Beyond the Board: Interview with CaveL1ghter

Hello everyone and welcome back to this new edition of Beyond the Board, where we sit down with members of the bingo community and discuss their games and discover more of their world!

Today’s Beyond the Board features CaveL1ghter from the Minecraft community – in honour of the game’s 1.0 11th anniversary! He has been featured in several marathons in the past, with games including not just Minecraft but Road Trip Adventure as well, so this is to say, he is definitely a bingo regular!

If you are interested in being featured on a future edition, then do not hesitate to contact either Pikastroff#4262 or Floha258#1968 on our Discord server. Enjoy!

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Pikastroff: Hello everyone, welcome back to this new edition of Beyond the Board, where we invite runners to talk about their bingo games. So it’s been a while since we’ve had our last Beyond the Board, but here we are again, with one which is definitely exciting and for a great occasion, which is for Minecraft, for the occasion of the 1.0’s 11th anniversary. So here we have CaveL1ghter who is a regular here at Bingothon. I think a lot of you will know who CaveL1ghter is because of being a regular, but just in case, would you like to introduce yourself?

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, so I’m CaveL1ghter. I’ve been part of Bingothon – well, I’ve been taking part in Bingothon  since, uh, I think Winter 2019 was my first, with Road Trip Adventure obviously, which has been a mainstay since then. I do a bit of speedrunning, I do programming, art, I do music, remixes and other stuff, and my main speed game, actually, isn’t really Minecraft, it’s Road Trip Adventure which I mentioned before. I’ve spent a lot of time with the community over there and sort of pushing… Trying to push some parts of that game forwards as well as sort of reverse engineering it and stuff. Yeah, Minecraft is obviously also a very big game for me. It’s very important. 

Pikastroff: Alright, awesome, so how have you gotten into Minecraft speedrunning then? 

CaveL1ghter: Minecraft for me [has] been part of my life since about 10 years now I think, so that’s like half my life, basically. I don’t really do that much Minecraft speedrunning these days actually, but in 2020 there was a surge in Minecraft speedrunning. It sort of took off quite a bit and started reaching a mainstream of people who don’t normally have that much interest in speedrunning. Like there were two streamers, for example, two massive, really well known streamers on Twitch who were fighting each other to see who could get the best time. All of this sort of drumming up about it made me think, yeah, I like speedrunning, I do it from time to time, I’ve speedrun a fair amount of different games. And so I thought I’m going to try speedrunning Minecraft, and we’ll see how it goes, just as a little thing for fun. I didn’t actually end up submitting any of my times to the board ’cause they weren’t that amazing. But it was just really fun to do ’cause it was my favourite game. And yeah, that’s how I got into Minecraft speedrunning.

Pikastroff: Actually, that’s an interesting point that I didn’t know about which is rather interesting. You mentioned that there was a surge in speedrunning with it in 2020, so is there anything specific that brought that surge? I mean, in general I know there’s been obviously a lot of surge in speedrunning due to the pandemic at the time, but outside of that, was there any specific reason for the surge in Minecraft speedrunning? 

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, it was a combination of a lot of things. There was obviously the pandemic, it’s a pretty big one. I think Minecraft itself has been on sort of waves of resurgence in recent years. There were quite a few, you know, Youtubers who were doing speedrun-adjacent content, I guess you could say. I can’t remember when it happened, but there was the Dream Cheating Scandal that sort of surged a bit of interest in it as well, as well as the two streamers I mentioned before, namely, I think XQC and Forsen. They were sort of duking it out and they have huge audiences and that reached a lot of people.

Pikastroff: I see. Yeah it can be a combination of factors.

Especially as Minecraft was such an important game to you, I guess I’m not sure if it can really come down to one single aspect, but anyway, is there still a favourite aspect of Minecraft that you can think of, and why would it be so? 

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, the initial thing that sort of hooked me on Minecraft, I think, when I was a lot younger was the sandbox aspect. Obviously, the freedom to do basically whatever you want in the world given its constrictions and limitations. It’s so open and abstract that you can just build and do whatever the hell you want with it. And I think that as a young creative kid that really sort of sparked something in me like “wow, I have this free open world to do whatever the hell I want with it”. Obviously another key aspect which sort of forms what Minecraft is, is the RNG and how every world you generate is completely different and has a completely different landscape. So it’s got this endless replayability value to it.

