Minecraft Creations: The Brick Mansion Chapter 3, Less think more work

Just a little note, I've been thinking for awhile of going back to .jpeg format for my images, this may not be best format but it means I can have my screenshots at the normal resolution without being the very large .png files that Minecraft creates.Coupled with how I like to use 256x256 texture packs it makes for very big image files some of which I have are over 4meg! I've found this nice little program called Sagethumbs which lets you convert image files just by selecting them all and right clicking in a snap, similar to the image resizer addon I have which I won't be needing anymore hah! so I hope you enjoy downloading my new much smaller file size images.

“Well that’s two thirds of it done” I thought to myself as I started at the huge brick and wood laden structure that is by far the biggest house I’ve ever attempted to build , though I had done pretty well, I really need to take more shots of the stages I’ve got to but meh I usually just take them at the end anyway I have a few though as this is and I’ve really gotta push myself to get this thing done.

The house as it stands now: Entrance and Rooftop of lobby

Dining/Dancefloor area

Resource room

Relaxtion pool/spa/sauna area

There’s been a lot going on with the version releases though I’ve only been concentrating on things that are relevant to building my house. Beacons are on example which I have installed as a feature in the lobby, also I’ve made two lines of Anvils next to each other like some kind of multi-anvil and finally I’ve made good use of Item frames which make great wall features. Another great feature that has been added recently is that stairs now connect to other stairs to form corner stairs on edges which makes all uses of stairs (seating, decoration and actually stairs) look much nicer.

An Anvil

Using item frames as a wall feature

Some uses for corner stairs.

I’ve made a lot and I mean a lot of progress since the last adventures of JD post, basically I was waiting for a long period of time one of my favorite mods SingleplayerCommands to be updated so I could continue building. The main reason for this was I’d started the map in Survival mode and needed the mod basically for the commands (not just the one that changed the world mode) Though after this lengthy period I actually found that another of the mods that I use TooManyItemshad some pretty useful buttons on the top of the inventory screen that controlled, the day night cycle, the weather and most importantly whether the map was in creative or survival mode so needless to say after a lot of wasted time I quickly got to work.

TooManyItems mod adds lots of extra tools to the inventory screen, notice the very useful game mode, weather and monster options along the top left.

 After I’d left last time I’d cleared out the hill, carved out some rooms and made some roofs/floors, created the alchemy room and the indoor soccer pitch. I’d made a basic floor plan and decided to stick to it (roughly). The alchemy room I had finished first and added the potion item frames in recently as some sort of potion chart. It ended up looking pretty good with the stone brick and the mossy cobblestone, of course I’ve never actually done any potion making before so I’m not really sure what’s involved apart from needing water. The soccer pitch was reasonably ok though I had to remove the pool on the other side of the wall so the room with the soccer pitch could be properly square (or rectangle) as having that part of the field right next to the wall with the walkway on top really didn’t work or look good for that matter. Once I had made the new wall and added some more seating it looked much better. I also decided to colour the area around the pitch in blue as to get a more indoor feel.

Alchemy room with potions in item frames.

New and improved indoor soccer pitch.

 After a bit of haphazard TNT clearing work and cleaning up I started work on the club, cause every house needs its own club yo. The “Snub” Club turned out great, I love the way in the Faerielight texture pack the yellow wool really resembles carpet. I took a  lot of inspiration from the Minecraft Furniture site and server which is a delight to look around in I highly recommend checking it out if you’re looking for ideas to decorate your home.

Main room with dancefloor, bar and VIP area.

VIP area.

I liked using oak wood planks for the back of the bar and a feature wall for the VIP area as well as jungle wood planks for the pool room as there’s just too much brick around. The note and juke boxes work well as speakers and I even decorated the doorways in them, the different level for the VIP and the pool room worked well too.

Sitting area with stairs down to pool room.

Pool room.

One of the entrances to the club

 After I had finished the club I made another door in the section connecting the atrium and the soccer pitch and made a door from the pool hall part of the club into the soccer pitch as well. I had carved out the atrium but hadn’t done anything with it yet as I wanted to leave it until I finished the other areas before I planted the plants and grew the trees in the basement which technically wasn’t that much of a basement as some areas could of even had windows as they were.

The forge mining area was pretty tricky, cleared the area with TNT and decided to do the walls in stone brick instead of just stone as it looks nicer and the floor in cobble as I couldn’t really think of anything else to use. I had to build around the entrance to my diamond strip mine but it worked pretty well the new cobblestone walls look pretty cool though I wish you could make them with all kinds of stone. I created my usual lava/forge area with lots of furnaces next to it  and then made the cooling/water area with the multi-anvils next to it, though now I think about it, from what I’ve seen in Skyrim you actually have the fire and water in the same place i.e. the metal comes out of the fire, you bang it around on the anvil then cool it in the water so I may change it at some point. The rest of the area I just put chests and signs to store all the items, I managed to work around the stairway to the mine being in the middle of one part of the room as there was enough room around it to build boxes around it.

