Minecraft Christmas Time 2013

Merry Christmas Everyone!

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

My Usual Spiel: Saints Row IV, Turn the epic crazy up to 11

Release Date: 12/9/2013
Genre: Action Adventure
Publisher: Deep Silver

Developer: Volition Inc.
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Players: 1 or 2 Co-op and multiplayer.
Classification: R for REFUSED (in Australia)

When the infamous Saints Row the Third was released there were a lot of people asking how Volition was ever going to top the semi controlled chaos that was the storyline and the gameplay,  but now they’re saying that again about the latest installment.

Part of the cast from Saints Row IV from left to right: The Boss, Pierce Washington, Shaundi, Matt Miller, Kinzie and Asha Odekar

Having not played the original two Saints Row games I found Saints Row the Third one of the most enjoyable games I have played in awhile, I rightly considered it a fun alternative to the sometimes tedious realism that the Grand Theft Auto series creates and does well of course but sometimes you just need to let loose, and I mean hanging off choppers while shooting a rocket launcher then parachuting onto the top of a skyscraper then falling off that or shooting people dressed in animal costumes in a game show entitled “Professor Genki’s Murder Time Fun Time”. So because of that you could in all regards view Saints Row the third as a wacky brother to GTA but the next in the series shakes this theory up quite a bit.

Oh yep, that's a big ship alright.

Without spoiling too much yes this time around the leader of 3^Rd Street Saints (aka you) gains presidency of the United States after stopping a nuclear missile from exploding the country, then the Earth gets attacked by Aliens and you have to stop them. This was a bit of a drastic step as I thought as the Saints Row series could have possibly gone from a humble street gang to taking over two cities to taking over the whole of the United states in this installment rather than you being president right from the start then a out-of-nowhere alien invasion. So I guess I feel like they kind of went a bit further then they should but who knows really there will always be way to go in the future, not to mention prequels everyone loves prequels even if it’s going over past game content, actually wait. The usual Saints Row wit and flair is there obviously, the white house seems more like a party house with MP’s drinking beer and watching strippers dance on poles installed in the rooms, on your walk through the halls of congress you get stopped by Keith David with two documents and you shortly have to decide whether to end world hunger or cure cancer, gawd, I was playing it at a lan at that point at was so concerned that I had to walk outside and ask people their advice on my decision, how democratically-minded of me.

Being the president means making difficult decisions.

Saints Row IV was originally intended to be an expansion for the previous game but then changed so that it was a full sequel. This does mean that the graphics have not exactly changed much since the last installment but in my view the graphics were fine to begin with, not super trying to be realistic but not poor-looking either. Also the quality of the graphics is far less a topic of conversation than the eye candy on offer, the city of Steelport is pretty much the same as it was before but the inclusion of the alien buildings and ships and also the interior of the Alien vessels look pretty cool, not to mention the massive alien ship hovering over the centre of the city, though the ship which acts as your home when you’re not in the simulation does look kind of bland. As the city is supposed to be a “computer simulation” of itself you do notice many things that denote that for example there are matrix references with the water and parts of the landscape and buildings turning into 1’s and zero’s on certain occasions and cars and people sometimes ‘bug out’ by flipping around or the models suddenly twisting into wrong sizes and contorted shapes. The city is still as fully functioning as it was in the previous game with normal ‘simulated’ inhabitants etc the major changes are all the statues, billboards, posters, some stores and general signs and advertisements are all changed to a general theme of fear and submission by the alien invaders and their leader, the main antagonist Zinyak.