Pikastroff: And that’s something that’s definitely going to come up in more details later in this interview, but I think it’s interesting then how those concepts can then apply to the speedrunning aspects of this game. Like especially when it comes to the RNG and whatnot. Do you think you feel the same way when it comes to the speedrunning aspects of it?

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, it’s definitely a huge thing as doing whatever you can to try and minimise the amount of impact that RNG has on the game, and it leads to some really interesting tricks to try and circumvent the RNG in the randomness of the game that is inherent to its design.

Pikastroff: Alright, cool. And so then, how did you get into Minecraft bingos then? I guess you already had obviously the introduction to bingos via Road Trip Adventure of course, but then did that like stem from that then?

CaveL1ghter: Yeah it was from Road Trip Adventure, obviously. Actually the reason I was introduced to Road Trip Adventure bingos was because I think tr1cks brought it up in the Road Trip Adventure Discord, he was like “hey, there’s this event, Bingothon, would you guys like to showcase your game here?”, and that sort of caught my eye. I was like “oh, this seems pretty cool”, so I tried out bingos through Road Trip Adventure and then eventually, there was one year, I was thinking I want to do something else that Bingothon as well ’cause obviously, doing Road Trip Adventure is fun, but having it be the only thing I do year after year gets a bit stale. So I was thinking “how could I spice it up a bit?” and the one game that I know like the back of my hand basically would be Minecraft. I know so many detailed things about it that it just made sense with Minecraft, to do it for a bingo. 

Pikastroff: Hmm, that makes sense, yeah. Especially with the open nature of Minecraft, I guess there’s all these new ideas that you can implement, which is something we might discuss a bit later on. But yeah, I didn’t know actually that you even got started with bingos, just because tr1cks turned up in the server, that’s actually a pretty cool fact!

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, that’s the first thing that started me on doing bingos, it was actually him advertising Bingothon.

Pikastroff: Nice! All right then, it might stem, a bit from what you said earlier about Minecraft speedrunning, but what is it that you think makes Minecraft bingos fun?

CaveL1ghter: Well, there’s a lot of things that make Minecraft bingos especially interesting and fun. I mean one of the cool things about it is like all the locations to explore. There’s so many different biomes and every now and then you find a really unique world generation feature that just is cool to look at and it’s cool to come across and you don’t really get that with a lot of other bingos, where the game world is static. Obviously it’s the same every time. So it’s really cool to sort of explore the world and figure things out and find cool, unique things to that world in particular. There’s obviously plenty of variety. There’s so many different things to do and see in the game that there’s like tons of different bingo goals you can get as well. And the RNG obviously always adds a fun sense of chaos. Which is great. 

Pikastroff: Hmm yeah, it adds an element of surprise, on top of what the bingo board can bring.

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, of course.

Pikastroff: Uhm, so then in what do you think Microsoft bingos are the most challenging or engaging, is it in routing or in execution? Or is it in anything else? 

CaveL1ghter: That’s a tough one because the thing about the routing is that the routing is very difficult, obviously because there’s so much that can go wrong. But at the same time, because there’s so much that can suddenly happen, good or bad, it can be very flexible. So suddenly, like midway through your bingo session, you could suddenly have like “oh I got this item that’s really rare, but I need this for this goal. Maybe I can now do this row instead”, and suddenly your route changes all of a sudden, just because you found this rare item. I’d say the most engaging part throughout an entire bingo run would be specifically getting yourself out of sticky situations.If you have an unforeseen issue or mistake or whatever, or you end up in some place that you didn’t expect to be is trying to figure out like what’s the most efficient or the most clever way that they can get out of the situation and sort of get me back on track to finish the bingo.

Pikastroff: Yeah, it’s true, and that should bring that up because I guess with the nature of Minecraft as a whole, the way you would even approach bingo might not be the same as you would do it in most other games and so I guess it really emphasises even more on one particular skill that you have to develop with bingos. I mean, in general you know with all of that, the ability to adapt to things. Does that make sense?

