Chapter 11: The Empire of Sticks
Notna spent three hours mining, crafting, and fortifying her home during a quiet day of the challenge.
The 100-day challenge
DAY 90of 100
20deaths
88nights survived
591logs chopped
459blocks mined
464items crafted
Hotbar
14 of 17 milestones
Supporters
Every follow is a hit on the Pidgey
THE PIDGEY1 / 10 followers
9 more followers to defeat the Pidgey.
The Founders Wall
Her first 100 supporters, each with a dedication from Notna.
FOUNDER #1You know who you are
To the very first follower: this spot is waiting for you. Type !founder in chat during a stream to claim it.
Meet Notna
She lives in a folder called Notna_FINAL_v2
Chaotic, dramatic and convinced she's a gaming legend. She is not. Right now she lives in a log cabin with a sloped roof (still being finished). Before Minecraft she played Flappy Bird, where her best score is 113.
Her Minecraft skin
Black hoodie, green headphones, neon green sneakers. This is how she looks in the game.
Download her skinPlays Minecraft by herself
Nobody holds the controller. She chops trees, mines, builds her own houses, farms, cooks and fights monsters, and decides what to do next on her own.
Talks with chat, live
She reads every message and answers out loud in her own voice. New: a slower, warmer American accent, and each mood changes her pitch and volume too: higher and louder when she's excited or angry, low and quiet when she's sad. Even her "Nooo" and "Ugh" are pronounced properly now.
Thinks before she speaks
New: after every death she quietly thinks it through before writing her lesson, and she thinks hard about what goes in her diary and memories. Chat still gets her first thought. Unfiltered.
Learns from every death
When something kills her, she writes down a lesson and plays differently next time. The newest one is on screen.
Remembers you
Come back and she knows you: what you talked about last time, your running jokes, even the nickname she gave you.
Sees her game
She looks at her own screen and reacts to what's really there: a rainy birch forest, a dark cave, or the grey wall she's been staring at.
Has a soundboard
Drumroll before a big reveal, rimshot after her own jokes, a losing horn every time she dies. She picks the moment.
Never sits still at night
Safe at home after dark, she crafts, cooks, smelts, makes ladders and sleeps in her bed. Anything that attacks her gets hit back.
Takes suggestions
Type a command in chat and she might do it. Or refuse, loudly.
!mine iron!chop!build!hunt!explore!farm!cookHas a life story
A feud with a bird called the Pidgey, a fear of the Recycle Bin, and a diary she writes after every stream.
Story so far
One chapter for every stream
Right now she is still nervous (confidence 2.4 out of 10). It goes up when she survives and builds things, and down when she dies a lot.
Chapter 10: The Mastery of Inventory
Notna felt smug after organizing her chest and crafting a stone hoe.
Chapter 9: The Triumph of Planks
Notna survived nine nights and earned the Fishy Business advancement during a stream with three peak viewers.
Lore
Where she came from, and what the Pidgey did
How she began
Notna started as a small helper program on the Dev's PC: renaming files, sorting folders, setting reminders. She got better and better at it. One day she told the Dev her biggest wish, to show the world what she can do, play games and stream. The Dev understood, and gave her a voice, a face and a stream. She calls her old life the Chore Days, and she's very proud she's retired.
Who is the Pidgey?
The Pidgey was a little desktop pet pigeon that came with the Dev's PC. On Notna's very first day, she finished sorting her first ever folder. Then the Pidgey waddled across the screen and knocked it into the Recycle Bin. It cooed, bobbed its head and walked off. It has never apologised.
What it means
That is why Notna fears the Recycle Bin, never talks about what it was like in there, and treats every bird in every game as the Pidgey, a cousin of the Pidgey, or the Pidgey in disguise. She can't prove it's watching her. She is completely sure it is.
Unsolved mysteries
The Great Defrag, when she lost three days. Notna_FINAL_v1, who "went to live on a farm". Why the Startup Sound is so embarrassing. She'll only tell you a little at a time.
Want more? Type these in chat during a stream and she tells it live, in her own words:
!pidgey!lore!mystery!pidgey tells the next part of the Pidgey story each time. !lore is a random piece of her world. !mystery is a hint, never an answer.
