Just a little note, I've been thinking for awhile of going back to .jpeg format for my images, this may not be best format but it means I can have my screenshots at the normal resolution without being the very large .png files that Minecraft creates.Coupled with how I like to use 256x256 texture packs it makes for very big image files some of which I have are over 4meg! I've found this nice little program called Sagethumbs which lets you convert image files just by selecting them all and right clicking in a snap, similar to the image resizer addon I have which I won't be needing anymore hah! so I hope you enjoy downloading my new much smaller file size images.
“Well that’s two thirds of it done” I thought to myself as I
started at the huge brick and wood laden structure that is by far the biggest
house I’ve ever attempted to build , though I had done pretty well, I really
need to take more shots of the stages I’ve got to but meh I usually just take
them at the end anyway I have a few though as this is and I’ve really gotta
push myself to get this thing done.
 |
| The house as it stands now: Entrance and Rooftop of lobby |
 |
| Dining/Dancefloor area |
 |
| Resource room |
 |
| Relaxtion pool/spa/sauna area |
There’s been a lot going on with the
version releases though I’ve only been concentrating on things that are
relevant to building my house.
Beacons are on example
which I have installed as a feature in the lobby, also I’ve made two lines of
Anvils next to each other
like some kind of multi-anvil and finally I’ve made good use of
Item frames which make
great wall features. Another great feature that has been added recently is that
stairs now connect to other stairs to form corner stairs on edges which makes
all uses of stairs (seating, decoration and
actually
stairs) look much nicer.
 |
| An Anvil |
 |
| Using item frames as a wall feature |
|
 |
| Some uses for corner stairs. |
I’ve made a lot and I mean
a lot of progress since the last adventures of JD post, basically I
was waiting for a long period of time one of my favorite mods
SingleplayerCommands
to be updated so I could continue building. The main reason for this was I’d
started the map in Survival mode and needed the mod basically for the commands
(not just the one that changed the world mode) Though after this lengthy period
I actually found that another of the mods that I use
TooManyItemshad some pretty useful buttons on the top of the inventory screen that
controlled, the day night cycle, the weather and most importantly whether the
map was in creative or survival mode so needless to say after a lot of wasted
time I quickly got to work.
 |
| TooManyItems mod adds lots of extra tools to the inventory screen, notice the very useful game mode, weather and monster options along the top left. |
After I’d left last time I’d cleared out the hill, carved
out some rooms and made some roofs/floors, created the alchemy room and the
indoor soccer pitch. I’d made a basic floor plan and decided to stick to it
(roughly). The alchemy room I had finished first and added the potion item
frames in recently as some sort of potion chart. It ended up looking pretty
good with the stone brick and the mossy cobblestone, of course I’ve never
actually done any potion making before so I’m not really sure what’s involved
apart from needing water. The soccer pitch was reasonably ok though I had to
remove the pool on the other side of the wall so the room with the soccer pitch
could be properly square (or rectangle) as having that part of the field right
next to the wall with the walkway on top really didn’t work or look good for
that matter. Once I had made the new wall and added some more seating it looked
much better. I also decided to colour the area around the pitch in blue as to
get a more indoor feel.
 |
| Alchemy room with potions in item frames. |
 |
| New and improved indoor soccer pitch. |
After a bit of haphazard TNT clearing work and cleaning up I
started work on the club, cause every house needs its own club yo. The “Snub”
Club turned out great, I love the way in the
Faerielight
texture pack the yellow wool really resembles carpet. I took a
lot of inspiration from the
Minecraft Furniture site and server
which is a delight to look around in I highly recommend checking it out if
you’re looking for ideas to decorate your home.
 |
| Main room with dancefloor, bar and VIP area. |
 |
| VIP area. |
I liked using oak wood planks
for the back of the bar and a feature wall for the VIP area as well as jungle
wood planks for the pool room as there’s just too much brick around. The note
and juke boxes work well as speakers and I even decorated the doorways in them,
the different level for the VIP and the pool room worked well too.
 |
| Sitting area with stairs down to pool room. |
 |
| Pool room. |
 |
| One of the entrances to the club |
After I had
finished the club I made another door in the section connecting the atrium and
the soccer pitch and made a door from the pool hall part of the club into the
soccer pitch as well. I had carved out the atrium but hadn’t done anything with
it yet as I wanted to leave it until I finished the other areas before I
planted the plants and grew the trees in the basement which technically wasn’t
that much of a basement as some areas could of even had windows as they were.
The forge mining area was pretty tricky, cleared the area
with TNT and decided to do the walls in stone brick instead of just stone as it
looks nicer and the floor in cobble as I couldn’t really think of anything else
to use. I had to build around the entrance to my diamond strip mine but it
worked pretty well the new cobblestone walls look pretty cool though I wish you
could make them with all kinds of stone. I created my usual lava/forge area
with lots of furnaces next to it
and
then made the cooling/water area with the multi-anvils next to it, though now I
think about it, from what I’ve seen in Skyrim you actually have the fire and
water in the same place i.e. the metal comes out of the fire, you bang it
around on the anvil then cool it in the water so I may change it at some point.