For the entrance to the forge and the wall of the atrium it occupies I built in stone brick with holes for barred windows and made some pyres outside the entrance for decoration all of which looked pretty cool when done.

One other room I had to do was the Nether room, or basically where the nether portal would go, this is one of my favorite rooms to create as with the addition of nether bricks and stairs you can construct a pretty cool looking altar. I didn’t really have anywhere appropriate to put the entrance so I just made a doorway of netherbrick with iron doors, it isn’t exactly epic but it’s the inside that’s epic and besides it’s supposed to be a house, this is just the portal to the nether for resource and possibly adventuring purposes. I just managed to fit the stairwell within the confines of the house as I don’t know whether I’m going to continue the outer wall around that side. I named the stairway down to the nether portal “The Crimson Hall” as with the Faerielight texture pack it certainly is crimson, or maybe dark red. Anyway the walls I did with netherack and made holes in the wall for fire, I put the portal on an altar and decorated it with lava and fire.

Entrance to the "Crimson Hall"

Stairway to the portal

The ominous Nether Portal room, every house should have one.

So the club, the forge/storage, the nether room and the atrium had all been done which finished off the lower level. It went pretty well, without much hassle had to change things round a bit but that was ok. I left out a few things that weren’t really needed such as changerooms for the soccer pitch though I was thinking of putting toilets in the club, but you don’t go to the toilet in Minecraft but then again you can’t play soccer either so I don’t know, I’d just rather keep it practical making sure I include all the things you can actually do in Minecraft inc rooms for crafting, forging , alchemy, enchanting and a natural water area for fishing I’d suppose.

With the lower level pretty much finished I started mapping out the lobby. I chose a certain height for the wall, then bricked it all up with tall windows and in wooden frames to counteract all the brick.

Front of house with lobby walls and windows put up.

I also fixed up the entryway which I had created earlier (6 doors was enough) and also added some more brick to the stairs. I also have a secret entrance underneath the main one in the water, this leads to what I call the “undersurface” where you can see the untouched natural ground underneath the floor.

Main entrance.

With the lobby I wanted to do sort of a entryway sitting room with a beacon feature in the middle.

An early shot of the middle level and lobby where you can see the first build of the beacon feature and sauna.

I only recently worked out how beacons worked but all I really needed to know was how to make them project light into the air and all I need for that was a certain number of iron, gold, emerald or diamond blocks and in creative that was not a problem. Getting a beacon that works is a pretty big effort in survival mode as it involved travelling to Nether fortresses for Wither Skeleton skulls  and summoning and killing a Wither not to mention getting enough blocks of the appropriate resource to get the maximum effect of the beacon pyramid my house has. After completing the beacon feature for the middle I created some seating and nature features with trees, plants and mushrooms as well as waterfall features for the stairs.

Lobby left side

Lobby right side

Lobby right side

Mushroom feature of lobby

To complete the lower atrium I planted jungle trees and ferns as well as bushes and other plants in the lower atrium and it worked out pretty well when I added a gravel path, I also planted vines wherever I could to get that more jungley feel as now they’ve grown long enough to go over the entrances to the other rooms. I then built two sets of stairs leading down to the lower level, one main set of stairs and another small set going over the entrance to the soccer pitch. Which does remind me know actually that I have pretty much finished the middle level I sort of forgot to leave room for stairs up to the top level, oh well I’m sure there will be room somewhere.

The Atrium

The first thing I made on the top level was the dining area which consisted of a long table, wooden chairs and two more complex chairs at the end. I really wish Mojang would introduce wool stairs and slabs or the ability to cover slabs and stairs with wool as it makes it hard to make a wool chair because you have to make a slab floor beforehand which sits lower than normal floors.

Dining table

Anyway so I created the table and chairs but decided I should make this little square bit that was jutting out of the main house into a kitchen, and I did, got some quick inspiration from the Minecraft Furniture server but it was pretty easy anyway. Used a variety of materials to make the kitchen including blocks of iron, furnaces, trapdoors pinewood, buttons, cauldrons and stone brick, and it’s looks pretty bitchin’ so much so that’s what I decided to call it. I added a bar next to the kitchen too.

Bitchin.

