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