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 Aquaticyes
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.