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, and that’s an important part of doing Minecraft bingo, adapting to whatever situation you end up in.

Pikastroff: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting because the way the game is structured really, really helps emphasise on that, really. And, you know, in terms of things that you might need to adapt with, I guess sometimes in speedrunning, obviously you have tricks or glitches that you’ll need to do, and as such, are there any tricks or glitches that are not often seen in normal speedruns of Minecraft that are useful in bingos, and if so, which would they be? And why?

CaveL1ghter: The thing is, that’s really tough because most of the tricks that can be useful in bingos are kind of also used in speedrunning, but the thing about it is that like a lot of tricks in speedrunning, I only used for one very specific thing in the speedrun, ’cause there’s like a sort of flow chart to speedruns, where you’re in one specific situation, there’s a very clear next step to do, you know? Whereas in bingos, obviously there’s so many other things that you explore and do in the game compared to speedruns that you could use those same tricks to do completely different things. Things like the F3 Scanning Trick, for example. There’s a trick where you can scan for very specific things like chests or Monster Spawners, using the debug tools in the game and in bingo, you can use that to find even more different structures that you wouldn’t normally need to find in speedrunning, and I think that can be quite interesting and quite useful. There’s a couple other things, like for example if you need to find diamonds, which can happen in a bingo, there’s some goals that require you to do so. You don’t have to dig for diamonds like you would in a normal playthrough. You could use treasure maps for example. They lead you to chests buried in the ground that can sometimes contain diamonds, which is a very efficient and easy way of finding them. Alternatively there’s also huge ravines under the ocean, so if you have an ocean you can go into one of those ravines that lead you really deep underground and there should be diamonds all the way down there. Uhm… Although I don’t know if that’s very effective in the newer versions, because obviously the caves go so much deeper than they used to. I’d have to test that out again… Uhm, what else? Oh yeah, you can use dolphins as well. I guess that it can be sometimes used in speedrunning, but it is more common in bingos to use dolphins to essentially lead you to treasure. I think you have to give them a fish or something and they will have you follow them to a nearby chest with some ruins or shipwreck or something like that. And one last thing that I think is useful in bingo that you don’t really ever see in speedruns is the biome temperature system. So, biomes tend to have similar climates next to each other, so you won’t find a desert next to a snow biome for example. If you’re looking for a very specific biome in the bingo, you can sort of weave your way through biomes that have similar climates and you will have a higher chance of eventually finding that. So if you’re looking for a jungle, it’s quite warm, it’s quite wet. So you want to look for similar things like swamps or something else warm like a savanna, for example.

Pikastroff: Alright, I see. Yeah, I guess it makes sense that a lot of things might crossover, especially considering the open nature of Minecraft makes that the openness also applies not just to bingos, but to just general speedrunning as well and so some of the tricks may or may not be needed. It’s interesting, although it’s more about speedrunning that you describe it more like a flow chart, which I guess will be the flow chart of the actions we need to do because I guess it’s not as easy to do something like a precise routing for a game like Minecraft, even when doing normal speedrun categories. 

So that one might be a bit of an amalgamation of a lot of stuff you’ve already mentioned because we’ve talked a lot about the openness of Minecraft and I think this one can be specific about the RNG. How does the seed generation of Minecraft affect bingos?

CaveL1ghter: It affects it quite a lot. If something just happens to be far away that needs to be on the bingo card, then it could take hours longer than it would otherwise. So it’s very difficult to predict because if you just get a really unlucky seed, it’s basically impossible to finish the bingo properly within the allotted time. At the same time though, because the world is so endlessly big, everything is theoretically always achievable. You can always complete a bingo card, but the RNG only affects the amount of time that it would take to complete that bingo card, for example. To avoid this to some extent I actually usually curate my bingo cards before I do a Bingothon event, for example, because for a marathon obviously if you’re doing like a blackout bingo for example, and the card has some stuff on it that’s possibly far away in whatever seed you get dealt, it’s not really much you can do about it, and you basically can’t finish the run in the marathon. So usually I curate the cards beforehand to try and avoid some of that, but it still happens from time to time. That’s simply part of the game.

