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.
I was looking back on my many Minecraft creations in my main
world and realised that there was a few remakes of multiplayer creations that I
had missed so I’ll go through these which are now sitting proudly on display in
my now museum-like original minecraft map. Some of the rebuilds you see here
will be built to be exactly the same as the original, others will be different
in certain ways due to me being able to build bigger better and faster in
creative mode. The main difference that you will see is that I will be using
different texture pack then the original, the texture pack I used for these
screenshots is Cyberghost’s
256x texture pack. All of the creations below have already been featured in
detail in a Minecraft creations post, this post just reviews them and notes any
changes I made in the rebuilds.
I’ve listed these from latest to earliest as I think it
works best, I’ve also linked the titles to the original posts so you can
compare the two.
This was a recent creation from the Oceanic-Craft server that I was
part of for a while I had the idea for a sort of “tower in the forest”
terrace-style woodland style house made with mostly spruce wood as it’s in a
Spruce wood forest. The rebuild I did pretty recently and it went fine and
pretty much copied the same design except with maybe a few more windows to make
it look a bit nicer. I must admit the 256x realism texture pack makes it look a
lot better as the original was done with no texture pack so it looked a bit
bland.
There unfortunately isn't any Spruce forests in my original world so I had to use an oak forest instead. It's a nice spot though near the lake.
The crafting room
The entertainment/pool room
Bedroom
Enchanting room
The roofed top balcony
The tower by night, the texture pack makes it look pretty damn dark.
The Hunter’s hall was created as my contribution to my pal
Richy D (aka Dickdatson’s) Minecraft singleplayer creative map. I had no
trouble finding a spot and making it again as it was a fairly simple design
supposedly just being a rustic hunter themed hall.
The Birchwood house was built in my friend Lupidoo’s claim
in the Ozgamerparty
server, basically I just wanted to make an entire house out of birch wood and
had to make it in the area that he places, so naturally I made the house as big
as the whole area. The rebuilt went ok but I think I got the size a bit wrong,
it’s hard working with only screenshots.
That's it big and square, apparently with default textures it looks like a cow
Due to it's bright white colour it glows during the night
This was intended as a giant version of a minecraft tree
that was also a house, this was also on Ozgamerparty but on my friend Rennz’s
town. Unlike the other rebuilds in this post this one is was rebuilt a bit
differently as in creative mode I could build to my full potential without the
time sink and constraints of survival mode. The first thing you might notice is
that the new tree is wider and taller, the rooms are bigger so I could fit more
in and I also got rid of the “furnace basement” underneath as I could fit them
in the entry floor. I also had room for another floor that was inside the
foliage so I made that part the pool room. Basically everything else is the
same except more refined and rooms have more things in them, I also cut some
windows for the library room. I reckon it turns out a lot better, obviously was
much more helpful using creative mode.
You can't see it here but I put a hatch at the top then carves a stairway through the leaves to get on top of the tree.
This was made to get away from everyone and everything for a
while and live in the sky in peace, I should have known I wouldn’t be able to
for long before someone made a tower and a bridge up to me, my one in my new
world is much more peaceful though I could actually build it much, much higher
now. The inside of the house in the rebuild was much better as I used this
lovely light blue wool to fit the ‘sky’ theme, it was also more spacious and
better designed overall. Once I decided to come down and join the others on Zocrowe
Island I did make a “House of Peace” detailed in the same post which was
basically the same but was on the ground obviously and used leaves as
decoration. I decided not to remake this one though as it wasn’t anything
special albeit more spacious then the cloud house.
This was an odd creation that I thought up with the
intention getting a certain female Minecraft player inside, looking back now it’s
as dangerous and scary as it sounds. The remake was much better than the
original as I had an unlimited supply of coloured wool so I was able to make
the place look much more colourful (including the entrance) The bedroom and
fireplace ended up looking much better too and less claustrophobic.
I need a fancier door, come to think of it I should have used the dark oak door
Looks like a nightclub entrance, just needs the ticket booth and cloakroom
Yes unfortunately the coach isn't too comfortable but that's the point as it makes it more favorable to go to the bed
Possibly could have redone this room with better decor, maybe at least done a multicolour roof.
The Lava Temple was basically an over-the-top “house” which
I made when I joined a town on the Tribalfield server around March 2011. Originally
supposed to be a pyramid, this structure was mostly made to experiment with the
new sandstone block that had come out at the time and also was one of my best pieces
of work that included lava. This thing was one of my favourite creations back
then and even now as I’ll always remember Warpage chiding me over showing
everyone up with my extravagant houses compared to their plain (and boring)
rectangles and mucking up the look of his town. Seriously guys I’m an artist XD
Fortunately I had a sandy area nearby my main house to build on
Yes those are my initials written in lava, damn that was hazardous to make in survival
As you may have guessed this was the original inspiration
for the Underground
house version 2, the Overfarm though technically it wasn’t the first. It
was indeed the first I made with skylights but wasn’t my first little-house-leading-to-a-big-house-underground
creation, that was actually my “Mini –house” made way back in the 2010
Tribalfield days. Not really any noticeable differences with this one it was
pretty much the same apart from me being able to put down grass in the
greenhouse instead of just dirt.
I need to explain the reason behind this one. In the Tribalfield
server we had different Tribes, and depending on which Tribe you were in you
had different abilities for example, Spirit Tribes took no falling damage, Fire
Tribes were resistant to fire and lava (that would be useful) and Water Tribes
did not run out of breath underwater. Ours was an “Air” tribe and our power was
not being crushed by blocks like gravel and sand which I’ll admit was kind of crappy
but sometimes useful none the less. So I made this “Temple” “For the Glory of
AIR” as written on the wool monument inside that was supposed to resemble
clouds. Some differences between the two were that the staircase up was steeper
and made of stone brick stairs not stone slabs as the slabs were in the way of
another of my creations and also I’ve now noticed that the remake is slightly
smaller, oh well it’s only the equivalent of two blocks shorter so it’s fine.
I used wool blocks for the 'floating clouds' theme
Another very early creation where I first experimented with creations
high in the sky (which could only go as high as block 256 at that point) I
actually did attempt to create a Cloud
of Peace but gave up when I didn’t have enough wool and decided to make a
glass platform instead where you could look down onto the land below.
Unfortunately when using a realism resource pack the glass doesn’t look quite
so good as you can see in these screenshots, it looks better on the linked post with the default texture pack. The idea with this was mt personal throne in heaven where people who died would come to worship me as god himself (yes it is as messed up as it sounds)
Here is a video showcasing the creations mentioned in this post as well as another the Rubix house that was showcased in a different post. From a recommendation from a friend this was the first video I have added commentary to and I do apologize for the swearing and general unprofessionalism though this was my first time. I have no idea whether this will turn into a proper youtube channel but at the moment I just want to concentrate on writing not video recording and editing.
So that’s that, many creations in my museum world, I must remind
myself to use more new items like using Prismarine to make some
underwater houses and Banners
which give a nice flair to houses but I overlook most of the time as their not
integral to the outside structure like windows and torches.