Looks like something from an Orson Welles film

Probably the most drastic change in the gameplay is the way you move around the city right from the start in this new simulation you are given superpowers that allow you to sprint faster than cars and jump as tall as houses and small buildings this along with other powers that you receive over time that help you move around such as wall jumping/running and air “dashing” and gliding quickly makes using actual vehicles seem pointless, even more pointless by the fact that to upgrade these powers you need to collect data clusters which are scattered throughout the city that you can spend as a currency for upgrading your current powers and when you acquire new ones through doing the story missions. Collecting these is heaps of fun and you jump and glide and dash across the city and even at the start where your power aren’t that good it’s much more practical and rewarding to jump and sprint across the landscape collecting data clusters to get better powers then driving a fast car there for the sake of efficiency which will be made redundant when you get better powers anyway. As you progress you unlock more powers such as the ability to throw energy blasts and objects around with telekinesis and one of my personal favourites is the ability to charge down to the ground from above superman style and create a huge shockwave.

Gliding through the air, probably my favorite thing to do in the game, you can see some data clusters on the top of those smokestacks.

A feature that has made a return from the previous game is your “hub” which now instead of it being your phone is now just a hub where you access things like the map, your ‘quests’, your normal and power upgrades menu, ability to phone homies etc and your money laundering account is now your ‘cache’ but works relatively the same way. Basically most of the hub menu features have returned including the upgrades menu where you can upgrade your health/stamina/weapons/homies etc and you can also increase your strength i.e. the power of your punches and how far you can throw people. The character creation is a bit less extravagant this time but you can still go pretty crazy I just tried out the randomizer a few times then managed to come up with a guy who I think looked exactly like my character from the previous game when I gave him the “clean cut” haircut he had before which was kind of weird though I don’t remember him having eyes that big, but meh there’s your usual array of modifiers so you can create your own crazy avatar. The simulation of the city of Steelport basically has basically the exact same layout and shops inc plastic surgery, tattoos, street and fetish clothes etc  as before though the Saints hideouts have been removed and the “Planet Saints” shops have been changed to “Planet Zin” though you can still get all the regular saints gear from there. I was going to go my usual jeans, skate shoes, trilby and purple dressing gown but decided to go with a jacket, shirt and tie this time being the president and all and it worked quite well, I didn’t really experiment much with clothes after that I just go with what works really.

Lookin cool with my "Lazor Razor"

Even with having all these awesome powers I was still interested in seeing what was to offer with the weapons as I’d heard of some of the Alien weapons inc the Abducto-matic and the Inflato-Ray. You do use the Alien weapons throughout the story mode and they are ok I spose, there is an alien version of each type of weapon but I decided I’d go with regular weapons since I’m a human fighting aliens though because most of these weapons were from the previous game though I went with the police versions of each rather than the gangster versions I had used before. There are 7 categories of weapons inc Melee, Pistols, SMG’s, Shotguns, Rifles, Explosives and Special, each category has different sub classes i.e. semi automatic and pump-action shotguns and each sub-category has various models of itself for example a water pistol model for a rifle. This makes quite a large selection of weapons available not to mention the new special weapons which aside from the usual flamethrowers and grenade launchers there is the addition of the Lasergun and Minethrower arms used by Alien enemies. Though my most favourite  weapon would no doubt be the infamous Dubstep Gun as not only does the gun fire “wub” blasts to the beat of the song it plays, these blasts can also be upgraded to explode creating massive damage, this gun uses no ammo but requires a charge to fire and pedestrians dance to the music when firing, seriously what could be better?

The Dubstep gun in action demonstrated by GamingMistress

I was also thinking whether I would use the car shop again and I did right at the start to create my little smartcar that I loved so much from the previous game in the Saints Row style but realised almost immediately after that that I shouldn’t have wasted so much money as I wasn’t going to need a car at all, and even if I did need a car you get that many vehicles to use in your garage (inc flying vehicles) for free from doing the story missions so that using the save-a-car system is a novelty thing at best. Also now when you dial-a-car from your hub it just warps you straight into it so there’s another thing about vehicles that has been automated. Apart from the new alien vehicles (and some new city vehicles) everything is pretty much the same as before and as you do various missions you unlock new Alien and novelty vehicles mostly from the previous game which have little or no significance for this one. I can honestly say that the vehicles are really in this just for looks, for you at least.