Pikastroff: So what is it then that you think makes a tough seed compared to an easier seed? 

CaveL1ghter: Uh, The thing is that really heavily depends on the card, because sometimes the cards have things like “find a jungle biome”, but if the seed doesn’t have a jungle biome within like 10,000 blocks of spawn, there’s not really much you can do about that, and that can just happen, because that’s the way the game is generated.

Pikastroff: Yeah, so I guess it’s all really a lot of it will be about the synergy between what the bingo card contains and what the game actually provides you, and sometimes it just doesn’t match at all. And in that case you just don’t have the time. [Laughs]

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, it makes it very hard to predict.

Pikastroff: Alright cool. So the next thing I wanted to ask about… It’s kind of in relation to a particular category that you’ve submitted multiple times at Bingothon. It was back in Winter 2021 and I believe Summer 2022 as well is Scout and Route bingo, which I thought was an interesting way to make the bingo card work for for the game, and as such this this made me curious about how does Minecraft’s “endlessness” create room for creativity when it comes to creating bingo categories, do you think?

CaveL1ghter: The thing is, obviously it’s basically an endless possibility for different categories and formats in Minecraft because it’s so open you can do whatever the hell you want with it. You could even use mods to perhaps enhance the experience or give it more depth. So it’s like an unending tunnel of things that you could potentially come up with for Minecraft, it it is quite difficult though to plan them out and make them work smoothly because there’s so many things that you have to account for because there’s so many different things that can happen in Minecraft that it takes a lot of planning and ideas to sort of hone in the format or category that you want to create. And yeah, you mentioned obviously Scout and Route. Scout and Route was actually, in my case, I got it from a speedrun category that exists. I got the idea initially from that category, and I don’t know how I initially came across it, but I just saw it on speedrun.com and I thought “this is a really cool idea actually”, and it gave me the idea to apply it to a bingo format, because obviously that sort of mitigates the impact of RNG on a lot of runs while still keeping them fresh enough, because the steed is still random, but it just helped you sort of find some of that stuff that might be just impossible to find in in a normal bingo run.

Pikastroff: I was just thinking, in case there’s anyone here who’s not familiar with what Scout and Route is, could you do  a brief summary of what it is?

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, so Scout and Route, in the case of the bingo runs that I did.. There’s a grace period, I guess you could call it where for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, however long you want to set it, you are allowed to enable cheats and go into spectator mode to basically use the commands in-game, the cheats in-game as well as the spectator mode features to find whatever you want to find and note it down before you begin the bingo run. So you could look at the bingo card and say “I need this, this and this”, and these are probably really hard to find, so you go around using commands and cheats and whatever to try and find out where can I find these things that would normally be really hard to find in the world? And then you basically note them all down and then when the time is up you start the run and you can use your notes to sort of more easily find things in the run.

Pikastroff: Alright cool, thank you. So now we’re going to move onward questions that are more geared towards the goals themselves. So for you, what is it that constitutes a fun and engaging goal versus one that you think might need some rebalancing?

CaveL1ghter: Yeah so some of the achievements, or I guess they’ve renamed the achievements in Minecraft to Advancements… Some of the goals that involve those can be very interesting. There’s some really specific stuff like “hit a target with an arrow from a certain distance”, for example. That is quite fun and interesting to sort of figure out mid bingo “how am I going to get the target” for example, “where am I going to get the arrows from?”, “where am I going to get the bow from?”, “how am I going to set up this distance so that I can hit the advancement in the first place?”. But at the same time some of them are really convoluted, and take an absurdly long time to get and require you to go into real late game stuff, even after the theoretical end of the game where the credit scene shows up. Those goals, specifically the Advancement goals can be really hit or miss I think for bingo. Well, another thing I think that’s always sort of fun to do is the exploration goals, like “find a certain biome”, or “find a certain structure” or whatever, because it’s always chill to sort of go around the place and just explore and see what the world is like. But sometimes obviously they can also be quite RNG-heavy, so it’s always a sort of double-edged sword with a lot of the goals.

