Yesterday I got lost and ended up cowering in a cave which I'd dug out. I had no torches so sat in dark all through the night. Just as the sun was coming up I realised I'd been staring at iron ore all night. Went to go get it and realised it wasn't iron ore at all and was then killed by a creeper :(
The spawning and losing your inventory thing is a bloody nightmare, fun though.
PB - is it likely that you'd run out of raw materials before you build whatever you'd want? Or am I just being silly?
edit: quite tempted to set up a server for this somewhere.. Does it stay consistent if you start/stop it, or does it re-initialise everytime you restart it?