I'll say it, these things are really OP

The gameplay works in a very similar manner to the previous game, in the simulation you have “entry/exit points” rather than hideouts that let you go to and from the Zin ship you have stolen. The activities are different this time around with the exception of Tank Destruction and Fraud which has become much easier now with the ability to launch yourself high in the air, the activities mostly revolve around using your superpowers which include super sprinting across a mapped course and a simulated racetrack dodging barriers Battletoads style, jumping and running up tower platforms, using your telekinesis to hurl objects in a new Professor Genki game as well as the Genki superpower showdown which is like some sort of super power WWE style wrestling match. As I mentioned before there are lots of data clusters for upgrading your powers scattered around the world and sometimes you need to use powers like telekinesis and super stomp in order to get at them, there is also statues of Zinyak to destroy and various audio logs which contain quotes from the characters.

Professor Genki's M.O.M, where you must pick up and throw the correct objects which is either humans, cars or Genki heads into the correct spinning hoops.

The sound and music in Saints Row is excellently over-the-top, the pulsating beats and pounding dubstep soundtrack to the game menu mixes well with the classical music remixes and I was more than often physically dancing to some of them, especially this one. The game includes a small range of radio stations with fully licensed songs, some of which are used to great effect in story missions especially Haddaway’s What is Love during a scene when you’re flying the ship. As I mentioned before because it’s almost unnecessary to drive vehicles Volition decided that because you spent the majority of your time in the simulation they have made it so you can listen to the radio while on foot, and this actually creates some great moments where you’re shooting up enemies to  Blur’s ‘Song 2’ or flying a helicopter to ‘Flight of the Valkyries’. Probably my most favourite station is the Klassik 102.4 which is interestingly hosted by Zinyak himself, this station has lots of great classics my favourite being Jacques Offenbach’s, Orpheus in the Underworld: Infernal Gallop which creates a hilarious soundtrack when doing anything really. The voice acting in Saints Row is great, I liked the first male voice and I love making a character that fits it so well, there’s some interesting celebrities in some of the cameo roles.

What is love! baby don't hurt me....

There have been many games that have stirred controversy over the years and the Saints Row series is today’s prime example. The game was refused classification in Australia due to the Rectifier Probe weapon (which was removed from the game) and the “Girls night out” mission where Shaundi and the player consume alien drugs and receive superpowers, this though was still in the game, the one I played at least. Though this was minor in my view, though the game has a large focus on sex and sleaze and there is plenty of scantily clad women around though there is no actual on screen sex, you can have sex with any of your ‘crew members’ aboard the ship (this is amusingly referred to as "romancing your crew member") and this is obviously off screen. A few times throughout the game I noticed that they would have been a bit more enjoyable playing as a female character and after I had finished the game I did start out with one just to quickly see the differences, it’s an invigorating way to play the game if anything though it’s a real change to the way I usually play.

The banned rectifier probe (pictured with another classy looking melee weapon), I don't have a screenshot of how it works but you get the idea. I don't know about you but I prefer the lazer samurai sword.

I enjoyed my pants off (not literally) of Saints Row IV there was just something so exhilarating and free of bounding, gliding and zooming over the landscape, the story is heaps on fun to play and each mission no matter what type of thing it is parodying there’s always that sense of Saints Row wit and flair. The game does have a bit of the GTA syndrome that when you do finish the story mode there’s little to do (challenges) etc though you can re-do almost any mission you like (to an extent). This series represents some of the best things gaming has to offer, chaos, freedom and fun and that’s what it’s all about.

JD

Free as a flying squirrel.