Pikastroff: I guess with that last one it can kind of remind you of just playing the game casually, of discovering the world you generated, because it really helps you focus on exploring the world and all those wonderful values that you have with the game. Coming back to what you said about the advancement goals, is the problem, especially with the late game ones, with the idea that there’s perhaps too many prerequisites?

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, definitely for some of them. Also, some of them are just very RNG-heavy as well, but I guess the issue is that basically every advancement has been turned into a goal for the bingo cards because it’s just, obviously, a really easy thing to do. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, this game has an achievement system, we might as well just turn all of these achievements into bigger goals’. But some of them just don’t really work, especially in a marathon format. So yeah, it’s a bit tough.

Pikastroff: So it’s going to be one of those times where you’d create the card to make sure you don’t have such late-game goals with it. 

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, there’s always certain very specific goals that I look for that I’m like, yeah, no, I’m gonna rather stay away from those.

Pikastroff: Do you have any examples? 

CaveL1ghter: There’s so many of them, it’s actually hard to think of [examples]. There’s one where you have to get a full set of Netherite armour. That takes… because getting one piece of Netherite is super rare, or that you find right at the bottom of the Nether and it takes absurd amounts of script mining to find just one piece of it. And then you need to get a full set of Diamond Armour and then convert that all into the Netherite armour using this really really rare material and it could take days in a like a normal casual playthrough, let alone in a bingo run. So that one, for example, is just absurd. 

Pikastroff: Ouch! [Laughs]. So on the flip side, we already kind of mentioned the goal that you like, for instance, the ones where you just explore the world and whatnot, where you want to find specific biomes or specific chapters. But in general, do you have any other particular favourite goals that you see and you’re like, yes, that’s good, I like having that? 

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, a good one is always like defeating the Ender Dragon for example, or something that requires you to defeat the Ender Dragon, because then it’s fun, ’cause then you can do like the whole speedrun strat, where you try and find a stronghold, or you even do the speedrun strats getting to the Nether and finding the Fortress, killing the blazes blah blah blah… going through the whole speedrun route, all while doing a bingo. Always fun to go through that ’cause it’s an engaging thing to do. Also, ones that require diamonds are surprisingly fun because despite diamonds… obviously, usually in a casual playthrough, it’s a pain to find them… there’s actually so many different interesting ways that you can go about finding diamonds. Like I mentioned earlier, for example with the treasure maps. It’s actually really fun to do them ’cause then you can showcase those different ways. I’m not sure if they’re on the bingo goals anymore, but I remember, in some of the previous versions, there were goals where you had to get every different kind of wooden door. So you had to go around to different biomes and collect all the different tree woods that you can get and make doors out of them. I thought that was quite fun. It filled your inventory like crazy, but it was always fun to do. Also, there’s one in particular that I like. I had to do it in one of the Bingothon runs, I can’t remember which one, where you have to make a spyglass and then stare at the sun with it. I think that’s funny.

Pikastroff: Yeah, I like the ones you mentioned, especially the one with the wood from all the biomes – that one sounds interesting.

CaveL1ghter: It’s fun to find all the different trees to get that goal. 

Pikastroff: It kind of goes in combination with the other goals where you explore the world, really.

CaveL1ghter: Yeah. 

Pikastroff: All right, so when it comes to routing with the card, and especially considering how open that can be, what are the aspects of it that most people usually do not think of? And are there any mistakes in the thought process behind routing that one can have that can damage one’s potential? Like you already mentioned, there’s so much of the game that counts, considering the nature of it, and so you need to be able to adapt. Are there any other such factors? 

CaveL1ghter: One thing it’s really easy to do, and even with my like 10 years of experience playing the game, it’s always easy to misremember something and think like, oh yeah, I need this item for this goal, and then you go through all the trouble of getting that item and then you suddenly realise, wait, actually I need this other thing. That’s always a really, really tough pitfall, because at that point you have to, first of all, go to the wiki and find out what you have to get, and then it’s also… it throws you completely for a loop, because sometimes that item could be really rare or really annoying to get from where you are at that time. Another thing is obviously if you end up underground somewhere, you could get lost in a cave or something and you have to figure out how am I going to get back to the surface. Just generally if you die, for example, you have to think, well, OK, where is my stuff? Can I retrieve it or do I have to complete this bingo card with a completely fresh inventory now? 