The rest of the area I just put chests and signs to store all the items, I
managed to work around the stairway to the mine being in the middle of one part
of the room as there was enough room around it to build boxes around it.
For
the entrance to the forge and the wall of the atrium it occupies I built in
stone brick with holes for barred windows and made some pyres outside the
entrance for decoration all of which looked pretty cool when done.
One other room I had to do was the Nether room, or basically
where the nether portal would go, this is one of my favorite rooms to create as
with the addition of
nether
bricks and stairs you can construct a pretty cool looking altar. I didn’t
really have anywhere appropriate to put the entrance so I just made a doorway
of netherbrick with iron doors, it isn’t exactly epic but it’s the inside
that’s epic and besides it’s supposed to be a house, this is just the portal to
the nether for resource and possibly adventuring purposes. I just managed to
fit the stairwell within the confines of the house as I don’t know whether I’m
going to continue the outer wall around that side. I named the stairway down to
the nether portal “The Crimson Hall” as with the Faerielight texture pack it
certainly is crimson, or maybe dark red. Anyway the walls I did with netherack
and made holes in the wall for fire, I put the portal on an altar and decorated
it with lava and fire.
 |
Entrance to the "Crimson Hall"
|
 |
| Stairway to the portal |
 |
| The ominous Nether Portal room, every house should have one. |
So the club, the forge/storage, the nether room and the
atrium had all been done which finished off the lower level. It went pretty
well, without much hassle had to change things round a bit but that was ok. I
left out a few things that weren’t really needed such as changerooms for the
soccer pitch though I was thinking of putting toilets in the club, but you
don’t go to the toilet in Minecraft but then again you can’t play soccer either
so I don’t know, I’d just rather keep it practical making sure I include all
the things you can actually do in Minecraft inc rooms for crafting, forging ,
alchemy, enchanting and a natural water area for fishing I’d suppose.
With the lower level pretty much finished I started mapping
out the lobby. I chose a certain height for the wall, then bricked it all up
with tall windows and in wooden frames to counteract all the brick.
 |
| Front of house with lobby walls and windows put up. |
I also
fixed up the entryway which I had created earlier (6 doors was enough) and also
added some more brick to the stairs. I also have a secret entrance underneath the
main one in the water, this leads to what I call the “undersurface” where you
can see the untouched natural ground underneath the floor.
 |
| Main entrance. |
With the lobby I
wanted to do sort of a entryway sitting room with a beacon feature in the
middle.
 |
| An early shot of the middle level and lobby where you can see the first build of the beacon feature and sauna. |
I only recently worked out how beacons worked but all I really needed
to know was how to make them project light into the air and all I need for that
was a certain number of iron, gold, emerald or diamond blocks and in creative
that was not a problem. Getting a beacon that works is a pretty big effort in
survival mode as it involved travelling to Nether fortresses for
Wither Skeleton
skulls
and summoning and killing a
Wither not to mention
getting enough blocks of the appropriate resource to get the maximum effect of
the beacon pyramid my house has. After completing the beacon feature for the
middle I created some seating and nature features with trees, plants and
mushrooms as well as waterfall features for the stairs.
 |
| Lobby left side |
 |
| Lobby right side |
 |
| Lobby right side |
 |
| Mushroom feature of lobby |
To complete the lower atrium I planted jungle trees and
ferns as well as bushes and other plants in the lower atrium and it worked out
pretty well when I added a gravel path, I also planted vines wherever I could
to get that more jungley feel as now they’ve grown long enough to go over the
entrances to the other rooms. I then built two sets of stairs leading down to
the lower level, one main set of stairs and another small set going over the
entrance to the soccer pitch. Which does remind me know actually that I have
pretty much finished the middle level I sort of forgot to leave room for stairs
up to the top level, oh well I’m sure there will be room somewhere.
 |
| The Atrium |
The first thing I made on the top level was the dining area
which consisted of a long table, wooden chairs and two more complex chairs at
the end. I really wish Mojang would introduce wool stairs and slabs or the
ability to cover slabs and stairs with wool as it makes it hard to make a wool
chair because you have to make a slab floor beforehand which sits lower than
normal floors.
 |
| Dining table |
Anyway so I created the table and chairs but decided I should
make this little square bit that was jutting out of the main house into a
kitchen, and I did, got some quick inspiration from the Minecraft Furniture
server but it was pretty easy anyway. Used a variety of materials to make the
kitchen including blocks of iron, furnaces, trapdoors pinewood, buttons,
cauldrons and stone brick, and it’s looks pretty bitchin’ so much so that’s
what I decided to call it. I added a bar next to the kitchen too.
