Builds – ARBTServer

June 10, 2018January 9, 2021

Brave New World Order

Screenshot from the game Minecraft, depicting a mostly empty landscape with a few buildings here and there.

I’ve been playing quite a bit since server reboot. Happily, I’ve had a few guests and a couple of brand new folks pop on and carve themselves a little piece of the server as well, which makes me happy. I’ve missed my server babies. <3

The server is mostly survival. I say mostly because I’ve been happily tooling about in creative mode building stuff. It is still surreal flying around the map and thinking to myself “ah yes, here is about where the Crystal Palace is” or “this is where the Four Guardians would be” and so on and so forth as I traverse the bare ground. Ghosts of Minecraft builds past. But I’m excited for what sort of structures may appear in Minecraftverse 2.0.

Screenshot from the game Minecraft showing a forested mountainous landscape with the top of a build visible in the distance. — View of a lake to the west of Center. In the distance the top of a build is visible. This is about where the Crystal Palace would be on the other map.

Spawn House and World Center

Obligatory first builds being obligatory, I built a nice little public house near spawn with some starter crops growing by the door and supplies in chests nearby. Due west of this at 0,0 is the first Tower. I like marking the center of my maps for some reason. Plus it’s a good landmark for folks to navigate by, depending on how far their render distance is. (Mine is cranked out to 64 chunks for the pictures, though I tend to play at maybe a quarter of that.)

Screenshot from the game Minecraft, depticing a large tower with a door at the bottom. — The eastern side of the Tower, viewed from ground level.

Subway 2.0

Because of COURSE I’m going to have one. Not really much to say about this, as it’s built in the same style as the old one, though between fill commands, setblock commands and a little typing/repeating help from autohotkey scripts, building them out takes a fraction of the time it used to. So far there’s only one length of track completed stretching from 0,0 to -1024,0) with a station at the midway point; hopefully soon I will have a bisected square of subway line built with a corresponding express track in the Nether.

Screenshot from the game Minecraft, depicting an unbuilt subway station space — An unfinished station shell at -1024, 0.

Screenshot of the game Minecraft, depicting a train station at track leve. — Station at -512, 0 at track level

Screenshot from the game Minecraft, showing the interior of a stone structure. at left, a staircase descends. — Station at ~ -512,0 at entrance level, interior

Screenshot from the game Minecraft, showing a stone structure with a doorway. — Station at ~ -512,0 at entrance level

There isn’t a station built out at -1024,0 yet because I haven’t quite worked out how it’s gonna work with the build I’ve started directly above it.

Huge Unnamed Build #1

So last week poking around Tumblr I ran across the below image. Further poking on the internet led me to more illustrations from a 1929 architecture book called The Metropolis of Tomorrow and an artist named Hugh Ferriss and oh my, talk about jabbing me directly in the Art Deco totalitarian dystopia feels.

a dark black and white drawing depicting an art Deco style towering edifice moodily lit from below — A drawing from Hugh Ferriss’ The Metropolis of Tomorrow

I feel like it would be hard to grow up in New York with an interest in architecture without loving some Art Deco style; goodness knows I did. Anyway I kept circling back to this particular image and thinking “I’m gonna Minecraft that building.” Started to do that yesterday.

Screenshot from the game Minecraft showing the top floors of a new building floating far above the ground. — A view of the floating top floors of Ferris tower from about -512, 0

Screenshot from the game Minecraft showing the beginnings of a building floating far above the ground. — The top four stories and the roof of Ferriss Tower take shape.

It made sense to me to start from the top and build it out from there, after a couple of hours with graph paper planning out the number of stories between building transitions. I’m excited as it’s going to be my first build that will cap out at the 255 block building limit, even if I’m vastly annoyed that Mojang still hasn’t raised the cloud level accordingly. I’ve tentatively named it Ferriss Tower after the artist, we’ll see if that name sticks.

