The moon rises over my pixelated vegetable and herb garden, casting a soft glow over the leaf covered roof of my cabin. I begin brewing an invisibility option while my crow familiar, Alwin, blinks at me from atop a bookshelf (his favorite place to perch). I hear the sounds of my straw golem friends harvesting crops for me, the gentle bubbling of my cauldron, and the low magical hum of the altar I hadn’t dared to experiment with yet. This night, I am equal parts witch, builder, and explorer. But this wasn’t any ordinary Minecraft world, I was deep in a modpack that promised slow living, homesteading, whimsical magic, and just enough danger to keep you on your toes.
Minecraft has always been a type of escapism for me. I adore how the game is simply what you make of it and what you put into it. You can become a creative builder, a speed runner, a redstone genius, a diamond miner, or an explorer. You can choose to live a quiet mundane life in a village, create a whimsical paradise of your own, or live out your days deep in the mines and cave systems. One of the things I’ve always found Minecraft lacking was the ability to do magic. Let’s be honest, I really just want to live out all my cottagecore millennial witch fantasies. Since that dream isn’t really possible with vanilla Minecraft, I did some searching and found a modpack called Cottage Witch which transforms a basic world into an enchanted escape. I played through the modpack as a month-long immersive experience, and this is what I learned along the way.
How It Started
I began my new journey in the heart of an Archwood Forest, surrounded by magical trees with brightly colored leaves. It felt like a dream or the type of place that only exists between different realities. After doing the usual survival game tasks of collecting materials, tools, and a modest amount of food, I set off in search of a place to call home. After a few days of exploring and traveling on foot, I came across a crumbling overgrown cabin overlooking a biome called the Crag Gardens, a stunning landscape with towering cliffs and rainbow eucalyptus trees. I decided to adopt the cabin, patching its holes and clearing away the dense foliage. I used the cabin as a temporary home while I worked on building my own cozy cabin nearby.
Becoming the Witch
It all started with the altar. I never really meant for it to become my sole purpose to play the modpack. I initially built it on a whim, something to tuck into my newly built cabin made from diorite, rainbow eucalyptus wood, and blue mushroom blocks. I had finally managed to find some mahogany wood, a staple material for the magic mod I was the most interested in, so I decided to go ahead and make the altar as a decoration, a fun aesthetic addition to my cabin. After adding in a few more decorations, the altar seemed a bit too plain, so I crafted a Book of Shadows to display on the altar, that’s when everything changed. That’s when I truly started becoming the witch.
I didn’t just plant and harvest herbs, I hung them on various drying racks strung up around my cabin, crafting jars with personalized labels to store various dried herbs like mandrake, mugwort, sage, and belladonna. I made a set of enchanted robes, tamed a crow familiar, and made blends of crushed herbs using my mortar and pestle for brewing. This world became my lab, my dream, and in many ways, my sanctuary.
Then came the broom. After days of pottering about my cabin gardening, brewing, decorating, and the occasional daring venture into the dangerous caves to fight off skeletons and wilden stalkers for rare materials and crystals, I was able to finally craft a flying broom. The first time I took off into the sky in the moonlight, something primal clicked in me. I wasn’t just playing a game anymore, I truly felt like the cottage witch of my world. I was a protector of birds, a gatherer, a gardener, and a potion-maker.
Ritual and Routine
As the days passed by, I found myself falling into a comforting rhythm, a rhythm much slower than I would normally play any game, including Minecraft. At the beginning of every session, I would just spend time harvesting and replanting my crops and herbs. My straw golems shuffled through the fields in the sun hats I had made for them, slowly harvesting crops like my sleepy little assistants. After gardening, I would spend time storing the crops, drying the herbs, decorating my home, and lighting up my cauldron and oven for a bit of potion making and bread baking. I never found myself specifically trying to progress or beat the modpack, I was just enjoying living my cozy little life. Sometimes I would explore the world for hours, wandering into new biomes, gathering rare plants, visiting a local village for trades and socialization, and always ending my adventures with a moonlight flight on my mahogany broomstick.
I think what surprised me the most was how this slower pace of living bled into my real life. I began to try and incorporate new routines like making myself tea every morning, watering my small collection of succulents and herbs, sitting in silence looking out the window at the squirrels and bunnies that roam my neighborhood. I allowed myself to slow down, decompress from the stress of school and work. My cottage witch life in Minecraft helped to teach me I should slow down in this world too.
Reflection
When I started this month-long immersive journey, I was simply looking for a magical cozy world to lose myself in when the stress of real life got to be too much. What I found was more than that, creativity, slowness, wonder, and quiet. Beyond that I saw a glimpse of my former self, someone curious, patient, and able to relinquish control to be fully immersed in a new world.
I fully admit that I didn’t explore even a small fraction of what the Cottage Witch modpack contains, but what I did find in it has helped to remind me to take life slower. I often tend to get so focused on my end goals, the light at the end of the tunnel, that I forget to stop and enjoy the journey along the way. Sometimes, the most meaningful experiences in life (and in games) aren’t about reaching the end, they’re about creating something unique and beautiful along the way.