Minecraft Creations: The Brick Mansion Chapter 7, The Great Escape Routes and the Future Fallback Base

My delving into Minecraft is minimal these days, I remember the good old times where I would join a community of players and we would make whole cities and communities. Of course I could still join a server and get back into this again but I guess I’m just a bit fatigued with the game I’ve been playing it that long. I used to work on my Brick Mansion every major patch to add new things, but at some point I just decided that was enough and just left it, mind you it had been finished for a long time I was just adding and redecorating. Though one of things I always wanted to do was create more secret fallback tunnels with powered minecart tracks that you could zoom along and escape a potential invasion. I already had one from my bedroom to the nearby village in case the house gets invaded, but I needed more, something that went far away to an (also secret) fallback base. So I searched around for a bit and found an island just a little bit away from the taiga forest across a small bit of ocean and decided to was far enough away to be safe from would-be invaders.

My original escape tunnel had lots of more powered rails

I decided to make the entrance to the secret tunnel in the pool hall as the idea was to make it a wall switch that activates a secret door. But because I don’t know enough about redstone I just had to make it a normal door on the wall, but the problem with that is you can see the door right there and because the wood on the wall is jungle planks I had to use a jungle door which as you may remember has holes in it. So it wasn’t really a secret entrance but nevermind I’ll fix that later. 

Ahh no one will notice that XD

Entryway from the (8-ball) pool room with chest of minecarts (yes minecarts) I like having the torches in their own little alcoves sometimes as it looks cool although doesn't give off that much light.

 So then I started digging, and digging, and digging, and digging out the tunnel, I joined up my original escape tunnel with the new one so now you had two options of where to go and dug the rest of the tunnel underneath the forest towards the sea. I stopped at one point as I noticed I had dug into a cave, so I made another secret exit in the middle of the forest.

One of the tunnels with a ladder to the forest exit

The Taiga forest to the southwest of the mansion, you can see the cave entrance at the bottom of the screenshot

Once I was nearing the ocean things were going to get tricky, I wanted to create a tunnel of glass underneath the ocean to the island with the fallback base. So as soon as I came in contact with water I stopped putting torches for light in the tunnel as it can’t have any light otherwise you could easily see it from above the water. So I built the glass tunnel into the bank and zigzagged across the ocean floor at one point dredging out a hill to make it a bit lower. I got to the island and tunnelled into a large cave which was accessible from the surface via a tall shaft, I was thinking of making the fallback base on the surface built into a mountain but then I thought that it may be safer built into the cave as we’re trying to hide from invaders aren’t we? I could make a lookout on the surface I guess. Minecraft really needs a way of making lifts as ladders are a bit too flimsy and stairs take up a bit of space but that may be a bit sophisticated for the base Minecraft as there’s redstone but no rope/pulley system in it really.

The entrance to the ocean tunnel

It's dark down here

See the dolphins!

Glass tunnel exit

The fallback base 'cave'

 After doing some test runs I managed to give the Minecarts enough speed to get through the glass tunnel stretch without needing more speed which worked out well as without any lighting the tunnel was pretty hard to see.

A few shots of the underwater tunnels

As that’s as far as I got really I just wanted to make the tunnels and they are pretty cool, especially the underwater bit as you can see all of the undersea creatures. Speaking of which there are now lots of more undersea creatures as of update 1.13 The Update Aquatic yes there are now dolphins, fish mobs and turtles to look at which is a welcome change from just the damn Squids. But anyway this was just a quick update, I may keep working on the fallback base at some point or maybe even update the mansion again but for now it’s finished.

A flythrough of the fallback tunnels

JD

Time for Plan B

Minecraft Creations: The Brick Mansion Chapter 6, Supply and Demand and Patch 1.8 The Bountiful update

Ok well first of all I’ll explain the changed post title. Originally the “Minecraft Adventures of JD” post was supposed to be purely about what I do in Minecraft while playing singleplayer, specifically I started a map intentionally to do that. Though unfortunately like always I started plans for a house and it turned into this monstrosity, I even got rid of all my old items so basically even if I did decide to continue on my quest the world would be totally out of date being created in 2012 and all. So I’ve decided to create a Minecraft Creations post title specifically for the Brick Mansion which may not go on for too much longer, but just to break it up from the regular Minecraft creations so I know where everything is and as a testament to it if I am ever satisfied that it is fully finished.

Well yes here it is, the much awaited (well not by me) 1.8 Bountiful Update is the biggest update yet, with a wealth of new features added to a game really already flowing with them, and to be honest I can’t keep up. Changes for me in my world really only mean I have to change around my Brick Mansion in some way, so with an update like this, I was like damn, this is gonna be a lot of changing, and change it was. But anyway, let’s first go into the changes, which there are a lot of...