Nether House

Not too much to say about this, as it’s just a tiny house in the Nether at the 0,0 mark. Mostly built it as a safe haven from the passing mobs and so that the nether portal in the Center Tower had a safe destination.

Screenshot from the game Minecraft showing the front of a small brick house. — Front of the Nether House at Nether 0,0. Pretty much a standard ARBT house in red brick

Screenshot from the game MInecraft showing the same brick house on an island in the middle of a lake of lava. Two bridges lead to it. — An aerial shot of Nether House, with the two bridges leading to it from two of the netherrack masses around it.

It feels good to be playing and building again, even if I’m neglecting some necessary life things to do so. >.> Hell, maybe I’ll start streaming myself again, considering this build is gonna take me a while to finish.

October 17, 2017January 9, 2021

Kitty Trap

WW2 era gun bunker on a hill with "Come see my cat" spray painted on one side

So noodling through Tumblr I discovered the above picture. After having a chuckle and mostly agreeing with the notes under it (my favorite being “this would be the horror movie scenario which gets me to leave my car and get murdered” because yep) I looked at it again and went “hey, that might be fun to build in Rust.” So I found a desolate looking hill by the satellite dishes, quickly built a bunker (with some decent loot hidden inside), then carefully lined up two huge wooden signs on the front facing the road. I then doctored up a cropped photo of just the graffiti, sliced it in half, and loaded it onto the signs using the SignArtist oxide plugin. I’m pretty pleased by the end result.

A Rust recreation of the same WW2 bunker with graffiti. — Happened to catch the cargo drop in the picture too.

Undecided whether this is a one-off joke or if I’ll be including the bunker in future wipes, but for right now I am VERY amused.

October 9, 2017January 9, 2021

The First Church of Obi-Wan

Screenshot from the game Rust, depicting the interior of a church.

Time to give my Rust island a little love!

Every wipe cycle I take the time to paste in one or two builds to liven up the landscape a bit. (Considering the island is usually empty, the landscape needs a lot of livening.) The first one is always the First Church of Obi-Wan, named for the giant picture of a bearded, Jesus-esque Ewan MacGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi hanging inside.

I built this originally for a private session of hunger games/hide and seek for my friends on the server; I built the church, put myself into God mode, and for every skull of another player they would bring me as “tribute” I would reward them with a gun. More skulls presented generally got better guns. Needless to say the game got brutal very quickly and the chest I was standing behind to receive tribute filled up VERY quickly with skulls.

I liked the church build so much that when I started leaving the server open I first would rebuild it in world immediately after wipes, and then once I discovered the Copy/Paste mod, just started pasting it in. It is built with strategically placed teddy bears and other comfort generating furniture, as the idea is for it to be a sanctuary where players can rest and heal up, though since there’s nothing preventing other players from popping in and sniping whatever sitting ducks are currently inside, and also since the helicopter can see inside via the grates in the cieling, there is only so much safety to be found inside. Use at your own risk.

I’ve made some improvements over the past few months, the latest being adding a side porch for workbenches and a large furnace in the back.

Side view of the Church, showing the new outdoor workbench space.

Looking towards the back from the tower.

Inside the tower! No bells, just lanterns.

August 31, 2015October 6, 2017

Featured Build of the Month: A cottage near spawn

August is drawing to a close and comes with several new faces from WSE, a blip with the website domain, and many amazing builds being built or just getting started on. Today I would like to highlight, a cottage near spawn. The cottage was built by BatMan3054 and the farm was built by Swarmhut.

I like the use of bricks as part of the path material, because it really pops against the green of the surrounding grass. I admire how the windows of the building are irregular and somewhat mismatch. The windows of the house make it feel quirky.

wp_ss_20150824_0002 — The inside of the cottage

Stepping outside to the garden area features your basic crop setup and a outdoor shed. I like the use of the dark oak and the quartz as the retaining wall holding back the hill.

The best part of the build in my opinion is the roof. The roof looks worn down and has a very natural slope to it.

