Minecrafters, assemble!

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

I just wish I could have shown off my "Oblivion Tower in the Mortal Realm," complete with its own handmade island and border of flaming netherrack. It would have been too dangerous to try to put in a moat of lava.


A shame I never did finish it, and considering it was made of obsidian, would have never been able to have been legit. The island was, though. I can't remember how big it was. I do know that even with the single-player command mod it took a long time to actually construct the tower.

 

[Overread]

Obsidian, library blocks and TNT are three things you can legitimately cheat to get without people hating on you for getting them that way - because getting them normally takes forever!

That said really liking that dam and lighthouse (mine pales to comparison now!)

 

[Lenny]

I see no reason to cheat to get bookshelves - set up a tree farm and a sugarcane farm and you're laughing all the way to the bank. Yes, it takes a bit of time to build everything, but once you're done, you'll be swamped in sugarcane and wood.

Obsidian and TNT I can understand, though.

 

[Overread]

To be fair I didn't feel like setting up a sugar cane farm - and I was building a fairly big library (nothing on the scale of the above projects I hasten to add - just big for a wolfbuilder). So cheating just sped things up a bit.

On the subject of farms I was nosing around and found that people actually made cobblestone farms (or rather stone fountains that they mine). I couldn't get my head around why though since its just as dull as driving down a borehole - minus the fact that a bore hole can find loads of shiny interesting things as well as caves and other neat things.

I've also been cheating for redstone recently - but mostly because I'm fooling around with TNT and canons (trying to work them out myself and only half reading the guides ) so it tends to result in lots of lost resources to - - minor setbacks....

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

Yeah, by the time I abandoned my Oblivion tower, it had, if I remember correctly, over sixty thousand blocks of obsidian alone in it, complete with the Corridors of Dark Salvation, the Rending Feast, and many other aspects. Shame I never did build up Sigillum Sanguis.


That being said, I soon lost count of how much dirt it took to create the island and going through the nether for the netherrack was no fun. Ugh. At one point I had to do peaceful just to prevent death by ghast. I'm a bad shot against their fireballs.

 

[Overread]

Picture time!!!!!!! !!

The"front" of the main fortress. When I started those were going to be outer walls to a castle, then once they were made 4 blocks thick and towers added and suchlike I found that it was far smaller than I thought - so it became a keep with a rain cover over the main court yard.
I also started with all cobblestone walls, till I thought that it looked bland and so I'm (slowly) changing cobblestone for obsidion (the front is pretty much done the rest are in need of various amounts of repair)

And here is the way in

Lever for the 6 blocks that pop up is just behind me, whilst the 4 that slide apart (two moving into the walls either side) are controlled by a level just under one of the supports you can see. These are also switches that are mirrored inside the fort via a fancy logic gate (all hidden underground) which lets me have a pair of levers inside to lock the fort. It's the only official way in and out.

Inside from the corner, you can just see the entrance. I'm not sure what I'm doing with this area as yet so its fairly bland.

And facing the other way from the corner up toward the main tower of the keep - mostly unadorned and unfinished.

 

[Overread]

Ground is boxes and furnices and general work area

The next two levels are pretty bare and boring with nothing in, then we meet the library:

Best thing I've ever built thus far - nice wood fire (well really hell stone but still) loads of books and a big reading window

A peek at the bigger and totally unfinished library (which isn't as nice as the small one because I got carried away building books and forgot to put in a log fire!)

And then we've Isengard

Er I mean my lighthouse (which can't run because it slows my machine down). But essentailly its two layers of pistons which open and close, letting me run a beam of light around. I can vary the beam length and also have them go opposite directions (if I fiddle with the redstone circuit). It's also as tall as I could go before the new patch - so it has a flat roof at present, but I'll be sure to add more to it now the world is higher.

 

[Overread]

And a peek from on high

Showing the fort, most of the library - the road out to the mines and the outer terraced area and tower (which once I perfect a working design will house a TNT gun turret!)

Annnnnd photobucket proves it really can destroy anything when it sets its mind to it

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

What I'm wondering is, if there was ever a real story Notch ever intended to put behind Minecraft....

Back before the Adventure update, it obviously didn't need one, but I think the credit roll was a little too ambiguous and confusing to be a real explanation of anything...

