Wacker Tower

Well, after getting the domain and port forwarding right and figuring out FINALLY how to switch the main world back to Survival (I’ll post a tutorial on both later), I posted a “hey my world’s open, come visit!” notice on /r/MCPE this evening. I wasn’t expecting too many visitors – hell, I would have been happy if one person showed up. Happily I had four, and to those four, especially /u/Palcto and /u/EclipseSun, I say thank you for making my first MCPE server run pretty epic.

Sadly the allotted 3h of game was cut a little short by an incoming call from the husband (note to self, Plug PE does NOT play nice with phone calls). Such is the hazard of running a server on one’s iPhone. But still I’d say a pretty successful first run and I’ll definitely be doing it again.

Good Stuff:

I am frankly flabbergasted that it took two hours into a 2.5ish hour run for the game to crash. Between the general bugginess of MCPE especially with Plug PE going, and the unreliability of my net connection lately (sigh *COMCAST*) I was expecting the game to be yo-yoing way more than it did. Nope. Pretty smooth and stable. We only seemed to have problems when teleporting players with laggier connections around, making them fall through a not-loaded-yet world. Oops.

Bad Stuff:

Plug PE’s give command is borked. I can .g stuff to myself fine, not so much to other people. Also had a frustrating problem with amazing disappearing/reappearing chests. >_< Also the .in command does NOT hide you from mobs. I spent most of the game invisible near spawn (mostly so people didn’t spawn into oncoming zombies) and would get knocked about by spiders and skeleton arrows constantly. Yay diamond armor I guess. 😛

Interesting Stuff:

It apparently takes about 2.5 hours to see almost everything in the main world. Palcto found just about everything (I suspect the Hellfire Library was missed, as it’s a little off the beaten path and possibly the maze under the castle). Something for next time then.

Stuff to fix/think about for next time:

It’s been so long since I’ve run/played this world in survival that I’ve not only forgotten what’s in all the chests everywhere (answer: lots of good stuff still) but I’d forgotten to do things like leave minecarts in the subway stations for folks to use. Whoops.

Player Pictures!

EclipseSun has a different shader pack, so I asked him to post the screenshots he took, and holy crap, some of the builds look amazing in it. Palcto also took screenshots of his adventures.

A pretty sunset and a glimpse of the subway running underwater.

The subway looks really cool in EclipseSun’s shader/texture pack.

Looking back toward Spawn House. EclipseSun needs an apple.

I mentioned I liked browsing Brutalism tumblrs and other images for inspiration for Minecraft builds. One day I happened across a pictures of the Blue Cross Blue Shield building in Chicago, IL.

Apparently Hertz has been around a while.

The building still stands, although it’s been given a bit of a facelift and the more generic moniker of “55 West Wacker.” (It nevertheless has made several “Chicago’s ugliest buildings” lists, which seems a little unfair – I’ve seen way uglier examples of Brutalism.) It also now has very tall neighbors on all sides but the front, rendering all those pretty windows useless and making the building itself look a little squat by comparison. Nevertheless something about this building held my attention. Maybe it was all those pretty windows.

Oh hey look, I figured out how to make WordPress galleries work, go me.

Every floor has different colored carpet, or a different (often purposefully hideous) checked pattern

Third floor. The rest of them are pretty identical.

There was a natural cave here when I started building the tower. It was mostly walled off by the pools but I carved out this stairwell down to it so I could continue to mine for materials.

The southeast roads. You can see the sheep farm I built to supply all the carpet. Also 3 houses.

Another look at Baori from the top level (which isn’t the roof!)

This building was my last big MCPE build in cheat-less Survival and as such it was a pain in the butt. It’s the reason why there are five nether reactor tower corpses across the samd biome (for all the glowstone and quartz) and spruce trees in an oak biome. And the poor rainbow sheep in the farm. Even with the Shear button I still accidentally punched all of them at least once getting carpet. And I still haven’t cleaned up all the supply trunks from in front either – figured their content’s’ll be useful for when I get bored and switch back into Survival. Still, oddly enough, for all the time and frustration in building it, it’s probably second only to Seuss Library in my list of favorite builds so far.

World: Main
Location: -120, 71,-427)
Build Mode: Survival
Build completed: Early October, 2014

Tag: Wacker Tower

First open MCPE server run!