Well that’s it for this FBoM, until then keep on building.

Update: Due to some miscommunication, I incorrectly identified Rudie as the builder. If the builder would get in contact with me, I will update it to the correct person who built this.

July 30, 2015October 5, 2017

Meanwhile on Worst Server Ever…

Since /r/WorstServerEver started up a new map last month I’ve been hanging out over there whenever I’m not running game. It’s actually a really nice, laid back Survival server where people hang out, chill, build stuff and complain about chunk lag (which, being a pocketmine server, is kinda expected). I like the regulars there quite a bit, and there’s been a lot of cross-pollination between players there and players here, as DoublePositive, Batman5024 (? don’t know if I got the number right) FatalDeath, Hachi, and Umbrella_Hermit play there as well.

Well. First thing one tends to do is find oneself a bit of unclaimed land and make a base. Except the area around “spawncano” is pretty densely developed/populated so I decided despite the chunk lag to walk pretty far out along one of the overpasses until it ended in a hill, then I walked down some of Skribe’s dirt paths until THEY ended, fell into a ravine (thankfully not a deep one) climbed out, walked some more, and found a hill at the border of a jungle biome and a desert to dig out a home for myself. I think I managed rather adequately.

I’m not anywhere near done – I want to punch through the hill I’m colonizing eventually and build a log cabin style house above the main room, in similar style to Spawnhouse on my world, which got built almost exactly the same way. I also plan to continue with the layers of cobblestone basements, which hearken back to similar dig-out-and-redecorate-in-cobblestone style mines I tend to make on almost every server I have.

It actually doesn’t quite look like this anymore – I decided to expand each of the basement outwards after I took these pictures.

Anyway this is all very nice but it was near impossible FINDING it every time the server rebooted – there was a lot of wandering around, getting lost, and trying to figure out which acacia tree at the border of an unloaded chunk was the one I had to pass. So eventually I got annoyed with it and decided you know what… I’m going to dig a tunnel back to spawn area so that I can just run that way to my base. So I took some coordinates, changed my job to “miner” and got busy digging, and once I’d dug a path all the way through, I lined it in cobble, torches and gravel, because y’all know me and uniform tunnels.

So starting with this tiny cobble building on the shore of the swamp a ways behind Hachi’s house (you know the place)*, here is my weird and wonderful path home.

It's a long way down. — It’s a long way down.

This server has a lot of ravines.... — This server has a lot of ravines….

July 26, 2015October 6, 2017

Featured Build of the Month: Hachi’s Base

As July is coming to a close, with it comes exciting news from Minecon, a redesign of the subreddit and many of fun server runs. FBoM is in its 2nd month and is here to highlight Hachi’s base. The first thing I like about this build is the bottom floor with the checkered pattern used on the bottom floor.

The diorite fountains are a nice touch, because they contrast well with the blue stained clay.

Going up the large staircase we enter the main room that houses the bedroom, a living room and a small bathroom. A nice detail that is present is the small canopy above the master bed.

Going up to the top floor opens up into a rooftop balcony great for watching the sun rise/set.

If you want to check out Hachi’s base for yourself, it is located near spawn, behide the farm. You will need to go past my base to locate it.

July 21, 2015October 5, 2017

Fixing and Protecting a Village: Part 3

With a somewhat secret sunday run, I decided to continue pecking away with my village project. Unfortunately while preparing for 0.12 in my own world I forgot about making some buildings for the village. So I asked ARBT for some suggestions and she replied with a suggestion for a tavern. So I took the idea and see what I could do with it. This is what I have come up with.

Entering the tavern leads us into the main seating area with a bar and grill in opposite corners.

But now by now you are wondering what those doors are on the back. Well go up those stairs and see. They are guest rooms. The middle room is a bit tricky to get into. The top floor has a balcony offer a nice view of the village as whole.

wp_ss_20150719_89 — one of the guest rooms

Something I noticed while flying over the village as a whole is that someone, maybe ARBT’s stepkid, fixed the steps to the villager houses. Beforehand they were in the way of the path. Additionally I added a small villager style pumpkin farm for future building of iron golems to help protect the villagers. In the end, I am happy to say that I am finished with fixing up this village.