One of the shorter 1.8 videos, still goes for 10 minutes instead of like 30 heh

One of the most prevalent changes is that you can now change your Minecraft username, obviously they are going to work on some sort of unique identifier to stop bad people from changing their name and causing havoc. Also difficulty is now per world not global so you can finally have one or the other when you’re switching worlds. There’s also new skin customisation, I think you can wear jackets now too. There is also a new Spectator game mode allowing you to actually noclip around the level and look through other players eyes. There has been a cascade of new blocks inc Granite, Andesite and Diorite  which generate in pockets within stone terrain apparently slightly larger size and more in abundance then gravel. There are new Ocean monuments which are generated underwater in Ocean Biomes with all new blocks inc Prismarine, Prismarine Bricks, Dark Prismarine and Sea Lanterns, where you can find Guardians and Elder Guardians in the center which apparently has 8 gold blocks.

A well made feature of the new Ocean Monuments with Gardians and Elder Guardians

World spawning is now much more customisable which will be fun to mess around with different settings. In addition to the new blocks I’ve mentioned before you can also get polished, Diorite Andesite and Granite and also Red Sandstone. There is also a new type of dirt called Coarse Dirt which is a mixture of dirt and gravel where grass does not grow, but can be made back into normal dirt too. In ocean monuments Guardians and Elder Guardians drop Prismarine Crystals and Prismarine Shards which are used to make Sea Lanterns, and also Wet Sponges. You can also now make Slime Blocks and bounce on them like a trampoline.


A simple example of a slime block trampoline made with pistons.

And finally, Fences, Fence Gates, Doors, Slabs and Stairs now appear different depending on what type of wood you used to make them,  most just change colour (appropriately) but the new doors look awesome with the dark oak door looking like something out of a formal victorian household and the Jungle door looking very hobbity with sort of mushroom shaped holes, the Acacia door is almost not there at all. An interesting new addition is Banners which can be adorned with many different colours and patterns and man can you do a lot of combinations, ‘decorating’ is done by adding dyes to a blank or coloured banner, and then adding more to the current banner to decorate it more resulting in “Over a quadrillion possible combinations” apparently. An Armor Stand can now be made allowing you to finally place that armor away when it’s safe and view your beautiful skin texture.

Armor stands with various armor pieces.

Many new Mobs are now in including Endermites which are sometimes spawned by Endermen teleporting away which basically act like silverfish but the funny thing is Endermen hate them too. Guardians and the boss Elder Guardians as I’ve mentioned before ‘guard’ the Ocean Monuments. Rabbits are here! (including a very scary one which you may remember from a certain Monty Python movie) they can be killed for a variety of things including rabbit hide, raw rabbit, cooked rabbit and rabbit's foot and can be guided or bred using carrots, golden carrots or dandelions and are also used to create Potions of Leaping where you can jump super high. There’s also a new “Depth Strider”  boot enchantment which allows the player to move faster in water and is probably specifically for exploring ocean monuments. There is now Iron Trapdoors and you can colour beacons with coloured glass.

Two Rabbits I caught while adventuring in a Mega Taiga Biome at the Bluewire Lan, unfortunately didn't have amy more carrots to make them breed.

And that about it for the major changes, you can check out more here. So without further ado I will now yak on about the latest changes to my supreme Brick Mansion or rather to the lands around it...

With my magnificent house pretty much finished I spent quite a bit of time pondering what to do with the outside, at first I thought of gardens and whatnot but then I thought there was enough gardens inside (which is kind of strange I know) and if this house is going to be self sufficient it’s going to need some farms, or a farm, a big farm. Though the first thing I had to do was extend the wall around the east side of the house, it took a bit of trial and error but I got it done, instead of the usual cobblestone wall I had before, I put an overhang of I cobblestone block at the top as well the wooden plank walkway so there was essential a two space walkway instead of 1, it looked quite good when finished especially with the stone stairs mixed with the wood. Because of the extra weight I added some support at various intervals of the wall which also looked pretty cool, I might take this moment to remind everyone that this wall is meant to stop monsters getting in not people hence the simplicity.

4 block high wall, keeps monsters out and doesn't make the house feel like a fortress.