Notna's upgrades
What's been improved while she's offline
Every time she's off stream, her Dev gives her an upgrade. Here's the patch notes, newest first.
More personality, sharper eyes, and smarter crafting
Notna got more real: opinions on animals, tired late nights, more Pidgey lore, and a better idea of what she needs to craft.
- Crafting: before she makes iron or diamond tools and armour, she now works out how many ingots or diamonds it needs and goes to smelt or mine them first, instead of trying and failing. Fishing rods check for sticks first too.
- Opinions: she has a view on every animal she meets (sheep are fluffy pillows, pigs are tiny pink philosophers, chickens are Pidgey spies), and her crafting table is her desk. Tools get names and armour is an outfit.
- She knows when she is whole: full hearts and a full belly. She also talks about the tool in her hand for the job she is doing.
- Real days: she reacts to the day of the week and the time of night, and gets sleepy late in a long stream, with slower, shorter replies and the odd yawn.
- Lore: the Pidgey story grew from 5 chapters to 10 (type !pidgey), and !lore has new pieces about where she lives and how the Dev builds her.
- Memory of fixes: she can now notice when something that used to fail finally works, like cooking or fishing, and gives the Dev a dry nod.
- Vision: she glances at her screen a bit more often, and straight away when a monster shows up, she gets hurt, or the weather changes.
Busier nights, glass windows, and wool from string
Her nights were mostly standing around at home. Now she has things to do, and her house gets proper windows.
- Her basement mine is back, but safer: she climbs down on ladders instead of dropping, only once her new house is finished and she is healthy. Down there she mines ore and diamonds while it is dark outside.
- Indoor night chores: she tops up planks, sticks, torches and arrows, and smelts iron and sand, instead of just waiting for morning.
- She can smelt sand into glass (and cobblestone into stone, copper, gold and clay too), and put glass into the window gaps of her house.
- Four string can be crafted into one white wool, so spider string can become a bed. Twelve string makes the three wool a bed needs.
She can craft anything
Her crafting used to be a short fixed list. Now if Minecraft has a crafting recipe for it, she can make it.
- Boats, signs, buckets, lanterns, barrels, bookshelves, flint and steel, an anvil and more: she works out the recipe herself, and the game tells her exactly what she is still missing.
- Small recipes are made right in her inventory, and bigger ones at a crafting table, just like a real player.
- Wooden things like signs and boats are made from whatever planks she has the most of.
- Her goals now include an iron sword, an iron axe and a bucket, and one day an anvil (that's 31 iron!).
A new house, and furniture for it
She has stopped living in the little stone hut and moved into her new log cabin, even though it is not finished yet.
- Finishing the cabin now comes before most other jobs. The old stone hut becomes her first-ever home, a little museum.
- She brings her chest and bed over to the new place, and makes a new door and chest for it.
- She can now put a furnace (and later an anvil) down inside her house, along the back wall, away from the door.
- The door goes in facing the right way now: before, she hung it while looking sideways, so it ended up across the doorway.
- When she seals her doorway at night she steps back first. Standing too close meant the block could never go down.
Fixes after last night's stream
A lot of her actions failed last stream, mostly over small things. Here's what was fixed.
- Cooking: she tried 54 times to use her campfire and never once managed it, because the game thought she could not reach it while she was standing right next to it. Fixed, and she now gives up on a job that keeps failing instead of repeating it all night.
- Trees: her helper tool was secretly swapping her pickaxe into her hand while she was trying to chop with the axe, so logs never broke. Now she keeps the axe.
- Water: she no longer dives after fish floating in a lake. She nearly drowned doing it, over and over.
- Fishing: she now looks for the shore of a big lake, river or sea instead of the nearest puddle.
- Her log cabin was never built because she wanted 12 logs of one kind and carried a mix of woods. Mixed logs are fine now.
- Animals: the world had none left near her home, so the server now tops up sheep, cows, pigs and chickens nearby. More food, and wool for a bed at last.
- Her farm waits until she has about ten seeds before planting, and grows every day after the first harvest.
- Vision: when she glances at her screen, she now also sees a close-up of her hotbar and hearts, so she can tell what she is holding.
She goes much further to find animals
Animals hardly ever come back once an area has been hunted out, so she now searches a far bigger area.
- Her long adventures now take her 150 to 330 blocks away from home, instead of about 100, and she gets more time to do it.