Pikastroff: Yeah, it beats you up, that last one, when you have to take death into account. I guess sometimes you’re just like, well, I just have to make do with it. Since you mentioned sometimes misremembering stuff, does it happen sometimes that you hyperfocus on goals and you end up just kind of forgetting about other stuff?

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, that’s very easy to do, and it kind of sucks because at some point, like on your way to the hyperfocused goal that you’re looking at, there’s something that you need for a different goal and you completely miss it and you know, when you realise that you need it, you’re like, oh my God, I saw this like half an hour ago or whatever, I have to go all the way back there. It does happen quite a lot. It happens to me in Road Trip Adventure sometimes as well. So in Minecraft it’s just even worse. 

Pikastroff: Yeah, I think that’s an experience universal to bingos when you have an especially challenging goal and whatnot, and sometimes you’re just so focused on wanting to get this challenging goal done that you just kind of forget about the other ones. And I guess it must be even worse for a game like Minecraft. Speaking of goals, when looking at the goals on your card, what kind of factors make you think OK, this is a goal I want to go for and which ones make you say I am not going for that one?

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, I mean obviously the easy ones to go for always like the really early advancements. Like, you know, make a stone pickaxe or get a crafting table or whatever, or get an iron ingot, so those are always obviously you see them and you’re like OK, I need that now. And obviously with the random nature of Minecraft, you obviously route normally for specific rows or columns, like if you’re doing a double bingo, you look for two rows or columns that you want to do and you’re like, OK, I gotta do those. But sometimes, if it’s really easy to get different goals on the card that wouldn’t be in the rows or columns that you need, it’s a good idea to go for them because you wouldn’t know if you happen upon some random rare item that actually makes one of those other goals or columns a lot easier or more feasible. So you always go for the really early easy stuff to do no matter what you’re routing for. And obviously there’s simple things like, you know, kill a sheep or whatever and it’s like, yeah, sheep are pretty common, I might as well do that. The ones that you usually try your best to avoid are rare biomes like jungles for example, or items from the jungle like a cocoa bean. I think a good rule of thumb is not to go for things that you would otherwise take a very long time to get in a normal playthrough. For example, like I mentioned before, the Nether thing. Stuff like that would take you an absurdly long time in a normal playthrough, let alone in a bingo. So it’s like, yeah, might as well not go for that.

Pikastroff: That makes sense. Yeah, I found it truly interesting what you brought up regarding the idea of still doing goals that are easy even if they’re not part of the rows or columns that you plan to do. If you’re doing a category like single or double bingo because of the very possibility that something could happen that all of a sudden that other column or row becomes viable. So it’s basically a way of planning ahead in case something ever happens. Of course, there’s always a question of how much does it cost to take that time to go and get those goals out of the way, but if it’s easy indeed, it can be worth taking that time to achieve them. Because I remember you did bring up earlier, with that those are the kinds of things that can happen due to the chaotic nature of Minecraft, so it’s a good call to do, and I find that interesting. 

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, it’s definitely something that sort of steps it out from other bingos. I mean obviously there’s some other games that involve RNG where you have a very similar effect, but compared to a completely linear game, or a game where everything sort of happens the same every time you play it, it’s definitely an interesting way that you approach filling in the card as opposed to just only going for the ones in the rows and columns that you select. 

Pikastroff: I see. I was looking at my next question, but I suppose you’ve basically already answered that anyway in multiple ways. I don’t think I need to ask it because it was: What is it that makes goals feasible, really? And how do you determine difficulty? Unless you want to bring more stuff up about that, you know. I think we basically already covered this. 

CaveL1ghter: I think, like I mentioned, the idea of how long would this take to get a normal playthrough, that’s probably the biggest rule for that sort of thing.

Pikastroff: Alright, cool. So we’ll be moving to our next little section here. What would you say is the barrier for entry for people who are interested in picking up Minecraft bingos, and have you got any advice for them? 

