Minecraft: The Diamond Chronicles {Book I}

Chapter 4: Research

Basically, the villagers wanted me to a few chores while I stayed in their village: I'd scratch their back, they'd scratch mine. I decided to start with the wall around the village. I grabbed the materials I needed from the blacksmith's and set off - I was thinking two blocks of cobblestone up, two blocks of oak wood on top of that and a stone wall on top of the wood. That should keep the mobs out.

In my spare time, I did plenty of research - I looked through nearly every book in both libraries. One of them was filled with books about simple stuff like building, crafting, mining, gathering food, etc. The other library was my favourite - it had thousands of books that contained information about the more intricate, secretive things, such as potions, portals, mobs and many other intriguing topics; I found out that the crawling, hissing thing that explodes is called a 'creeper', and the tall mobs that teleport are known as 'endermen'.
As I flicked through the foisty pages, slowly beginning to understand this crazy world, I came across a certain page with the title 'Iron Golem' scrawled across the top. It read:

'The Iron Golem is a very useful mob - it can be built with four iron blocks {made with 9 iron ingots}, and a single pumpkin. It can be used to protect villages and its inhabitants from hostile mobs; it does this by throwing the mob high into the air, or by picking up the mob and then slamming it into the ground - this is its most effective attack.'

Underneath the text, there was a realistically drawn diagram of it - the golem's chest was bulky and hunched over, with moss, vines and fungi scattered across it. The chest curved down to a much smaller waist, with short, stubby legs. The arms were like that of an orangutang's: long, lanky and flexible, looking very disproportionate from the rest of its body. Sitting atop the incredibly broad shoulders was an oblong head, the sloping forehead looking very similar to a caveman's, its small eyes almost completely invisible underneath the furrowed monobrow. The mouth was straight and unmoving, partially hidden by a pear-shaped nose.
'It looks just like a villager...face-wise that is,' I giggled.

I re-read the crafting recipe to build the 'Iron Golem': four iron blocks and a pumpkin.
"They can be used to protect villages and its inhabitants," I read aloud.
"That'll be handy!"