In the autumn of 2013 I had joined yet another new Minecraft
server called Vancraft
and after looking around for a bit I decided to start another project. This
time I wanted to create something in a swamp, a sunken temple to be precise. I got the idea from the original Temple of
Atal'Hakkar in World of Warcraft which is a pyramid-like temple with only
the very top rising above the water with the rest of the temple below the water
line. So long story short after a lot of effort dredging the lake bed, digging
a hell of a lot of stone, fighting off zombies and clearing out the water it
was built, and this was the result.
The original sunken temple
I was pleased with it at the time but I knew that I would
need to go back and re-do it in creative mode to make it bigger and better than
before and that’s what I did. Finding a swamp was easy this time as you can
just generate a world which is the one biome so all I had to do was find a nice
big lake to put the temple in. Once I found a suitable place it was a process
of working out the how wide and tall the temple was going to be, how deep it
went and how much of the temple was above the water and of course which type of
stone. I decided on Mossy Cobblestone as this seemed the most appropriate
choice for a temple in a swamp. And so for the second time I went through the
process of dredging out the bottom where the base of the temple was going to be
and building up from there which didn’t take too long. I then built all the way
up to the top above the water, I had decided to do more of a rectangle then a
square so it took me awhile to decide on what the top of the temple was going
to look like.
This is the only shot I got of the build in progress, nice sunset though
When I first created the entrance to the last temple I didn’t
include a door just a stairway but we got attacked by so many zombies that I
had to seal it off with a door and entryway. So built over the entrance to the
temple with a sort of curved roof and decorated with blocks of emerald which I
chose basically because they were green and looked cool. After I had finished
though I thought it needed something more so I created a sort of spire at the
front which actually make it look more like a chapel than a temple but oh well
it looked pretty good anyway.
Yeh it kinda does look like a chapel, and hurrgh look at that water oh yes it's beautiful!
So then came the task of clearing out the water, previously
this was done automatically by the helpful owner of the server Van, however
this time I was on my own and without any knowledge of commands in Minecraft so
the only option was sponges, many, many sponges. So I swam around placing
sponges all over the floor and gradually dried out the entire bottom.
Spongey!
But of course
I had to dig down a lot more to reach the bottom of the temple perimeter and
you know what that meant, TNT and lots of it. This was probably the most fun
part of the whole process I placed TNT everywhere and blasted the floor out
from under me until it got the right level, in the process I managed to blow up
parts of the temple walls and had to patch a few leaks but got it done in the
end and ended up with a relatively smooth floor.
Boy do I love TNT excavation.
I built a stairway to the bottom but then I had a dilemma, I
hadn’t thought of what I was going to put on the bottom, I didn’t really know
what the temple was for. The last time I made the temple it I just covered the
bottom with sand and left a pool of water and it was my ‘Sunken Temple of
Solitude’. Though this time I decided it would be a temple for the worship of Slime(s) I didn’t want to
cover the entire floor with slime though so I made some bouncy ‘slime block
pits’ and also some water pits but left the floor as stone, I considered making
the entire floor slime but meh the whole point was more for the outside of the
temple not the inside.
Slimes, Slimes everywhere
I made a pyramid of emerald blocks as these were
basically the symbol of the temple and a green beacon to go on top which
unfortunately cut through the staircase but there wasn’t much else I could do.
As an additional decoration I hung vines all over the temple which looked
pretty cool on the inside once they were fully grown. And then of course it was
time to spawn the slimes which I put all over the place but unfortunately most
ended up killing themselves somehow and also because the place was so dark
other monsters such as skeletons, zombies and bats had spawned too but oh well
it was fine.
Once the vineshad grown it looked pretty cool, I had to lighten this picture up to see anything
In the screenshots and movie I am using the KOP
Realism 64x64 Texture pack with RRe36's
Shaders (High) from the Optifine mod.
And man did the water look spectacular not to mention the sky and sunsets. I
only realised now that my monitor at home must be very light compared to other
monitors as viewing on other screens is much darker and I actually had to
lighten up two of the pictures as they were just too dark on other screens I
tried. But anyway I’m happy with the result, it was the first Minecraft project
I’ve worked on in awhile and don’t know when I’ll back to the game but I don’t
think I’ll be gone forever, no siree.
