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.
a view of the West Side of the Tower.

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.

Ziggurat of Ur

While I work on subway tunnels, get caught up on documenting previous builds, and chomp at the bit waiting for 0.11.0 to appear in my update list, I figured I’d post something small, and noticed I haven’t used the Minecraftspiration tag yet. Clearly that needs to be fixed.

At some point – not super soon cause OMG busy and stuff, and also because I am still burnt out on using sandstone after GCT – I think I’d like to build a ziggurat, probably based on Ur. I mean, look at that picture. It is screaming to be recreated in cubes. I already have a pyramid build, and its not bad for something constructed when this world was still strictly vanilla survival, but I’d like to build something ridiculously huge. Why not a giant Mesopotamian temple?

what it probably looked like from the air.
what it probably looked like from the air.

I’d have to find a desert biome big enough to build it in, but this could probably happen.