Tuesday, 8 September 2015

Minecraft Creations: Underground house version 2, the Overfarm

Following my latest Minecraft adventures post I mentioned that I was creating an adaptation of my Underground house. I was living in a town and had a fairly large vacant lot to start building in so I thought instead of making a normal house I’d get a bit more elaborate, so I decided to make my patch of land look basically just like a normal farm and I would have a well that leads to an underground house, I would still have skylights but these would be underneath water so would supposedly not be visible (though in the finished product they actually were and I may rectify this.

The finished farm part of the overfarm.
 After starting the process in multiplayer and unfortunately losing my work to a map reset I decided to create it in creative mode as I usually do, I had trouble picking a spot as my original survival map that was now my creative showcase museum world thing didn’t have much clear land left around my original house so I decided to build over the river in the landmass that had my main mine entrance and the Blocktree house which interestingly enough I don’t think I’ve done a Minecraft Creations post about the creative remake, the same with my Hunter’s Hall and Birchwood house. 

The start of my original overfarm, it was a little cozier then.
I started off boring a 2x2 hole into the ground then went I thought I had gone down far enough I got busy with TNT and blew out a reasonable large space where I would make the centre area, this was much higher than last time obviously as this was 7 blocks high instead of 4. I made a hole for the water to fall into then put some water down the hole which allowed you to just jump into the water and  come out onto the floor underneath. I had decided before that the wood for the borders of the innermost area and my bedroom would be made out of dark oak (which is a reddish colour in the Cyberghostde's 256x HD Texture Pack that I’m using) the floor would be made of carpet and spruce wood and the roof would have acacia wood, most of the walls would be brick unless changed for that particular area. I made windows and wooded frames for the entrance area and turned it into a large room with three exits and put chests and crafting tables around as this would be my main crafting area. 

Semi-finished crafting area
 I then started blowing the hell out of the surrounding walls with TNT in order to create more space for rooms etc. 

kaboom!
 I made my bedroom first which was fairly small and simple, it was elevated one block above the main area and decorated with dark oak, orange carpet and a fireplace. 

Bedroom entrance
Hallway
My Bedroom

I then made the recreation area one block lower with a bar, speakers, pool tables and a giant fireplace. 
The rec room, with egg portraits, lots of egg portraits
I added a forge which was about three block’s lower complete with lava, water, anvils, furnaces and an armory. 

The forge and armory
I made an alchemy room with moss stone walls and some ridiculous lime green carpet and decided to make the library section entirely from spruce wood  a sort of spiral staircase with books in the edges and it went down 3 floors with the lowest level housing the enchanting table and being walled in Obsidian for a sinister feel. Sinister too as around the corner it led down a locked stairwell down to a variation of the “Crimson Hall” from my Brick Mansion, except this one was actually bigger and longer and took quite a while to mine out a hallway as I had broke into another cave system.

The Alchemy Room
The library with stairway down to the enchanting table
The obsidian level
Stairway to...
The Crimson Hall 2!
After randomly decorating the middle hallway with pictures etc I had a bit of space left over so I thought, well it’s a house I may as well do a toilet and I did. As with most of the furnishings in the house the toilet took the same style as the one in my brick mansion, made mostly of quartz with cauldron toilets.

Oh yeh, that right!
Complete with skull hand dryers.
Afterwards I cut out the holes for the skylights and added chimney’s for the fireplaces, I had to dig out quite a bit of the hillside in order to accommodate all the skylights for the rooms and the surrounding fence for the farm went quite high up. I planted almost everything I could think of including: wheat, sugar cane, pumpkins, watermelons, carrots and potatoes and tried to include an even amount of each.

Creating the farm
Due to the design of the skylights the farms looked pretty funky, you could actually see the glass underneath the water but I didn’t wait to set the glass and lower down as the extra water would put too much weight on it. I built the well and a covered storage area and it was pretty much done, it looked pretty cool how you could see into the house from the top and vice versa as you could see the sky and the moon from down below.

Inside the house
Looking down from the farm
A shot where I was still building the library roof looking up at the moon.
Most of the rooms I made following the same sort of design as my brick mansion, lastly I made a secret passageway through my wardrobe out of the house into the nearby cave which was the entrance to my main mine.

My secret wardrobe exit

So it ended up working pretty well, was one of the most intensive earth shaping and dredging projects that I’ve done since the brick mansion.