Now it was time for farming, I had to look up all the things you farm to make sure I had everything but it turned out ok, I think I got an equal amount of melons, pumpkins, carrots and potatoes, and lots of wheat and possibly a bit too much sugar cane but anyway. I made sure the place had enough light for during the night by placing long rows of fences with torches on top of them. Speaking about the design I’m a fan of having water right next to crops in single block rows, I now know that a single block of water can hydrate crops 4 blocks way but I like the way I’ve done it cause it’s kinda nice looking but may change it in the future. Taking advantage of the new 1.8 changes I created a well out off the small patch of water near the crops that goes right down to bedrock and used dark oak slabs and fence poles as decoration as well, I also made a rope out of acacia wooden poles as it was a nice orange colour, I also made a small rotunda with chests underneath as a sort of storage pavillion for gathered crops for transport to the main storage centre.

The crop farm, well and storage pavillion.

 I then thought I’d need some livestock so I fenced off a few sections of the front gardens creating pens for pigs, cows, horses and chickens, complete with water troughs and shelter from the rain or sun. Now that I had the area around the house planned out I had to change the location of the iron door entrances, I also made the main entry into my “land” with a twin double door. I also made two new staircases coming down from the pool deck as it was obviously now safe to come down and also serve as a main entry and exit point to the east side of the house.

Animal Farms!

Made sure the stairs were well lit heh

I then decided to update the inside of the house as per the 1.8 changes and the first thing I thought of doing was taking advantage of the new Prismarine blocks for the indoor pool, this basically meant replacing the entire wall of the pool with prismarine bricks, the floor with dark prismarine and adding lots of sea lanterns to brighten up the pool area. I then updated most of the flowers and plants in the house, which was quite a few I even added some bigger flowers here and there. I updated all the doors depending on what kind of wood they were near, the dark oak doors worked well as formal doors for the cinema I also changed my bedroom’s personal balcony to be entirely made of jungle wood since I can now do that. I also added some armor stands with armor to the armory lol no it was actually the forge.

Big flowers!

Dang those dark wood doors are fancy.

I also realised I had forgotten about the cacti and cocoa beans so made two smalls farm around the northeast and southeast corner and grew a huge jungle tree and covered with cocoa plants which don’t really know if that’s how it’s supposed to work but meh their growing. I finished off the outside with gravel paths leading everywhere starting from the entrance to the house, and added some rows of tulips near the entrance so I could tiptoe through them.

One of my Cacti farms, my Coca bean tree and the many gravel paths going around.

 While looking around the house I realised that my secret way into the undercroft of the house through the pond near the entrance probably needed a way into the house, so I dug a hole which came up through the water in the centre pyramid of the lobby which was pretty fun. I made a secret exit from my room which involved making a long ladder all the way down from my room through the sauna pipe into the undercroft of the house then into a specially made tunnel with minecart track which led to a shaft up to the surface and an exit hidden by dirt just outside the walls. I might add another secret passageway that goes from down in the mines all the way to the NPC village in the future.

The hidden trapdoor and the tunnel leading down to the Minecraft track

Spot the hidden exit (it's usually covered by grass)

One of the last things I did was make use of the new banners, with over a quadrillion different designs I’m sure I could make something good, though unfortunately I couldn’t think of anything unless I found some way of putting the letters “JD” on there, so I just went with a blue background and red upper “chevron” (it’s interesting to see the actual names of these banner/flag designs). So in case you didn’t know that’s the Melbourne Football Club jersey design, I’d hate to resort to football but that’s all I could think of. SO I placed these banners everywhere it seemed appropriate inside and out of the house. I also decided that the space to the right of the entrance need a bit of a sprucing up so I made a flower bed thing but I may actually try to change it to a different colour grass or maybe just no grass I dunno it just looks a bit weird with the same grass around where it obviously doesn’t inside the house as the floor is either wood or carpet.

Proudly Displaying my Banner both inside and outside the house.

So the house is relatively finished, never thought I’d say that heh, sure the outside is a bit crude and could do with some prettying up (especially the west side) but I can decide when to do that at some other point but for now I can bask in the knowledge that my biggest house ever is finally finished, and what an experience it’s been, I remember first starting out in June 2012 and thinking that “this is gonna take awhile” though I have been building it on and off. The sad part is I’m kinda alone here, but I don’t mind, and of course I can always open it up to Lan (While at a Lan!) and invite some homies, after having backed up of course.

Ahh bliss, nothing like a job well done, time to finally sit back and enjoy, if there wasn't so much damn maintenance to be done.

So that’s that for this topic for now, I’ll see if I ever add to it again but basically it will always be here as a milestone topic.

JD

A flythrough (or around really) of the outside of the house.


