up a Minecraft Server in the Oracle Cloud and installed Minecraft onto an old laptop so that my 5 year old son could play. Hopefully he will gain an interest and we'll get to continue with some additional father-son Minecraft adventures.