Minecraft Adventures: Vancraft and the Sunken Temple of Solitude

In the fine month of Autumn I decided between the builds of my Brick mansion that I felt like some more survival classic PvP, and actually do PvP this time, so I trawled the Australian Servers under minecraft-mp.com and settled on one that looked pretty good called Vancraft named after it’s friendly owner Vandorann and it ticked all of the boxes including Bukkit, Factions, PvE, PvP and Survival. Pretty much as soon as I got there, there was a “Drop Party” going on, where the Admins would fly around the spawn room and drop various items while the players below would jump around trying to get them. I managed to score myself quite a haul getting 5 diamond blocks, a Steve head, 4 Iron blocks, lots of coal and iron and redstone, gold nuggets, wheat and various other goodies that allowed me to start off with a bang.

A shot of the Vancraft Spawn Area

The Spawning Chapel where they had the drop party

The Market

And with a bang I did, I walked around for a while exploring the area, there were quite a few things to see as there always is around these servers before finding a jungle biome and digging a small hole in a hill to forge some Diamond armor and a sword to have the best level of protection in the wilds.

Some kind of Mushroom-related house

I then decided to log in to the Teamspeak server and went to the Minecraft channel where Tim0776 came down and asked me how old I was, and in saying I was 28 moved me down to the Admins channel where I met Vandorann and Mstrdonut and they were all quite friendly. Tim0 even invited me to his faction and his odd looking base out in the ocean.

I find it interesting how much I am trusted when joining Minecraft servers once I tell them I’m over 21 I spose it’s just all the griefing, immature and distrustful younger generation that people were suspicious of. It’s happened quite a few times actually so the advice I give is if the server has some of kind Teamspeak/Ventrilo or any type of voice server get on and say hi, you’ll be amazed of how far that goes with trust once people hear you and  if that isn’t available then some random acts of kindness will go far too i.e. giving someone a gift of iron bars or even diamond if you can spare goes a long way too. I’ve learned over the time i’ve played on random factions servers that you need create a reputation of integrity for yourself in the community if you want to remain part of one.

I had came out of my Nether portal and found myself in someone's house once and found this odd setup, I cannot fathom why someone would use Anvils as a bedrest display. You literally looking at 186 iron bars there less the amount of coal that was used to smelt them as well.

  Anyway once I had my temporary hideout sorted I decided instead of a jungle retreat high up in the trees I wanted to build in a swamp and make a sort of sunken-temple-like structure in the middle of a swamp lake (much less picturesque I know) be but in order to do that I was going to need a swamp. So after trying the ‘random location’ command “/rl” a few times I found a few interesting things  and falling in a large hole and going splat and Van very nicely recovering my stuff. I'd made quite a few saved locations with Rei's Minimap it's quite useful when you use the marker options so you can see how far away everything is to you and that's useful when you want to get as far away from spawn as possible.

I called this "the blasted desert"

I did actually find a little swamp near a large lake with towering wooden walls above it, Van said some people had used to it raise there woodcutting skill which I found kind of odd as due to the Decapitator Bukkit mod the trees fall as soon as you cut part of the trunk but still this was much too close to spawn so I figured I was going to have to do some exploring. I went out to tame the horse that was sitting in the trees near my hole, I had bought a saddle with in game money that you recieve from voting for the server which I had done a few times and after a few tries of breaking it in I got the saddle on and was up fine.

Horsey come down!

So off I went on a grand journey across the world in search of a suitable place. This was the first time I’d ridden a horse and man are they fast and they can jump damn high too and I felt like a badass running monsters through on my high horse. After a while I did find a small swamp, fortunately though Tim0776 did some flying around and found me an even bigger swamp where I gratefully travelled to, to build my creation.

The Swamp, as taken from the edge as you can see the green from the forest biome is covering half of the tree. This also happens with the water as you can see from the edges of the swampland the water is murkier.