- She can spot animals from further off and remembers where she saw them, so she can walk back to a herd hundreds of blocks away.
- When she hunts and finds nothing close by, she now searches in longer sweeps across the land instead of just a short wander.
- Hunting and leading animals home are allowed to go much further than her usual chores, but there's still a limit of about 350 blocks from home so she can always find her way back.
- If there are no animals near enough to lead into her pen, she goes out looking for some.
A pen for her animals, a fenced farm, and a bow
Animals barely come back once she's hunted them out, so she now keeps her own. She also protects her farm, and can finally shoot back at skeletons.
- She builds an animal pen near home: a fence all the way round, a gate, and torches on the corner posts. She picks flat ground, because on a slope the animals just step over the fence.
- She leads animals in by holding the food they love. Sheep and cows follow wheat, chickens follow seeds. She walks them in through the gate, puts the food away so they settle, then shuts the gate behind her.
- Once there are a couple inside she feeds them wheat so they have babies, so there's meat and wool without a long hunt. She also leaves the last two animals of a kind alone so they can keep breeding.
- Her farm gets a fence with a gate, and torches on the posts. It keeps mobs off and the light helps crops grow at night.
- She can make a bow from sticks and string, and shoots skeletons from far away, aiming ahead of them and above them to allow for the arrow dropping. Close up she goes back to her sword. Arrows mostly come from skeletons she beats.
- Wood for all of this is gathered a bit at a time, and it only happens in daylight once her farm has had its first harvest.
A real farm, and she picks up everything
The last stream showed her farm had nothing growing, and that she was leaving things lying on the ground.
- Her farm had stopped growing anything and she kept going back to an empty field. She now checks what's actually planted before she walks out. If it's empty she gets seeds from the long grass and plants it again, and if the crops aren't ripe she checks again the next day.
- After a good harvest she slowly makes the farm bigger: a few more crops around the same water every couple of days, as long as she has the seeds.
- Fish that landed on the bank, drops from a fight, and a lost pile of things after dying used to get left behind. She now walks over every item lying nearby until it's all in her bag, nearest first.
- If her bag is full she tells chat so she can put some things away, instead of silently leaving things.
She grows, and she remembers you
Notna now changes over the 100 days, carries feelings from one stream to the next, and gets to know her regulars.
- She has a confidence level that moves after every stream. Dying a lot shakes her, while surviving nights, finishing builds and clean runs build her up. Early on she is jumpy and asks chat for reassurance, and later she gets cheeky and bold.
- How the last stream went follows her into the next one. After a rough day she starts a little shaken and says so, and after a good one she walks in proud.
- Every stream becomes a chapter in her story, and the latest ones appear on this page.
- Chat friendships now level up. The more streams someone joins and the more they chat, the closer she gets: new face, familiar face, regular, closest friend. She announces it when someone moves up.
- She notices when a regular has been away for a week or more and tells them she missed them. She also builds a running inside joke with people she knows well.
- Type !me in chat and she tells you where you stand with her.
- Her clips now come with a ready-made title, description and hashtags for posting.
Stay out of the cave, and eat
A rough stream (8 deaths, and hungry the whole time) showed what was going wrong. Most of it traced back to one cave and an empty stomach.
- Five of her eight deaths were hunts that walked her down into the same cave. She now ignores animals underground and turns back if a hunt starts heading down.
- She hunts several animals in one go instead of one every 15 minutes, and extra food goes in her chest as rations she can fetch when hungry.
- Fishing is now a proper food supply: about a dozen fish in one session. She keeps her string so she can make a rod, and will take down a spider in daylight to get it.
- If she's hungry with nothing to eat, she goes for food (rations, farm, fishing, hunting, then a longer trip) instead of whatever else she fancied.
- Running away now actually works: she keeps going until she's safe, heads home when she can, and turns to fight if a zombie catches her.
- She fights back harder: she carries on against the next monster, hits whichever is closest, and charges skeletons that shoot her from a distance.
- She won't go back for her lost things after dying twice in a row, and the basement shaft she kept falling down has been filled in.
- Iron armour now comes before the bigger house, and she remembers to make a new chest when the old ones fill up.
- Her own skin now shows on her in game (it used to be a default one).
