Minecraft
It's Minecraft time (once again), which means lots of pictures, and not a lot of text. Which, you know, is good with me, given how long it normally takes to write one of my pieces of political...er...ramblings?
The Castle
This sequence of photos revolves around my Castle, built on the flatest bit of land I could spot a some renderings of the map of the server I run from the end of my bed1. Currently my largest undertaking, although it's not a pinch on most major undertakings, it is over 4000 square tiles on the map.
Inside, we have a variety of little niceties. The port, which faces out into a rather large ocean (leading into a couple of smaller projects I may post about at some point in the future) is possibly or as much practical use a aesthetic. The weather updates had a major impact on the landscape, coasting most of the landscape in snow and ice, so the large water channel had to be created. Although you can't see it, it actually works using a glowstone and glass lattice one block below the surface of the water.
Another thing that is not immediately obvious is that half of this area used to be a desert, which I have since removed. And, I don't just mean replaced the top layer - all the sand (and, in after a large chunk of the castle got randomised due to some save corruption, some sandstone) was removed and carefully stored in crates, and then replaced with layers of stone and earth dug out from other parts of the map. This also gave rise to the opportunity to remodel the area slightly, as is shown in some of the different looking contours.
Inside the Walls
Back inside the castle, the Castley bits. Here, we can see once of the barracks, the drill square, and the practice area. The practice area was when I actually started properly decorating the area, rather than just throwing up some rough walls to look impressive.
Also around the grounds are a couple of nice little features (well, I think so): the furnace and storage rooms (I have actually managed to get all the furnaces running at once, and they're all full stocked with (char)coal), and the well (which has self-regenerating water at the bottom, naturally).
In the Keep
There's a number of rooms inside the keep; the main hall (currently holding the cake supplies) is indeed lit by lava - this also acts as an emergency break point in case of invasion - underneath the floor is also lava, and all the keep points in the keep are futher up than there. There is also the high throne, also built over a pit of lava.
There's also a number of little secret passages inside the keep too - you can find yourself a giant staircase, underneath the throne, and eventually at the inner sanctum
In the depths
The amount of building, of course, takes a lot of resources. As I also mentioned earlier, the area was also once desert, which took even more resources to replace. Underneath the main area, 10 of the bottom 11 layers have been removed, forming two floors of 5 blocks, yielding create after create of stone, and nearing 3000 obsidian (which it took a very, very long time to mine).
- 1 ↑ You can find out more about my computers in A New Member of the Crowd