Now you might be thinking, “isn’t this a survival PvP server” why would you want to think about building a large structure when it might get destroyed, and unfortunately I really didn’t think that all I could focus on was creating a brand new funky creation that I always do. I don’t know what gets into me maybe I just don’t like PvP but I don’t know why I keep joining servers that have it, maybe for that extra element of danger I guess? So anyway, I picked the lake, made myself another hole and got building. One thing I found during my extended period in the swamps is that they were one of the hardest biomes to build things in, their dark in texture, there’s water everywhere and they seem to spawn the most amount of monsters out of any biome I’ve seen including Slimes which can see you wherever you are and their splotchy moving noise is hella annoying. I also found that I would have to deal with a Zombie horde every night, I even tried creating pits and traps to kill them all but unfortunately since their AI upgrade they don’t just walk blindly towards you and fall down the hole in between you and them anymore so you have to be a bit more creative and unfortunately I wasn’t.

The main resource room of my underground base

Over the course of building I had to add a few extra rooms to my underground base inc. a bedroom, a room for the, anvil, incinerator and nether portal and I also covered up my pit trap and started digging downwards to gather enough cobblestone to cook to smooth stone to then turn into stone brick. Basically not much happened after that, I just started building and kept building with amazingly no interference from any players, the main problem was the monsters that made life difficult but that’s what it’s like building on a survival PvP server.

The incinerator and Anvil room

The Nether portal, I had to create a gate around it as at one point I had a zombie pigman walking around.

 This was one of the more difficult builds that I’ve done as it required a lot of underwater work which was a major pain especially when you don’t have access to any kind of underwater breathing potion, as I forgot to go up for air quite a few times and ended up dying on occasion. Basically what I wanted to build was a temple that was half underwater so I started at the lowest point of the pool and built in a  supposed square around the bottom with stone brick and putting in glowstone on the rows every so often to be able to see what I was doing. And then basically I just kept building up and up and mining down and down heh. I voted for the server any time I could and used the money to purchase more stone brick.

Underwater building be a pain, also doesn't quite look very good with the stairs, hopefully they will fix that at some point.

When I’d almost finished the temple and was mining the last bits of stone I looked up and it was quite a damn long way up there, like I was some kind of miner looking around the huge cave of other miners, except it was just me but anyway. I built in a pyramid style right up to the waterline using stone bricks and steps though when I was directly on the waterline I noticed that the steps make that weird gap in the water so I had to leave that part without the stairs and then continued to the top which I filled in and made a roof across it with the glowstone in the middle of the poles supporting it.

That's a looooong way down.

The finished outer temple.

The next stage was to make a stairway down into the temple itself which didn’t take very long as there was only a few levels till I hit the sand island in the middle of the water inside the temple. Having become bored with building this creation I was just going to leave it as a quiet temple of solitude then Vandorann kindly helped me rid the water from inside the temple, so then me and another very helpful member of my faction whose name I unfortunately cannot remember started digging out the inside and removing the excess water left behind until we’d got down to the level that I started the temple.

Dredging out the lower temple.

 While we were doing this so many zombies and monsters appeared that we decided to wall off the entrance to the temple and add an iron door just to make things easier. I cleared out the floor and used the sand I had left over as a base for the downstairs level, I wanted sand down there as there’s something tranquil about cool sand in an underground place though I suppose it would be more suited to a beach or desert, there was also a section in the corner where I left a pool of the excess water which added to the tranquillity.

The door and some shots of the inside of the Temple

I didn’t do much else to the temple as I’d kinda had enough, I added a few torches and christened it “JDman’s sunken Temple of Solitude” and that was it really. I may re-create it in creative mode in the future thought. I’ve now shut off my home base to the world and will log in from time to time to see if anyone has found it since that Lockette has been removed but my Temple of Solitude will always be there.

Higher view of the temple.

The temple using Rei's Minimaps large surface map

So that’s that really, I’ve gone off to play some Star Wars the Old Republic and of course Battlefield, I’d just like to thank everyonething on Vancraft for an awesome time and hope to see you guys again.

JD

Probably my favorite shot of the Vancraft server, the lonely path to the red pyramid house, the texture pack really makes it quite picturesque.

 

Only the lonely