1. when building a keep people's first instinct is to start by outlining the outer walls, in my experience this has been a mistake. figure out what all you want to put in the building and how big the rooms, stairwells, etc are going to be and decide on the keeps overall dimensions with the interior in mind. in other words build from the inside out not the outside in.
2. stairwells in particular are particularly problematic for some reason. I would highly recommend designing the structure around the stairwell instead of just plunking one in somewhere otherwise it will always be awkward and in the way. also if they are awkwardly placed it will mess with the entire structure because they extend all the way from the top to the bottom of the castle.
3. IRL castles are typically constructed entirely from the same material. In minecraft this uniformity looks rather dull so I recommend having a primary building material most everything is made from, a "floor" material for... floors and most ceilings, and a "trim" material for corners, door frames, and anything else that could use some accent. For a primary block I would suggest the two staples cobblestone or stone brick as well as the underutilized red brick block (Marienburg castle is one of the most beautiful castles ever made and it was made with brick)
For trim I suggest cobble, stone brick, netherbrick, or halfslab (I suspect those with more aesthetic skill than I could do some awesome stuff with the new stained clay blocks.
I love castles. As far as I'm concerned Notch released Castlecraft. Having recently read a thread in which a ‘crafter asked “how to build a castle” I became interested in how other castlecrafters and noted that, while most all of them were very much my superiors in terms of making their structures beautiful, they seemed to lack basic knowledge about castles themselves. I felt I was uniquely qualified to write a castle guide outlining things a crafter might benefit from knowing before beginning construction as well as eventually outlining specific tips for realizing a castle in minecraft. Pics and additional guide-ness will be added over time.
I would like to start this by mentioning what exactly a castle is. Most people assume anything with crenellations is a castle and in doing so miss out on some cool castle features. A fortress is a major fixed strategic defensive structure and all castles are fortresses however, like squares and rectangles, not all fortresses are castles because in addition to their military function castles also served as the seat of power and home for a feudal lord. This means that unlike a pure fortress a castle includes administrative offices, local records, government resource stockpiles, treasury vaults, and the organs of the criminal justice system (dungeon=jail). Castles were also the permanent home of the lord, his family and usually many others who served the lord’s administration. This status as a high class residence meant that castles had far more creature comforts than a pure fortress and were frequently designed to be aesthetically pleasing as well as defensible. The cold depressing stone walls were typically covered with brilliantly colored tapestries, trophies, mounted animal heads, and all other manner of posh decoration. Castles were designed not to merely survive but to impress.
Still the primary architectural priority was defensibility. Castles were designed so that each line of defense was totally defenseless against the subsequent lines of defense so that as attackers overcame each obstacle the defenders could withdraw and continue fighting without losing the advantage of their fortifications. In general the upper floors of towers and keeps were designed to defend against attackers moving up floor by floor from the bottom so as not to lose the high ground and each layer of defense was vulnerable to the ones behind it. Concentric castles in particular focused on this second principle and featured not just one but several rings of walls nested inside each other like those funny Russian dolls. These two priorities allowed a small number of defenders to stand against many times their number as it forced attackers to pay dearly for every inch they advanced into the castle until they had stormed every last room of every last structure.
Castle Anatomy:
Typical castle features include A: big walls and/or a keep (a single large multistory stone building) C: a courtyard (open land inside of walls) a castle composed of just a keep doesn't have a courtyard. You should decide if you want to build a keep by itself, a walled courtyard without a keep inside the courtyard, a courtyard whose walls incorporate a keep as an oversized tower or gatehouse, or a keep surrounded by a courtyard surrounded by walls.
Castle buildings should never have wooden roofs and the land around the outside of the castle should be cleared of all trees and other obstructions approaching baddies can take cover behind.
Castle walls typically have towers at their corners and in the middle of longer stretches of wall, these towers are taller than the walls and extend out from the wall a ways so that soldiers in the towers have enfilade (crossfire: ie if a soldier approaches the wall behind a big shield to defend himself from arrows shot from the wall an archer on a tower can shoot him in the side) on troops approaching the walls as well as the ability to drop nasty hurtful things on any enemy soldiers who manage to reach the top of the walls. (Soldier avoids boiling substances and heavy falling rocks from defenders on the wall and congratulates himself on reaching the top of the wall when he is then doused in boiling bad-juice and crushed by large rock dropped from tower.)