 Behind the dining table I made a  dancefloor with DJ table and speakers and a potplant feature on the wall, the reason I didn’t use the actual Flower Pots that are in the game is that you couldn’t actually stick them to the wall and they were a bit small anyway.

Dancefloor with DJ table.

 The next room was to be the resource room, I found thought to myself though the initial concept to this room as fairly bland as all I was thinking of it was just a room with lots of organized and named chests and readily available crafting tables, I then had an ingenious idea to make it a bit more like an industrial processing and storage centre, and right way I knew this room was going to take a lot longer due to that idea. It’s hard to explain in words but basically what I wanted to do was create a minecart tracks for minecarts with chests to run along from one area to another sort of like a supply line, there would be minecart tracks going to 3 different places, a mine, the surface outside the house and the forge inside the house. But of course to do this I needed a mine and one that was close by so I scouted out an area with my x-ray mod. Finding one I decided that the best thing to do would be to blast a huge hole and bore into the ground with TNT until I found a cave system (yes that’s right) which I did without too much trouble and even found an underground crevasse pretty close by.

The minecart ramp to the mine and the surface.

The 4 tracks down to the mineshaft

The mine processing area

Entrance to the main mine and underground crevasse.

I then built a huge ramp wide enough for four minecart tracks, a walkway and fences on the side which led from inside the house all the way down to where I’d stopped and turned the bottom into a sort of underground processing and storage area to go back up to house. I made a similar thing on the ground outside the house then finally dug out a tunnel for another two tracks to go to the Forge and back, I then made racks to put the double chests on and signs to mark what was in each of them and crafting tables around the general area. I decided to use the item frames as decoration again and made a large feature on two walls, funny thing was I used the toomanyitems mod to pick the order to display so I ended up having moving water and lava on a frame, hah oh well something surprising anyway.

The finished resource/storage room

Chest racks with signs and crafting tables (I can make them higher if needed)

Minecart tunnel to the forge area

The last part of the middle level was the relaxation/pool area, this was the biggest area as I’d cut the resource room off short so I could fit a large spa, a pool and a sauna, which I did. The spa worked pretty well, made in a desert theme with cacti, dead bushes and sand brick.

Desert-themed Spa

 The sauna I made with birch wood and cracked stone brick which looked pretty good with the colour of the birch wood in this texture pack.

 I love the way the pool turned out, basically I was filling it up but in order to fill a large space of water to more than one level you need to make it smaller first, so I ended up making these rows around the edges to get the water the right level. When I’d finished though I actually though the end result looked really cool as it looked like there were lap swimming lanes around the edge and a main pool in the middle, so I did that and made the middle just a bit deeper. I then added some lights to the bottom and worked on a  few nature features included a desert taiga and mushroom biome feature and a window. I’m still deciding what I’m going to do with that large wall space, whether I extend the pool via waterfall to the outside though I would have to close up the entire room but I’ll see how I go.

A very oddly-built pool.

Underwater building, only slightly slower

 The last thing to do until I had another break from this huge time investment I had to make the lobby roof, yes a roof for the lobby was needed as it is lower than the rest of the house. Basically I just wanted to make a basic dome shape with some sort of feature on the top for the beacon to shoot through so I made a small pyramid at the peak with a hole in the middle out of stone brick, I think stone brick is becoming my favorite block to use for structure other than red brick of course. I extended the stone brick pyramid out to the sides of the roof for support and put some lightstone in there as well. I was going to do a bit of overhang with the roof but then decided against it as it looked sort of messy, will definitely do it for the roof of the upper level though as that will have some balconies, I’m actually thinking of having some balconies for the middle level too. I didn’t really have any idea how I was going to do the roof so I just sort of stacked on the wood in levels which looked kind of messy in parts but mostly worked. I’m thinking it does need a bit more natural light coming in so I’ll make some holes in the stone for skylights.

Roof from afar

Rooftop (the pyramid at the top is actually bigger now)

View from inside

So that’s basically it, there’s a bit to clean up and work on but I needed a break after that effort, I’m even thinking of going back to play survival which tried out a bit of on the Mikeland survival, but on looking at their revamped website it appears they have a PvE server now!, hell why didn’t I see that before. Anyway I’ll be back here again to finish off my house, then get started on the outside I suppose, will it ever end? probably not, well I guess it isn’t supposed to, I mean what am I going to do afterwards, build a whole self-sustaining farm? complete all the achievements? kill the Wither and/or the Ender Dragon? After all there is a way to “finish” the game as the Survival page says, but whether I’ll still want to play by myself when this is all finished is yet to be seen.

JD
 
With my own two hands... and a limitless supply of resources, and flight