I've been a long time Minecraft player, and just like everyone else I have periods of taking long breaks. Yesterday I was playing Minecraft with him on his ipad, and I found out that he doesn't have anyone at home that can help him with Minecraft. He's never even built a house before!
I spent most of today putting off my chores and building a base for him in creative to learn PC controls. I built a house, a greenhouse, an animal pen, 2 beacons, a nether portal base on both ends, and surrounded it with a wall. The plan is for me to turn it into easy mode survival, so I loaded up the base with food, armor, weapons, supplies, farm animals, iron golems, cats, dogs, and more.
I had an absolute blast designing this base! It has a lot of fun details, like the greenhouse having speckles of colored glass. The house is 2 stories with a basement and a tower that goes 2 floors higher. My favorite detail of the tower is making the enchanting table float by using half slabs.
The nether portal building is a huge portal using the boundaries of portal for the building. The walls are alternating between warped planks and crimson planks. The other side had gilded blackstone for floors and deepslate bricks for walls.
I decided that the higher floors of the buildings are on slabs, to prevent unintentional building. There's a ton of chests and barrels, so he can store things all over the place. I gave several max enchanted sets of weapons and armor, even more unenchanted sets of weapons, tools, and armor, and all the supplies necessary to build hundreds more. The kitchen is stocked with food and raw ingredients.
I'm so excited to play it with him! I'm going to turn it into a LAN world.
Your cousin is lucky to have you; sounds like you guys are going to have a blast!
I played with my uncle and his kids for a few months (I think while I was home on summer break from undergrad). They must have been in the 6-8 year old range at the time. It was a ton of fun. He was the one who got me into video games when I was a kid, so playing with his kids was like everything coming full circle.
They'd find my stash of diamonds and make hoes and shovels to mess with me. Or they'd make a diamond sword and chase me around trying to kill me. After they went to bed, my uncle and I would log on and explore the Nether since it was our first time playing since the big Nether update.