The finished outside and main inside area



So stay tuned there will be more LAN Comps, Brick Mansion updates, creative remakes and a whole new adventure coming up in the world of JD’s Minecraft.

JD

Walk/Flythrough of the Farm/House Farmhouse? nah lol, apologies for me stopping to put a lid on the toilets, I also forgot how to half fill the toilets the bowls kinda full lol need to ill a few beakers.

Home, home in the ground.

Thursday, 30 July 2015

Minecraft Adventures: Oceanic-Craft, Aquaglow, Lan Competitions and other shenanigans

I’ve come to a realization that apart from the select most popular few Minecraft servers don’t last for very long, Australian servers anyway. I’ve been on quite a few now and it seems like an endless cycle of them being started then closed down after a while then either the community moving to another or someone else starts a new server then they find that managing a Minecraft server is hard work then they stop and give it to someone else or just stop. It’s the reason I wouldn’t bother starting one as it’s a hell of a lot of work, especially dealing with random people who aren’t your friends.

I’ve noticed this happening more as Minecraft gets older and it’s the same with me really, I really just can’t keep myself that interested anymore, as I’ve done the same survival thing a lot, and it’s getting a bit old, but I think it’s because I end up doing the same thing all of the time and I need to branch out and trying different things, achievements, alchemy, weapons enchants exploring more, getting to the end, if only I could get motivated. What motivates me most now is LAN competitions, as it gives me that drive to create and show off what I’ve done and be recognised and applauded but don’t we all want that I spose?

But I digress, I have nonetheless managed to participate in and create things under several different circumstances inc just casually hopping on servers, LAN competitions and just experimentation of my own so I will detail what has happened in the interim of my last Minecraft Adventures which was quite a while ago, back in 2013! Man I have some catching up to do.

Lanslide V9 Minecraft Comp

So we’ll start with the Lanslide V9 Minecraft Comp which had been changed to an obstacle course comp. As you could probably guess I was pretty peeved about this as the Minecraft Build Comp was my forte and was pretty much the only thing at the LAN that I had a chance at winning so to take that away I really had nothing left. But I learned to deal with it as it was out of my hands and it was kind of true that it was usually between just two of us who were really competitive and the same people winning all the time and TBH it gives me time to relax a little as building in Minecraft from 11am till 5pm (sometimes more) got me pretty sweaty. So anyway with the Lanslide V9 Comp I only got a few shots of the pre-challenge, I unfortunately didn’t get any of the main course inside the castle which was a shame cause it was pretty damn epic with huge caverns and mazes and even an interactive tunnel questionnaire at the end. Needless to say I didn’t come first in this comp but it was fun nonetheless (and a lot less stressful).






The Castle where the main course was held.

Oceanic Craft

So awhile after having left Vancraft I was searching for another Australian server to join and came across Oceanic-Craft, which surprise-surprise is now defunct though it was an ok server while it lasted despite some of the admins being uptight pricks. I made a good friend in a guy named Silent_Puppy (now Shiny_Puppy, reminds me a bit of Snoop Dogg and Lion haha) and I soon joined his Megacity though I lived in the nearby forest, which you may have seen in my Minecraft Creations post on my Spruce Forest Tower which I created while I was there.

An earlier spawn point, I had pretty much chopped down every tree around it lol
Silent_Puppy's Megacity
Megacity in all it's glory
A view of my hole from the top of the sign
My forest hole, you can see the world border in the background.
I liked this place, it was one of my better underground holes.
Nightchoppin'

Bunny!
Megacity at Sunset
I made a house for another player who needed one as I was good at making basic houses and they liked it very much. I also participated in a few server games including a Maze (Which I won :D) and an obstacle course (Which I didn’t L)

Oceanic craft supports gay marriage lol
I won the maze comp!
But not the obstacle course
A house I made for another player.


After I had finished my tower I needed a break and when I got back Megacity had unfortunately been griefed and the tenants had moved away, Thankfully my tower was still standing as it was in a separate claim, ha HA! After that I decided to grab some resources from the ruined Megacity (especially the sign) in order to use for my new home, I did some more exploring on the server looking at various other people’s creations that had been abandoned (i.e no claim) and grabbed some materials for that too.

