JD's Gaming Blog: Minecraft Creations: Submarine, Zeppelin, The Temple of Water Love and a brief contemplation of creation‏

Salutations all,

I’ve been thinking about what I create in Minecraft lately, and it’s strange but I feel that I’m not quite building to my full potential sometimes, or maybe the project I‘m doing I’m not quite happy with. Don’t get me wrong, I loved making and rebuilding such structures as my plane and grey tower that’s probably due to the fact that I was able to make these things bigger and better in singleplayer in fact that’s probably the main reason. Most of my creations are made first in multiplayer and then again in singleplayer, because of this a lot of them are fairly smaller scale and more rushed the first point being that whichever server you happen to be on, one map is almost never there forever, and pretty soon when a new Minecraft release comes around, the old map goes out the window, I mean it may be available for download afterwards but you’d really rather have something that others are going to be able to see (which is partly why I made this blog).

The second point being I am sometimes in a rush to finish things cause I want to make sure they are there long enough for people to see them because of the ever present factor that your creation may not be there in one piece or at all when you log back in. It is of this reason that I find myself planning concepts which are small but unique and imaginative then something huge and complex, and especially with me heading back to the dangerous, crowded and merciless gang warfare rampant cesspool that is Mikeland Factions, and you can bet your golden apple that anything I’ll be bothering to create will be very temporary indeed. But more on that at another time.

I recently downloaded the 1.7 and 1.8 Tribalfield maps and realized now that my usual theory of taking screenshots in multiplayer of my creations in order to document them for reference and creation in singleplayer was sort of redundant if I actually already had a singleplayer map to showcase them in. I’d always been proud of having all my previous multiplayer (and other purely singleplayer creations) all in the same area kind of like an outdoor showcase. This map that I’m using however is from Minecraft 1.4 if I remember correctly or perhaps even earlier, so although most of the features are carried over or change themselves, but this is not true with the actual geographical features of the map. As most probably all of you now know the Minecraft 1.8 release brought major geographical changes to the landmass including large deep oceans, swamps and ravines, and if I happen to use any of these new geographical features as a direct part of my building I will have no way of doing them on my current singleplayer “showcase map”.

The irony with this is these three creations is that the ones which were mad in the multiplayer 1.8 map weren’t built in or around the new geographical features and the one that as created in the singleplayer map was made with one exact feature in mind. I think that if I am going to build in multiplayer with the new features in mind I’m going to have to trust the owners of whatever server I’m playing on to always have the old map up to download every time there’s a total wipe, but of course I may not have the same close interaction on other servers as we did with NorC. I would like to keep my outdated showcase map because I think it’s great to have all your treasured creations been built sometimes bigger and better in the much easier conditions that singleplayer provides and be able to fly around and how all of your friends.

So without further ado, my latest creations

Submarine

I’d always wanted to make a submarine but was always kind of hindered by the level of the water etc it was either too shallow or the really deep parts just weren’t wide enough. As I could see from the Tribalfield 1.8 map the oceans did seem to be a lot bigger, you could paddle along in your boat for quite a long time even losing sight of land altogether, I had heard that the oceans in 1.8 were very big, though I wasn’t sure If they had been like this from earlier versions, but unfortunately due to me making this at a LAN strangely enough it was on my singleplayer map where I could only find a small bit of water deep enough and also close enough to the rest of the creations. I did have to do a bit of dredging the bottom but I still ended up making the actual sub sit just 1 block under the water, due to it becoming so damn dark in the water itself which I hope is rectified in a future update, and maybe add some fish, y’know? Squids really are a strange addition, I won’t go on a tangent with this but frankly if I was going to be designing a new sea creature wouldn’t it technically be one of the most basic and numerous of all of them? But I suppose what I see (or can’t really see) under the water doesn’t really matter in the long run.