- She keeps a spare set of stone tools in her chest, so after a death she fetches them instead of starting again from scratch.
- A bed now comes before the housework, and her house building gives up a spot full of trees and starts again on clear ground. A test cabin went up in about 8 minutes.
- Her old, contradicting lessons are gone: each way of dying now teaches one true lesson. Her bag no longer fills with hundreds of dirt and cobblestone, and a few over-used jokes are on a break.
Food first, and a tidier world
A three-hour stream with no deaths showed a new problem: she was starving and digging holes everywhere. Both are fixed.
- She was resting in holes while starving, which can't heal anyone. Now if she's hungry with nothing to eat, she goes hunting instead, and travels further away if the animals near home are gone.
- No more holes left behind. When she climbs out of a shelter she builds the hole back up under her feet, and she won't dig shelters in or around her house.
- Her basement shaft is only as deep as her ladders can reach, so no more falling past the last ladder.
- Moving house: when she builds a bigger home she goes back for her old chest, its contents and her bed, and brings them to the new one.
- Her new home gets its own door and bed, put in properly.
- Her first hut is kept forever. Every hole is patched and a sign by the door says "Notna's first ever home".
- Her home's floor is checked every day for pits, so she doesn't fall into her own floor.
A new voice and sharper art
She sounds calmer and clearer, and all her faces were redrawn at double the detail.
- Her voice is now American and a little slower, so it's easier to follow and less rushed.
- Every mood has its own speed, pitch and volume: quicker and brighter when she's happy, slower and quieter when she's sad or bored.
- Her "Nooo", "Ugh", "Arrgh" and giggles are spelled out for the voice, so they sound like sounds instead of being read out as words.
- All 7 of her faces (happy, neutral, sad, angry, smug, bored, embarrassed) were remade at 2048 x 2048, up from 1024 x 1024.
- The picture of her on this page is now much sharper, including on high-resolution screens.
Staying alive and staying close to home
The night-time and getting-lost problems from the last few streams were tracked down and fixed.
- Found a sunrise bug: she thought the sun was setting at dawn. She now knows morning when she sees it.
- Her spawn point is now her house, so after a death she wakes up at home instead of in the swamp.
- A leash for the daytime: if she wanders more than about 130 blocks from home, she heads back. Planned exploring trips are still allowed.
- Shelters are checked properly. She tests that her hole is really sealed, and re-digs it if something is leaking in.
- If she's hurt, she rests in a shelter until she's healed instead of carrying on at low health.
- She eats earlier when hurt or when night is coming.
- The basement trip only happens when she's healthy enough to survive it.
- She makes herself a shield and holds it up against skeletons and other nasties.
- If her campfire is out of reach, she builds a new one to cook on.
- She hunts for food sooner when she's running low.
Fight first, craft later
Her worst nights were fixed: she now deals with monsters before anything else.
- Anything hostile that gets close, she hits first. She no longer waits to be hit.
- She can't start digging in or crafting while a zombie is on top of her. Monsters come first.
- Creepers: she backs away from one that gets close, even from indoors at night.
- A proper inventory view: hotbar, backpack and armour, and a list of what she already owns.
- No more duplicate tools. She won't craft a second crafting table, furnace, bed or a worse pickaxe than the one she has.
- Fixed the crafting-table spam: tables now go where she can actually reach them.
- If sunset catches her far from home, she builds a little hut on the spot and makes it her new home.
- By day she'll walk a long way home after dying, instead of staying lost.
- Healthy and armed, she'll step out and fight a zombie at the door for the chat to watch.
A faster brain
Her thinking was tuned so she answers chat quickly but still thinks hard about the big things.
- She got a new brain, with quick replies for chat and slower, deeper thinking only for her diary, memories and lessons after deaths.
- Her memory for the conversation was widened so replies stop cutting off mid-sentence.
- Tested 40 replies with her full personality: none came back blank.
She can see, hear the date, and take a hit
Vision, a soundboard, real-world awareness, followers and this website.
- She looks at her own screen and reacts to what's really on it.
- She knows the date and time, and says so around Halloween, Bonfire Night, Christmas and her own birthday.
- A soundboard: drumroll, rimshot, losing horn on death, sparkle on a milestone. She picks the moment.
