Sand Baori

A few years ago I went to see The Fall. It’s a gorgeous hot mess of a movie, if anyone’s interested. It’s a Tarsem movie, they’re all gorgeous and weird, and kind of hot messes, lol. Anyway, in among all the gorgeous weirdness, was one particular scene shot on an eye-boggling location.

I dismissed it as a special effect – there couldn’t be an actual place that looked like that. I completely forgot about it until the same location (or, as I found out later, a set based on it) popped up in The Dark Knight Rises several years later.

What.

I did a bit of googling and OMG. Yes. This place actually exists. It’s an ancient stepwell in India called Chand Baori, and it looks every bit as awesome as the movies make them look.

Awesome right?

So of course I’m looking at this huge thing and thinking “Hey… wouldn’t look cool if I built it in minecraft?”

This was a bear of a build – digging out the space from the middle outwards took forever even with scads of TNT, and then you would be surprised how long it takes to precisely line up all those stairs. And then doing the fortification at the top. It’s no real wonder I ran out of steam and didn’t do the temple in the middle. Still it looks awesome – goodness knows everyone who visits it for the first time is all !!! when they visit it. My favorite reaction is still Palcto’s “Is this a Death Arena???” (He still calls it that when he visits. XD)

I have my view distance set to 350 blocks, which is over the max amount for my phone as determined by the game, but it makes for such good pictures. You can see across the swamp to Wacker Tower in that one.

It looks super awesome from the top. Just the TEXTURE of it.

Now comes with chicken!

So about that bit of water filling the lower stairs of this build. Since I wasn’t building the temple, I thought it’d be cool to make the bit of water at the bottom more interesting…

So as you can see it goes down several more levels under the water. But what’s in the very center?

I’m always creating stuff with the idea that I’m going to turn this world into a more public server someday. So I designed the lower level as a hidden apartment complex. I think Wee Beast does have a base down here, but the rest is empty. In fact, I may not actually be finished digging some of the units out lol. Someday.

By the way – I do design a lot of these builds on graph paper. Here’s a rough sketch of the apartment level floor plans:

also gives me chance to use netherbrick, which is one of my favorite textures in the game – I just dont get much practical use out of it.

Bookshelves are another big Thing I like To Use A Lot.

This way ends up at a stairwell on the west side of the structure.

But if you keep going down the hallway instead of climbing out…

I’m a big fan of preserving natural terrain or caves or other generated weirdness in and around my builds, or at least faking that I did so more or less convincingly. There was a waterfall here, but it was only a single stream and flooded the area I needed to put floor, so I dug it a pit to drain into and widen it a little.

Keep walking though, and eventually you come to…

This was actually the first station I had to add to the Netherrack line after it was built, which partially explains why this station was on the other side of the tracks from the rest of them. (Also easier to connect the rest of the structure.)

Sand Baori actually sits on the Granite line as well, via an unconnected subway station on the north side.

I… might have a subway station formula I adhere to… >_>

Anyway, that’s the build!I leave you with an animated version of today’s cover photo:

A few more pictures from my very first server run can be found at this post.