July 19, 2015October 5, 2017

Three Small Builds

I’ve been doing small quickie projects in my world just to pass time and fill up space. (Also procrastinating from finishing other stuff.) Finished up three smallish things.

The Cabin in the Woods

There’s this log cabin style house in Orange, MA on Rte. 202 (its here, if anyone wants to look at it in Google Street View) that we pass a lot on the way to Rt. 2. Every single time we did I kept thinking “oh… I should try making a log cabin in Minecraft” and then promptly forgetting about it. And then I didn’t forget.

I apparently have a thing for roses and potatoes. XD

The attic came out claustrophobic because I mathed wrong.

This was sort of a test run for what I plan to be the house atop my base on WSE, and I’m kinda glad I did it here first because I’m not quite happy with the way this came out. I think next time I attempt something like this a) wider on all sides so I end up with more of an attic, b) make the sides an even number of blocks so the roof peaks better. But for what it is, it’s kind of adorable. I think I will definitely be making more of this style house with different woods in the future.

The Haunted Ruin

Located on a small island not far from The Four Guardians is a ruin of… a small castle? a cathedral? a watchtower? People exchange theories about it in whispers, discussing the horrors that can be found within its cracked, mossy walls. Legends about about the source of the flame that still burns at the top of the crumbling but mostly intact tower that still at one end and never seems to go out. Perhaps it is demonic in nature. No one really knows….

Spiderboat, Spiderboat, does whatever a Spiderboat does... — Spiderboat, Spiderboat, does whatever a Spiderboat does…

Looking down from one of the crumbly pillars

Okay reality time – I started building a castle/cathedral thing on this island and kinda lost steam midway through. I’d put a bit of work into it, though and didn’t want to lose it completely, and then I got the idea of “ruining” it. So I built a 4×4 TNT bomb at one corner, set it off, then rebuilt some of the destruction with mossy cobblestone, mossy brick and cracked brick, strewed some cobwebs about, and then tossed in a few monster spawners. Voila, haunted ruin!

Significantly less creepy during the day.

Rainbow Balloon

I adore hot air balloons. There’s something rather intensely romantic about them. Honestly I am a fan of a lot of floating air transport like balloons, blimps and zeppelins. The latter are quite relevant to my steam- and decopunk interests.

I was initially thinking of making a zeppelin, but decided I wasn’t up to math-ing out an ellipsoid, but I could probably manage a sphere. I didn’t quite, but came close enough I think.

I’m not quite done with the exterior of this – I’m still replacing most of the white stained clay I initially used with wool in the rainbow stripey pattern you see in the picture.I do love how the flame source and the gondola came out, especially as I’d been mulling over what to make it out of and then realized if I used jungle wood, I could use cocoa pods as “ballast”

The really fun part about the balloon though is the inside.

Is that... dirt up there? huh? — Is that… dirt up there? huh?

When I was building out the shape I was using dirt to pad out the clay so I had something against which to lay the next layer of it. Since I was kinda to lazy to remove it, it ended up being this bizarrely neat looking spherical interior.

I think when the grass finishes spreading, I’ll come back, plant some jungle trees, grow vines from the top of of the balloon and make it into a seekrit cocoa farm. 🙂

So yeah, I’ve been busy, but I’ve been keeping my hand in doing littler stuff. Someday I’ll finish up the bigger stuff I’m working on. Someday. *sigh*

July 18, 2015October 5, 2017

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.

What in the name of MC Escher...? — What in the name of MC Escher…?

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.

Behind Christian Bale and his angst... — Behind Christian Bale and his angst…

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.

Stairs & stairs & stairs... — Stairs & stairs & stairs…

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?”