A flythrough of inside the house (sorry about the weather)

Look at what I have created!  *crickets*

Minecraft Creations: The Brick Mansion Chapter 5, That tops it and 1.7.2, the update that changed the world.

Greetings fellow Minecrafters, I originally wanted to make this update to my brick mansion after I had finished the entire outdoor area inc the gardens and farms etc but since the 1.7 update had come in I felt that I needed to discuss this now and can leave the full unveiling of the house to when it’s finally goddamned finished.

Though I will start with the rather large and exciting 1.7.2 update, as you probably know this resource brought a major overhaul of the game’s code meaning that the resource for mod creators the Minecraft Coder Pack (MCP) is still in the process of being updated so until that has happened unfortunately we won’t be able to use any of our beloved mods.  This doesn’t really bother me as I’ve still got 1.6.4 available and can use that whenever mods are needed but I may be curtailing my Minecraft business for a while until the mods are back up to business.

But anyway let’s go through some of the major changes...

There has a been a few changes to the options, the resource menu screen overhaul which apparently lets you select more than one resource pack at once?  and the fun “super secret settings” which adds in a random filter to your view such black and white and inverting colours. Lighting has been changed with black spots in the terrain being almost fixed and thunderstorms make the day much darker. There has been new changes to both fishing mechanics and items as you can now fish up more than just fish and we now have more fish including Raw Fish, Raw Salmon, Clownfish, and the Pufferfish which we can now use to brew the water breathing potion. There’s also some plans for players to create Nether Portals bigger and with different shapes  that may even allow ghasts into the overworld.

And in case you ask, no it automatically shrinks to a smaller portal when you actually go into the nether so I'm not exactly sure how a ghast would get to here.

 Probably the biggest addition is the changes to the Biomes featuring 11 new ones inc the Mesa, Savanna, Sunflower Plains and Roofed Forest as well as some variants of existing biomes inc the Flower Forest and the snowless Taiga biome and speaking of temperature each biome now has a base temperature to determine whether it rains or snows or whether rains at all. There’s lots more changes but I’ll let you read the version history for the rest. Thanks to the new biomes there are new Wood varieties inc Acacia and Dark Oak (as well as new saplings and leaves). New Fish have been added inc the Pufferfish which can be used to make the Potion of Water breathing which creates an alternative to the respiratory enchant for armor. 

A new Savanna biome.

There is lot of new Flowers for you to pick so you can make some different coloured wool other then red, yellow and orange and there is also flowers which are two blocks high that can be grown with bonemeal! As well as two block tall grass, all this is perfect for my upcoming garden with hedge maze for my Brick Mansion. And what’s more once you have crushed those flowers into dye you can now not only dye wool but glass! Yes Stained Glass windows are now possible so you can stain away all 16 colours. 

Stain that glass

So that’s that for the update, there are a few other improvements and changes which are listed in full on the Minecraftwiki version history. I leave you now with a video by autotroph who very nicely details the features of 1.7 in this 3 and a half minute video.

So now on to my quite extensive Brick Mansion...

After I had grown bored of building on the Vancraft server I decided I had to have a crack at finishing off my Brick Mansion, well the house part at least and I started of course with the main roof though I’ll first need to talk about the roof of the lobby. Apart from the stone bricks and pyramid the lobby roof was mainly constructed of oak wood planks unlike the stairs design I currently use, probably because there was no stair edges like there is now, though I did add some stairs in to finish off the roof as well as a oak wood slab trim to add a bit of overhang and it looked much better. When I started the roof of the main house I went for relatively the same effect with oak planks except I would use oak stairs to join the levels for a much cleaner look.

Buildin' that roof

Night time, I added torches around the roof to keep monsters from spawning (when I eventually turn then on)

The finished roof

 I think I used about a two block overhang (which I hope was low enough then did the usual trim of oak slabs, I then went 3 blocks across then 3 stair blocks up in sections right up until I’d closed off the roof, didn’t run into many problems apart from forgetting to extend some of the chimneys. When I’d finished off the top I went to work on the upper level and quickly decided which rooms were going to use the main roof as their actual roof as the rooms looked quite cavernous without a roof of their own (which is lower down obviously). So I designed rooves for the activity room, band room, gaming room, home cinema, lavatory and the inner guest rooms as the roof was low enough for the ones on the edges. I then heightened the walls of the rooms and boy did those rooms look big especially the main upstairs hall.

Band room roof.

Activity room roof

One of the inner guest rooms which have a roof and also has a tree growing out of it.

Viewing the inner roofs from above is an interesting sight.

The Main upper hallway, that's some high walls yo.