 |
| Bitchin. |
Behind the dining table I made a dancefloor with DJ
table and speakers and a potplant feature on the wall, the reason I didn’t use
the actual Flower Pots that are in the game is that you couldn’t actually stick
them to the wall and they were a bit small anyway.
 |
| Dancefloor with DJ table. |
The next room was to be the resource room, I found thought
to myself though the initial concept to this room as fairly bland as all I was
thinking of it was just a room with lots of organized and named chests and
readily available crafting tables, I then had an ingenious idea to make it a
bit more like an industrial processing and storage centre, and right way I knew
this room was going to take a lot longer due to that idea. It’s hard to explain
in words but basically what I wanted to do was create a minecart tracks for
minecarts with chests to run along from one area to another sort of like a
supply line, there would be minecart tracks going to 3 different places, a
mine, the surface outside the house and the forge inside the house. But of
course to do this I needed a mine and one that was close by so I scouted out an
area with my x-ray mod. Finding one I decided that the best thing to do would
be to blast a huge hole and bore into the ground with TNT until I found a cave
system (yes that’s right) which I did without too much trouble and even found
an underground crevasse pretty close by.
 |
| The minecart ramp to the mine and the surface. |
 |
| The 4 tracks down to the mineshaft |
 |
| The mine processing area |
 |
| Entrance to the main mine and underground crevasse. |
I then built a huge ramp wide enough
for four minecart tracks, a walkway and fences on the side which led from inside
the house all the way down to where I’d stopped and turned the bottom into a
sort of underground processing and storage area to go back up to house. I made
a similar thing on the ground outside the house then finally dug out a tunnel
for another two tracks to go to the Forge and back, I then made racks to put
the double chests on and signs to mark what was in each of them and crafting
tables around the general area. I decided to use the item frames as decoration
again and made a large feature on two walls, funny thing was I used the
toomanyitems mod to pick the order to display so I ended up having moving water
and lava on a frame, hah oh well something surprising anyway.
 |
| The finished resource/storage room |
 |
| Chest racks with signs and crafting tables (I can make them higher if needed) |
 |
| Minecart tunnel to the forge area |
The last part of the middle level was the relaxation/pool
area, this was the biggest area as I’d cut the resource room off short so I
could fit a large spa, a pool and a sauna, which I did. The spa worked pretty
well, made in a desert theme with cacti, dead bushes and sand brick.
 |
| Desert-themed Spa |
The sauna
I made with birch wood and cracked stone brick which looked pretty good with
the colour of the birch wood in this texture pack.
I love the way the pool
turned out, basically I was filling it up but in order to fill a large space of
water to more than one level you need to make it smaller first, so I ended up
making these rows around the edges to get the water the right level. When I’d
finished though I actually though the end result looked really cool as it
looked like there were lap swimming lanes around the edge and a main pool in
the middle, so I did that and made the middle just a bit deeper. I then added
some lights to the bottom and worked on a
few nature features included a desert taiga and mushroom biome feature
and a window. I’m still deciding what I’m going to do with that large wall
space, whether I extend the pool via waterfall to the outside though I would
have to close up the entire room but I’ll see how I go.
 |
| A very oddly-built pool. |
 |
| Underwater building, only slightly slower |
The last thing to do until I had another break from this
huge time investment I had to make the lobby roof, yes a roof for the lobby was
needed as it is lower than the rest of the house. Basically I just wanted to
make a basic dome shape with some sort of feature on the top for the beacon to
shoot through so I made a small pyramid at the peak with a hole in the middle
out of stone brick, I think stone brick is becoming my favorite block to use
for structure other than red brick of course. I extended the stone brick
pyramid out to the sides of the roof for support and put some lightstone in
there as well. I was going to do a bit of overhang with the roof but then
decided against it as it looked sort of messy, will definitely do it for the
roof of the upper level though as that will have some balconies, I’m actually
thinking of having some balconies for the middle level too. I didn’t really
have any idea how I was going to do the roof so I just sort of stacked on the
wood in levels which looked kind of messy in parts but mostly worked. I’m
thinking it does need a bit more natural light coming in so I’ll make some
holes in the stone for skylights.
 |
| Roof from afar |
 |
| Rooftop (the pyramid at the top is actually bigger now) |
 |
| View from inside |
So that’s basically it, there’s a bit to clean up and work
on but I needed a break after that effort, I’m even thinking of going back to
play survival which tried out a bit of on the
Mikeland
survival, but on looking at their revamped website it appears they have a PvE
server now!, hell why didn’t I see that before. Anyway I’ll be back here again
to finish off my house, then get started on the outside I suppose, will it ever
end? probably not, well I guess it isn’t supposed to, I mean what am I going to
do afterwards, build a whole self-sustaining farm? complete all the
achievements? kill the
Wither
and/or the Ender Dragon? After all there is a way to “finish” the game as the
Survival
page says, but whether I’ll still want to play by myself when this is all
finished is yet to be seen.
JD
With my own two hands... and a limitless supply of resources, and flight