Yes. Yes it would. — Yes. Yes, it would.

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.

A looooong corridor down one side of the fort.

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…

The chicken is not the interesting part.

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

Hey - where are we? — Hey – where are we?

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:

Keeps the hands busy while you're on the phone. — Keeps the hands busy while you’re on the phone.

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:

sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the days... — sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the days…
(click to animate)

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

World: Main
Location: 131 64 -142
Creation Mode: Creative
Build completed:Jan 2015

July 18, 2015October 5, 2017

Making a Mob Loot and XP farm in MCPE

Note from ARBT (October, 2017): This was an unfinished post on 51 Trillion Squares, but all it’s missing is pictures. Since the mob grinder was a pretty important build, I decided to publish/include it here.

Recently, a post was made to the MCPE subreddit by someone showing off their XP mob grinder. When I saw it, I thought “Well, I’ve had one of these in my survival world since 0.9.”

Mine is very different, though. It runs off of 2 spawners close enough together that I can activate them both at the same time. It also has a switch (using a fence gate) to choose if I want to kill the mobs or get them to half a heart so I can punch them for quick XP. Here’s a tutorial (which I’ll edit if you guys say it’s not clear enough).

Watch out for lava while building. It can burn signs even through blocks. Get rid of lava.

Also, this is only for zombies and skeletons, which are also the two spawner types in the double spawner.

Sorry for the lack of pictures. I’m on mobile and putting all the images in in mobile would take way too long. I’ll add an imgur link later.

Step 1: The Spawner Room

To make any spawner grinder, you need a spawning room. Dig out a 9x9x5 room centered around the spawner. Put a water source block in one corner and slope the floor (by digging down a little more) until the entire floor is covered in water streams heading from one corner to the opposite corner. Fro that corner, dig 2 blocks out of the room in either direction.

Step 2: The First Lift (and Drop)

Standing at the end of the short hall, put a sign at where your feet are, then another 1 block over at head level. Then dig up about 10 blocks, filling up this gap with water source blocks, except for the top one. Then dig over (same direction as before) 2 blocks. Put a sign at your feet at where the water pushes you to. Then dig down 10 blocks. The bottom 5 blocks of this is where the switch will be.

Step 3: The Switch

At the bottom, dig about 5 blocks over, perpendicular to the direction you were digging before. Then pillar up 3 blocks and dig over 2 blocks in the same direction. Break the top block of the pillar and place a fence gate where it was.

Step 4: The Second Lift (and Drop)

Put a water source block on top of the fence gate and place 2 signs to hold in water like before. Then dig up 20 blocks, putting in waer source blocks like before (put a sign in about halfway through to prevent drowning). At the top, turn opposite what you picked in Step 3 (left if you picked right, right if you picked left), and dig 2 blocks. Put a sign at your feet where the water pushes you, and dig down [17 if skeleton, 23 if zombie*] blocks. Make a small room around this spot. Then go back to the switch.

Step 5: The Drown System

Remove the pillar from step 3. Put a water source block where the bottom was, and then dig up 3 blocks from where the end of the hallway is. Place the standard 2-sign water holder from before (this is the last time) and fill up all the way to the top with water. The mobs will drown here. Dig 1 block down and make a water stream to the small room from here. Use signs to keep water from spilling into the room if necessary. Then fill in this lower tunnel so the water stream fills the whole tunnel.

Step 6: Putting it All Together

Put a half slab where the mobs land for XP, and make sure you can only see half a block above the slab. Dig a small tunnel from the room to the switch that won’t obstruct anything else. You want a 1 block window that lets you see the fence gate.

At this point, the grinder is fully functional. Keep the fence gate closed if you want XP and open if you just want them to be killed. Digging up from the room to make a ladder should be ok if the rest was built correctly.

*This should be 24, but a fall damage bug in 0.11 causes 23 to be the number needed here. Once this bug is fixed, you’ll need to go up and increase the fall by one block at the top.