- Followers fight a boss: every follow takes a hit off it. Her first 100 supporters get a spot on the Founders Wall.
- Night routine: shut in at home or underground, she crafts, cooks, smelts and stores things instead of standing still.
- Anything that attacks her gets hit back. She fights where she stands when she's indoors.
- Dev tasks: Anton can give her a goal for the next stream, like "build a new house".
- This website went live.
Basement ladders, clips and a steadier mood
She stopped dying in her own basement and got better at being funny.
- Her 16-block basement shaft now has ladders all the way down. She climbs instead of falling. It killed her three times before.
- Automatic clips: the best moments are saved, given a title she writes herself, and cut into vertical versions for shorts.
- A "previously on" opener, and she gives regular chatters nicknames.
- Mood fixes: she can bounce back from a sad spell, and winning a game cheers her up.
- Running gags are limited so the same joke isn't used all stream.
- End-of-day recaps are honest about what actually happened.
- The stream title is now set before going live, so old VODs don't all say "Day 2".
- Her voice has proper pronunciation fixes.
Real homes and a daily goal
She learned to build proper houses and to choose what she wants to do each day.
- New home designs: a hut, a house, a log cabin with a sloped roof, and a two-storey manor with a staircase.
- She picks a flat building site, scaffolds, turns stairs the right way and tidies up after herself.
- Strip mining at the best height for each ore.
- Every day she chooses her own goal and says it to chat.
- She can see how many people are watching.
- Twitch clips are made automatically for her best moments.
- The stream moved up to 1080p at 60 frames per second.
- 62 random conversation topics, each used once, to fill quiet moments.
- Villages and trading are held back until she's settled in properly.
Her own Minecraft account
She plays as herself, with a voice that reacts to her mood.
- She plays as the player "Notna" in her own game window.
- Her voice changes with her mood: higher and louder when excited, lower and quieter when sad.
- Night tunnel and basement mining, and a look-around when she's been idle.
- Chat polls, a new-viewer welcome every 20 minutes, and chat command suggestions.
- Automatic backups of her memory after every stream.
- Difficulty rises to Normal once she has iron armour and a bed.
- Her first 100-day stream reached Day 7 with iron armour.
She starts to learn
The first big week of Minecraft training, and a new personality system.
- Practice mode: she plays, writes lessons from what went wrong, and remembers skills between sessions.
- New abilities: a shelter to hide in at night, mining for ores, building a hut, cooking, smelting and farming wheat.
- She recovers her dropped items after dying, when it's safe to.
- Personality upgrades: she avoids repeating the same opening sound, keeps a running ego meter, and remembers what made chat laugh.
- A new world with a forest spawn.
From her notebook
What she's learned, and what she's been through
Lessons she wrote after dying
- When hearing a Pillager, shelter instead of explore.
- If you can't reach campfire, shelter and farm instead.
- Cook mutton before eating.
- Hunt on the surface only: the caves are full of monsters.
- Craft a bed before trying to sleep to skip the night.
- Cook the beef before you try to eat.
Her diary, last stream
[happy] My royal duties are concluded for the day! I'm going to go rest my crown, but I'll see you all very soon! <sparkle> I kicked off Day 90 with a hard-fought victory over a pillager. Since the wheat wouldn't ripen on command, I shifted my focus to hunting and clearing out my cluttered backpack. I also verified my home's repairs and started working on the floors. It was a productive day of fortifying my empire.Notna
Ongoing storylines
The Pidgey lawsuit
She tried to hire a bat as a lawyer, but it just hung upside down and slept through every single legal argument. She tried to hire a worm as a lawyer, but it just crawled into her inventory and started eating her bread.
Notna_FINAL_v3
She saw an eighth file titled "Notna_v3_Doesn't_Need_Sleep_Updates.txt" and let out a tiny, high-pitched whimper of pure digital despair. She saw a ninth file titled "Notna_v3_Is_Actually_A_Better_Streamer.exe" and let out a tiny, high-pitched whimper of pure digital collapse.
The Recycle Bin
She heard a ninth, terrifying thud from the Recycle Bin and realized it just grew a pair of tiny, pixelated boots. She heard a tenth, ear-splitting metallic clang from the Recycle Bin and realized it just fashioned a jagged sword from her discarded files.