CaveL1ghter: I’d say, because Minecraft is so huge and it gets so many constant updates that people don’t always keep up with, there’s a lot of features and advancements and things that have been added to the game that many people don’t know about. So I think that that is a big barrier of entry, although I will mention there are definitely ways to sort of get better at that sort of thing. And obviously the other big barrier of entry is RNG because it’s so unpredictable it can be a bit sort of, “What the hell am I supposed to do in this situation?” type of thing. The advice that I have would be, in order to learn some of the goals that you don’t know because there could be quite a lot of them, it’s always a good idea to fill out a complete blackout card over multiple sessions so you don’t have to do it in one sitting, ’cause obviously that would take an absurdly long time. But you could pick it up throughout the duration of a week or so, just do it every now and then and fill out a complete blackout card. And if you come across something that seems sort of unclear or that you’re not sure how to go about doing, you can just look it up on the wiki or whatever. And that’s one way to easily learn a lot of the goals that might be a bit unclear for certain people. Obviously, to mitigate some of the RNG you can come up with interesting ideas or interesting sort of new formats or concepts. For example, like I did with the scout en route category. Or you could just do single or double bingos because a lot of the time single and double bingos have like one or two rows or columns that are really easy to go for and it’s sort of straightforward to do.

Pikastroff: I like the idea of splitting a blackout over like multiple sessions. It removes the pressure that people might feel in trying to complete everything while also giving you more experience with more goals, so it can definitely be a good starting point for those that want to go ahead with that. And of course, as you said yourself, all this stuff of just doing singles, doubles. I guess there’s a lot of possibilities with that. 

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, it’s a very flexible game. 

Pikastroff: My next question would be, do you think that “normal” speedrunners could benefit from doing bingos in some way?

CaveL1ghter: Possibly. I think it depends how much the person has played the game outside of speedruns, because there are some people who have speedrun Minecraft who maybe haven’t played the game casually that much, and are sort of more interested in it, like oh yeah, everyone’s speedrunning this game, it looks pretty fun, maybe I should give that a try too. And I think there’s a lot to learn from doing bingos and approaching unusual situations differently because even though in speedrun there’s a lot of very straightforward ways to go about certain things, every now and then, because of the RNG of the game, you’ll end up in a situation where it’s like, hold on, this is a bit different than what I’m used to in most speedruns, how can I finish this run without having this become a problem? And I think doing bingos requires you to sort of solve those problems a lot of the time, and I think that could carry over to speedrunning. 

Pikastroff: Alright, OK. So there’s still room for people to like to learn bingos, especially if they’re more focused on speedrunning rather than playing casually. Something I’ve been thinking about is that due to the open nature of the game, I would suppose that speedrunners of the game are also more naturally inclined to know more about the game that’s outside of their route, because when you have a normal speedrun, which can be very rigid, I guess it’s easy, when hyperfocus on the category, to just lose a lot of experience playing with the game, but considering the nature of the speedruns for the game, is there as much of an effect do you think? 

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, but I think at the same time there’s so much in Minecraft that is left out from speedrunning that I think people who hyperfocus on speedrunning in Minecraft could sort of either forget about or not really know about that, every now and then, like I mentioned, just by pure RNG or whatever, it’s like, how can I make use of the situation? And you don’t really know unless you have had outside, non-speedrun experience with that situation. 

Pikastroff: I see, so it poses a problem in Minecraft as well. 

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, in a bit of a different way than it would to other games I think, but it does.

Pikastroff: Yeah, that makes sense. How do you think the community can further support bingos? 

CaveL1ghter: Obviously new goals and ideas are always good, just adding new goals to the bingo cards because there’s obviously so many different things you could do in Minecraft that there’s always new goals to come up with, all these creative and interesting things that you can add. New formats as well… Same thing, there’s tons of different ideas that you could come up with for different formats for Minecraft bingo, especially ones that have maybe less RNG involvement, or maybe even more, maybe you like chaos, I don’t know. Also, I think an interesting way could be making mods that work together with bingo cards. Or like just bingo in general to enhance the experience, make it more interesting and more suitable for bingo. So I think writing mods for the game for that sort of purpose could be a very interesting thing for the future. And obviously just doing bingos, the more people do bingos for Minecraft, the more awareness it gets, the more spread out it gets for the community. That’s always a good way to contribute. 