I decided to do a sort of lookout deck at the very top of the house, and I would use my favourite type of stone: stone brick to do the floor and made a sort of fenced platform right round the top layer of the roof, I also made a mini tower to get even higher up, then it started raining and I realised as always when it rains I had to make a roof over the platforms so I decided to put some glowstone on the top of the lookout roof as a sort of beacon. I then had to create the stairs down (or up) to the platform which I basically just made over the stairs down to the middle level which I did in the usual design.  I also added some hanging light in the form of lightstone on wires though I had to use fences as always with these things as there’s a lack of any type of wire, but I guess Minecraft is mostly blocks and I’d have to look at mods such as Industrialcraft to get any semi-proper structure building items but this house was always supposed to be vanilla Minecraft and that’s the way it will stay.

The "lookout deck" at the top of the roof with light tower

The stairway up to the roof in the main upper hallway.

Hanging lights

With the rest of the lighting the activity and band rooms had the glowstone light worked into the ceiling, the great library was chock full of torches (which is kind of dangerous around books now I think about it) but I made some spruce log chandeliers so the roof wasn’t this big dark mass. The “Hot Box” cinema obviously had minimal lighting and the games room had lighting worked into the roof but I made some mushroom lamps for the games tables to keep in theme with the mushroom-style roof. I had decided when making the staircase up to the lookout platform to include a gap in the wall with a fence overlooking the guest hall so I had also decided to not put a secondary roof over the guest hall or the very eastern guest rooms.

Library Roof Chandeliers

Games room mushroom roof

Guest room hallway

The gap in the wall on the stairs down from the roof which I thought looked better then just a plain wall.

 So because of that I decided to my some wall windows or ‘skylights’ I suppose you’d call them and some jutting out glowstone lights to give a bit of feature to the upper wall of that long hallway I also added some chandeliers which were supposed to be oak wood then I realised I’d done them in jungle wood but meh. For my own room  I didn’t need too much more light but I made a golden chandelier of lightstone. I also made some more windows for my room and the activity and band room and this made the southern facing upper wall of the house look much better. I added all the rest of the signs that weren’t there for the rooms that I could think of, inc some with some fairly funny names.

"Wall windows" and jutting out lightstone

Jungle Log chandeliers

My cool golden chandelier

More windows for my pad

Windows make house look better

My dad would get this...

Another thing I’d been meaning to do for awhile was a pool/sundeck, I was going to make this a sort of extension to the inside pool but ended up just creating a triangle shaped pool and deck outside the window and removed some of the plant features to make two entryways outside. I made the pool and deck raised up to the floor height of the middle level though the pool gets deeper from the top down for the diving board, didn’t know what else to put so I put lots of deckchairs around, might add yet another bar later, not sure.

Pool party baby, it was a cool party, cool pool party, lalalalaa

New exit out to the deck, there's also one on the other side of the indoor pool.

While I was doing this I had a bit of a crisis when I found out that the flaming netherrack from the forge entrance had set fire to the stairway above it yet again ( I stupidly though I could block it’s effects with a single cobblestone block) and had spread and destroyed whole walls, I couldn’t even put it out so I had to revert to a previous save and thank god I had made one as it would have taken days to rebuild the quite details corners of rooms it had destroyed. Unfortunately this meant I had to do a few of the changes inc the pool and deck again which was not fun. I also realised that I’d made this area on the east side of the house where the sun obviously rises not sets so this was a bit of a blunder (I definitely wouldn’t be the best architect).

The sun sets in the west you dumhead, though I spose the dancefloor balcony can see the sunset making a fairly romantic setting (with myself).

Probably the last thing I did was create a wall around the entrance to the main mine and the surface material processing with the secondary mine entrance. I’d original intended for this to be the finish of the house but really it isn’t. I haven’t done any of the garden or farms and I think I might extend the wall to go around the pool area and in fact I make might it cover most of the east side to make room for all that and maybe do a hedge maze or at least fence off a small area so the pool didn’t have to have monsters lurking underneath lol. I think I will make a decent garden or at least line the walls or patches of the grass with the multitude of new flowers that are available. I do feel a bit disappointed that I’ve made the house with a lot of emphasis on different types of wood and now there’s two new types but meh could have been worse, I could have done this when there was only one.

The wall around the mine entrances

The quite bare west side of the house. Mainly because of the Library and the movie theatre but might add some windows to the library and band room if I can fit them in

Southwest side of the house.

The house in all it's grandeur

So that’ll be the next job, walls, farms inc horses/cattle, gardens, hedge maze, maybe a gazebo or two but I ain’t makin’ this place too high class ;D

JD