 

[Warren_Paul]

I think it was intended for people to make their own stories, hence "adventure maps".

There are a few around, most broken by updates though

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

Well, one can still do their own story.


I have a few stories behind my maps, as I have a few skins for my character. My current one is this, in the Isaac Clark skin, and a weird little texture pack I picked up:


After the events of the second Artifact incident, Ellie died on board the escape pod due to an untreated brain hemorrhage caused by the wound to her eye. Isaac had put himself into suspended animation and the controls of the pod eventually wore out, hurtling him through space, far into the universe where humans had not yet ever been. He crash-landed onto a foreign planet, his ship falling into a deep ocean. He managed to swim to shore but found himself stuck and alone, needing to adapt to survive.


And that's pretty much what I have. I have one dealing with the ghost of a story character I killed off, and one dealing with an ex-Templar.



The trouble is, I felt there could really be something fully behind Minecraft if Notch could just put in some explanations. For instance, just who built the strongholds? Who built the nether fortresses? What are the zombies and skeletons the undead of? Who built the mines deep underground and left them to be overrun? In other words, was there a previous civilization of Minecraft and what happened to them?


That's the main trouble. No history behind the game.

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

Wish I could show you guys what I'm working on right now, started just this morning. To put it simply, I call it the Infinity Tower. For reasons of shape, understand.


Only a single day's work on it and it already reaches cloud level. It's simple so far, and I hope to get it to reach maximum height, then figure out something else to do with it...

 

[fxlive57]

I get a real interest in doing something epic in it.

 

[Dozmonic]

I've been playing a server with the tekkit mod - the amount of machines and complexity that adds is mind boggling. Some aspects I don't like... you can set up quarries that pipe what they mine out and put it into various chests which is great. However, you can also have them feed into an item that assigns all items a value and will convert from one to another. So your quarry can turn cobblestone and dirt into diamond. The next step beyond that is a cobblestone generator that'll farm infinite cobblestone (from water+lava source blocks) and turn those into whatever you want.

Disable that aspect of the mod and you've got a fantastic playground

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

First aspect of my infinity tower is finished and has a working nether portal on top of it, along with a "defunct" Aether portal, which is a mod I am hoping will be upgraded at 1.3.


I'm also planning on building more onto the tower, slowly. I sure as hell have enough cobblestone available.

 

[Shane Enochs]

If I created a new server, who here would want to play? I'd keep it up as close to 24/7 as possible.

 

[Lenny]

I'd happily pop on every now and then. Until September though, I probably won't have much time to do anything other than build my standard base - walled area with a small house, tree farm, wheat farm, the beginnings of a quarry to bedrock, and possibly some watch-towers.

---

I notice I haven't posted any pictures since the early days of my original base (it's a lot bigger now!). I've got a few other things on the go, including a mountain retreat, a house with a pretty extensive rail system (on a server with some people I knew as undergrads), and a 25x25 quarry slowly making it down to bedrock (what? I find putting on some music and digging is quite relaxing!).

If I remember, I'll put some up tomorrow (though my original base seems to have changed biomes since I last did anything, so all of my water is frozen ).

EDIT: There's a thought! I seem to remember sending a copy of my original world to friends before the biome update (1.8?), and I've kept all of the old Minecraft .jar files. I'll see if I can hunt it down to show off in all it's true glory!

EDIT2: Turns out that simply opening a world in an old version of MC reverts back to the old biome (though I guess things will just break if you try it with a world started after 1.8) . Once I've broken the ice, I'll take some screenshots of my original world in its final form.

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

Well, it'll have to be a new project for me. My save world with the infinity tower got corrupted somehow and wouldn't load, so...


But that'll free things up for a new project. Not sure what, though.

 

[Shane Enochs]

Edited for security.

 

[Lenny]

You might want to hide the IP and give it out to people in PMs, for various security reasons. It might also be an idea to ask people for the MC usernames when you give out the address, and whitelist them.

Also, I realise I forgot to mention that I can't connect on the standard port (25565)! My connection at University only allows certain ports out (I know that 443 and 27050 work - 443 is HTTPS, and 27050 is regularly used by online games), and I can't change any of the router settings to allow others, unfortunately.

I'm at home for at least a few weeks from September 7th, so I don't mind waiting.