The majority of the ship was made out of steel blocks including my ridiculous looking propeller, a resource which would be almost impossible to obtain such a substantial amount in multiplayer. It was a fairly long process of underwater building then filling and removing the entire interior with dirt blocks in order to get rid of the water, a process of which could have been time consuming with only about 20 seconds breath available fortunately on singleplayer I could remove this limit, I was never in a water tribe on the Tribalfield server, but if I was, this was the kind of thing I would build. My friend who happens to be very knowledgeable of the world war vehicles said to me that it must be a Russian sub because I had for some reason made the bridge (the part that sticks out at the top) at the rear instead of nearer to the front, I never knew this before, но я думаю, теперь я.

The redstone torch farm powering the engine, they don't really do anything though, apart from move the piston.

These two structures were built on the Tribalfield 1.8 map which was the last one before the fall. The interesting thing this time is I have downloaded the map from the now defunct Tribalfield website so I have a kind of dilemma whether I actually remake the things in my main ‘showcase’map or just leave them saved in the 1.7 and 1.8 maps an option which I’ve sort of always had but never worried about because I half knew a new map was coming. Anyway these screenshots are from the multiplayer maps, so whether I decided to remake them again is a decision I’ll just have to ponder

Zeppelin and Tower

Ahhh the Led Zeppelin, another of the things I’d always wanted to create in Minecraft, this one isn’t as big as others that are out there, I was just going for relative simplicity and also proper size ratio, although even as big as the balloon is it may have still not been big enough by today’s standards to be able to fly, you’ve seen the Goodyear blimp, there’s really not that much of a cockpit on those things compared with the gargantuan balloon that’s keeping it suspended, but we could blah blah physics, aviation mumbo jumbo all we want. Most of the bottom‘gondola’ part of the Zeppelin is made out of wood, though I did add some nice new iron bars for the railings. The balloon itself you could imagine I was meaning to make all out of wool, which is the best alternative for whatever the hell zeppelin balloons are made out of, but after exhausting x_xJDx_x and googleboy’s entire supply of wool I calculated that I’d have to shear an entire island of New Zealand, in order to have enough wool for the whole thing, so understandably I had to switch to cobble, mainly because I had used wood for the majority of the bottom gondola.

On a rather amusing note I logged back into the server a few times and found monsters inside the balloon as expected, but I also found that sometimes there were random single blocks missing, it took me awhile to realise that it wasn't griefers it was actually Endermen.

The ‘Zeppelin Tower’ and “Hoegarden”was pretty much made just to fill up my space in my friend Joro’s claim and plus we always have that annoying 1.8 aspect of hunger which has led to a lot more farms then usual sprouting up over the map. The tower was relatively simple, made of bricks with a spiral staircase and a standing platform that the zeppelin pulled up next to I also decided to use more iron bars for railings. The tower itself was built on top of the hole I had dug out of the ground in order to dismiss the large amount of cobble needed for the balloon.

Templo del amor, del agua (The Temple of Water Love)

This creation came from when I was on Kiwi island with mib44 and Lupidoo, I had finally decided to make my own residence and really wanted to use stone bricks as a main building material, I decided to write the name in Spanish as "The Temple of Water Love" sounded kind of weird. I'm not actually sure where this idea came from I think its was just another creation which I would do if I were in a water tribe, (similar to the submarine) I'd never been in a water tribe (whose main ability was underwater breathing) I spent most of my time in Spirit tribe with no falling damage which was quite useful and is why I ended up making so many things in the sky. It took me awhile to realise this temple could actually be the opposite of the 'Lava Temple' I had previously created. I especially like the hole in the roof and the way the rain comes through it into the well below.

As you can see from the pictures, I had intended to make my dwelling below with glass on the roof in order to be able to lookup through the ocean and let some light in, unfortunately though this went horribly wrong, as instead of making the rooms behind the temple under the sea bed, I had accidentally made the rooms in front of the temple so they were under the actual island.. This ended up with me having to greatly extend the moat and practically dig out a part of the island and let the ocean in resulting in a bridge style entrance. I also had to dig out the dirt surrounding the temple so it looked even. You could say this was my first project that went horribly wrong but turned out ok in the end.