Baskets of rocks, arrows, and pots of boiling oil have to get up on top of a wall somehow and are quite heavy. While smaller castles can simply have some peasants suck it up and haul a single round of boiling nastiness up on top of the wall the hard way once and leave them there until they’re attacked a castle that expects to need refills on their boiling vats and head smasher rocks needs some faster way to get their ammunition up top. Some castles solved this with the use of cranes powered by dudes in hamster wheel looking things called peasant wheels (I swear I’m not making this up). Others had counterweighted elevators. Most had simple pulley systems that could carry up arrows and baskets of rocks and just hopped they didn’t need more than one dump of boiling fun time. These castle features are not well known today because they were made mostly out of wood and rope which had long rotted away before the castles became tourist attractions. As a result most Minecraft castles lack anything like them and that’s a shame because it seems like a good MCers bread and butter.
Crenellation: this is the crown of up and down stone topping walls, towers, keeps, and most anything else people would stand on and shoot at attackers from. Not surprisingly they were designed to give defenders both a clear field of fire and cover.
A common minecraft castle foe paw it crenellating the outside and inside edge of a wall. They only go on the outside edge of the wall. If baddies make the top of the wall you want them to be as exposed as possible to attack from deeper in the castle. Crenellations on the inside edge of the battlements will let assaulting baddies shoot at your people in the towers, keep, and courtyard from cover and this makes Notch cry.
Murder Holes: once baddies reach the base of the wall someone in cover behind crenellations on top won’t be able to attack or even see them unless they lean waaaaaaaay out over the edge of the wall which is stupid on a number of different levels. Eventually castle design advanced so that the battlements extended out a bit past the face of the wall and included little hatches (that looked more or less EXACTLY like MC trap doors (when Notch introduced trap doors I think I teared up) these little hatches were directly over the base of the wall and they were very aptly named because they made smashing baddies head as easy as pick up rock then let go of rock.
Spiralstaircases: all spiral staircases, even today spiral in the same direction so that a man armed with a sword and shield has an advantage against armed men coming up the stairwell (the baddies shield arm will have awkward positioning making it easy to stab them on their exposed side while staying protected yourself. Also arrows, slingstones etc can’t be shot up the stairs because they fly in a straight like however gravity will make sure boiling butter (far more frequently used than oil which was too expensive to use without the castle steward stabbing the commander) rocks and any other debris will find its way down the stairwell. Stairwell were thus frequently designed as defensive choke points with hidden compartments at their entrances where men with stabby things could ruin whoever used the stairs day with impunity.
Gatehouse“Oh look ANOTHER gate”: The weakest part of a castle is the gate and as a result defenses around the gate were steadily beefed up until any sane commander knew attacking the gate was a death sentence. Gatehouses would extend out in front of the walls a good ways and include a walled-in corridor with several redundant varieties of door (like Mystery Science Theater 3000 style). In between these gates there would just be empty space, a space whose technical name was literally the killing ground as attackers would have to charge down this tunnel as murder holes overhead dropped all manner of nastiness on them the entire way. In fact some castles were designed to allow enemies through the first drop down portcullis and wait for a bunch of dudes to cram into the killing ground as they back up behind the dudes actively hacking at the next gate. Once the baddies were crammed in like sardines the defenders would drop the first portcullis and slaughter the dickens out of all the dudes trapped between gates. These poor soldiers would have to charge in and start hacking through the thick reinforced gates by hand because Gatehouses also typically included the medieval equivalent of speed-bumps or stop sticks to prevent mean nasty ol’ battering rams from accosting their poor gate. More common than this fish-in-a-barrel scheme however were gatehouses that simply placed their gate behind so many overhanging murder holes that any soldier ordered to assault the gate would laugh and then go “but seriously sir where should we actually attack?” Eventually gatehouses became so massive and elaborate that castle builders just made them the keep.