The new spawn (they replaced the trees haha)
Inside the spawn
Getting resources from the sign
The now griefed Megacity :(
And they expanded it too.
Unfortunately because a few of the admins as I mentioned before were very particular about this I ended up being banned for ‘griefing’ much to my protest as the land wasn’t even claimed. Silent_Puppy had left by this time but it didn’t matter anyway as the server soon got shut down, probably cause there was no-one playing cause some of the admins were cocks, just sayin’ hah


Aquaglow

Luckily for me my buddy Shiny_Puppy from the Oceanic Craft server had made a server of his own and I quickly joined and then quickly became a member of the new “Soul City” which was maintained by Kanga if I remember correctly. The city was pretty damn impressive with Giant trees and many layered parks, a church and a manner of many layered houses. After much though I decided on an interesting take on a past idea of mine. The idea was is that I’d name my claim “JD’s Funny Farm” or something like that  and have a normal looking farm with animals and crops on the top but on the bottom I’d have an underground house with glass skylights similar to my previous one except that there will be water above the skylights so it looks like a perfectly normal farm. I would then create a well in the middle so I could disappear into it down to my house. So I went on my merry way of creating the farm but unfortunately before I could finish the map needed to be reset so I lost basically all that I had done though this was usually the way with Mutliplayer and I don’t really think  I’m going to other making anything significant on one anymore. I ended up remaking the house in creative mode though I will have a post up about that later.

New hidey hole, went the full 256x256 Realistic by Cyberghoste this time
Towers! that one looks like the Empire state



Zeppelin!
I think this was the obstacle course arena, could be seen from the ground lol
Some custom blocks here
Soul City from the Zeppelin

The first attempt at my Overfarm, was a bit smaller then the real one heh
When I came back after the reset I did a bit of exploring on the server then decided to settle on a Mushroom island for a change with the idea of making some sort of “Magic Mushroom Palace” I struggled a bit with farming as bamboo for example doesn’t grow on mycelium so you have to make it separate. The other problem was I would have wanted to make the main body of the house out of Mushrooms with the interior being normal wood and carpet, but you can’t cut down mushrooms and collect the resources like you do for trees they just break apart.I won this "Hunting Rifle" that was a modded weapon on the server, it was basically a piece of iron horse armor that could "shoot" and was ridiculously powerful and to top it off it also had night vision and unlimited "ammo" crazy lol

To the seas!
A lovely sunset on my Mushroom island
One of the new Ocean Monuments was near my island, I jumped in quickly to have a look then was scared off by the guardians lol
The "Hunting Rifle with Night Vision on
And Night vision off, this was my home base btw
So I spent a while working out what resource I should use for the house and decided on Acacia Wood. I had been sheltering from the rain underneath a mushroom so I decided to make my house on top of the mushroom. Wasn’t exactly as good as I wanted it to be it was kind of just a plain loft house really but it was enough I guess.

My finished house.
Building a farm free of mycelium
Wheat farm.
Shortly after I had stopped playing for a bit I saw that Shiny_Puppy had stepped down as server owner and the guy who was admin of Oceanic-craft took over. Then most recently I saw the server had shut down completely, dang well shit happens I’d just like to thank Silent/Shiny for making my time there enjoyable. I actually did try to create a world in Singleplayer that was entirely Mushroom biome but unfortunately it didn't have red mushrooms just white so I'd like have to make a normal map and zoom around to try and find a mushroom biome though I suppose it's doable.

Baby Mooshrooms!

After that I left to play some more Star Wars the Old Republic but did manage to mess around with some Amplified word which was fun, damn they are amazing but would be a nightmare to play on.

The amplified world, awesome to look at, crazy to play on it


So that was basically a quick sum up of what happened in that period, I will create a post regarding my Overfarm soon. I’m currently making an entry for the  Digital Blasphemy Sandbox Challenge 2015 where I’m creating Desert Snow which is a lot of fun to do. I’m thinking of doing another singleplayer adventure (not making some huge thing this time) with lots of mods like Mo’creatures and Biomes O’Plenty and maybe even a shaders mod to make it more interesting. I’m also determined to get Forge working this time as I’ve never been able to do it but I want to in order to get a MapMod working as the old Rei’s Minimap is no longer working. I think what I’ll have to do is just pick an update or version level (preferably 1.8) and get everything I can for that to make the whole adventure super awesome. Meanwhile I’ve got Star Wars Dark Forces, GTA5 and Mercenaries to get through.

Never stop building!

JD


No place is forever