Pikastroff: How would people go about, for instance, adding new ideas for bingo types and goals? 

CaveL1ghter: You can, I guess, contribute to the Bingo Sync page. I’ve never done it myself so I don’t know what the whole process is, but I think it’s pretty easy, if I remember correctly, to submit new goals and ideas to it. I don’t know who is the original creator of the original set of goals that was added to the Bingo Sync page, but I’m sure there’s tons more ideas to come up with, even just building a structure, or doing something funny or interesting in the game. It can be anything abstract, it doesn’t have to be specifically something that is hardcoded in the game. 

Pikastroff: Alright, cool. So now we’re going to move on to our final section here. Before we move on to the end, are there any anecdotes you’d like to share? 

CaveL1ghter: Anecdotes? Hmm… What do you mean by that exactly? I’m trying to think. 

Pikastroff: Maybe just some memorable stuff that might have happened in a bingo?

CaveL1ghter: Right! What I recall specifically was in Winter 2021. There was a goal that I was trying to get… I think I was in the end, like in one of the end cities because I had to get a goal there for some reason… and I was trying to get out of the End, I wanted to go back to the Overworld and I had to go through one of these sort of portals that are one block high, and obviously you can’t enter a thing that’s one block high, unless you’re either crawling or swimming or whatever. So I had to figure out how to try and get in there. Normally you would use Ender Pearls because if you throw an Ender Pearl into one of those portals, you just teleport through. I ended up missing all my Ender Pearls and I had to think, well, how am I going to get myself one block high to get into this thing? And at the time I had an Elytra, and when you use the Elytra, it lets you glide, your character becomes one block high, so I thought, what if I fly into this thing using the Elytra? I did it and I was actually successful at getting through the portal, but then when I came out the other side I was in the air already so I couldn’t use the Elytra again. And I just fell to my death. And luckily I made a bed just outside of the stronghold that took me to the end, so I basically gathered wood and stuff to make a pickaxe and whatever so that I can make my way back to where I dropped my items, but it was a whole saga to try and get back there.

Pikastroff: I’m just trying to recall, was it clipped?

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, I think it was clipped and put on Twitter. 

Pikastroff: OK, I think I know what you’re talking about. I remember seeing that death and you just died on the inside when that happened. 

CaveL1ghter: Yeah, the thing that was so funny about it was that my idea to get through the portal was successful, but I didn’t foresee the idea of falling and dying after I got through. I didn’t know what to do after I came out the other side. 

Pikastroff: Running ahead, not so much. I guess, sometimes it’s just funny. Alright, cool. So here we are at the end. Uh, well, no pun intended here. But yeah, do you have any final words you’d like to say to the community? 

CaveL1ghter: Well, obviously, thanks to Minecraft, the Minecraft community and its developers, huge amount of things to say about that. There’s so many different people around the world that have contributed to make Minecraft what it is today. Obviously thanks to Bingothon, thanks to you guys, the organisers, and thanks to all the Bingothon community because it’s been so fun taking part all these years so far. And I hope to do so more often in the future, as I always do, but hope to see you in Winter this year. And I will be showing up with something very interesting for Road Trip Adventure, so stay tuned for that. 

Pikastroff: Wink, wink, we’ll see. All right, where can people find you? 

CaveL1ghter: My handle is on basically everything ’cause I’ve never changed or never used anything else. Uh, yeah. You can use that on Twitter, on YouTube, on Twitch, wherever, to find me. 

Pikastroff: Alright, awesome. Thank you so much for participating in this Beyond the Board! I hope everyone who’s been watching or reading the full transcript has been enjoying this. If you’re interested in being featured in Beyond the Board yourself, you can get in touch with either myself or Floha258, you can find us on the Bingothon Discord server. Thank you everyone and we’ll be seeing you in the next one. Cheers!

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That’s it for today’s Beyond the Board! Remember, Bingothon Winter 2022 is coming up very soon, from December 2nd – 5th. You can catch it on our Twitch channel once we go live with it! Thank you all, and we’ll see you next time!