Gate(s): Because castles were not just military structures but administrative, legal, and often economic seats of power wagons full of delicious taxes and such had to be able to get in and out of them conveniently, this required large openings that were tactically problematic; thus the gatehouse was born. While at first castle gates were simply set into gaps in the wall with a little walkway overhead they and the gates they housed grew more hardcore over time. Everyone has seen the classic drawbridge, a massive thick super-door hinged at the bottom instead of the sides. Castles also frequently employed main gates that were hinged at their sides like a typical western door except they were massive (these are the kind of gates that have bars dropped into slots on their backside to lock them (like the one at Helms Deep [which was a fortress not a castle] Portcullis: In addition to these kinds of solid heavy gates castles typically used at least one portcullis: hardened wood lattice grates reinforced with iron and or steel (they looked almost exactly like rows of MC fence stacked on top of each other). Instead of swinging open and shut like most gates (portcullis were hipsters and hinges were just too mainstream) portcullises were winched up over the entryway so that by pulling a single lever they could be closed in a second giving the ponderous heavy main gates time to close during a surprise raid or emergency (several castles were taken when the attackers simply charged in as fast as they could and managed to reach the gates before they could close all the way). The non-solid nature of portcullises also meant that arrows, crossbow bolts, and spears could be used on the attackers trying to hack their way in.
Winchroom: Every gatehouse needs a winchroom(s). Located directly above a portcullis they also typically housed the mechanisms for opening and closing the main gate if the main gates used something more advanced than a bunch of dudes pushing or pulling them. There is a really fantastic winchroom scene in the Snow White movie the Twilight chick was in. The winchroom needs to be incredibly well defended as if a baddie gets inside he could basically just open the doors (depending on the setup, many castles needed a couple of buffed out dudes to slowly crank the portcullis up).
Barbican: the most advanced gatehouses actually had a pair of independent towers located out in front of the gatehouse on either side of the road to the gate. Like little independent keeps they were only connected to the rest of the castle by skybridges which were often made of wood so if they were captured the bridges could be burned and the attackers would be no closer to getting in. A barbican allowed defenders to begin doing horrifying things to those intent on harming Mr. Gate even sooner for maximum day ruinage. Be aware a properly executed barbican is one of the sexiest looking things in minecraft.
Great Hall: The great hall was the primary feature of the keep. Frequently called a throne room nowadays they were actually what my college would call an MPR (multipurpose room) they were dining hall, ballroom, courtroom, field hospital, throne room, oh-my-god-its-cold-bring-the-cattle-in-before-they-freeze room, etc. The great hall needs to be big and impressive ideally new visitors should pee themselves a little the first time they enter both with aawe and with fear. High ceilings are common. The great hall usually was not on the first floor so that attackers who penetrated the keep would still have to fight through narrow hallways and smaller rooms instead of being able to spread out like they would in the open great hall. This is where the gifted Minecraft interior decorator can really let it all hang out.
Stores: One often overlooked part of a castle are its stores, any castle needed a secure stockpile of food and water on hand in case of a siege so that the garrison would be able to hold out until friendly forces arrived to break the siege or the attackers said screw it and went home.[/url]
Kitchens: larger castles require not only a garisson of soldiers but an army of servants, cooks, clerks, stablehands, masons, carpenters, and all the lords obligatory sycophants of indeterminate purpose. In addition to feeding all these people any castle will host numerous feasts thrown by the lord so any castle worth its salt requires some heavyweight kitchen as well as a bakery which is typically separate.
Smithy: any medium-large castle needs a smithy. even more than the obvious use in creating and maintaining of stabbies and defenses against said stabbies the castles gate mechanisms, which absolutely have to be 100% reliable, will include numerous parts which need frequent repair and replacement as well as the oddments of daily medieval life. Most any castle with a curtain wall will have at least a small smithy inside.
I've started updating the guide, but it doesn't look like that updates the thread in the forum listing, should I just post updates as a reply?
[META] That's how the forums work. If you just update the OP, the thread doesn't get bumped up. So when you do update, just make a little note as a reply. This will bump the post at the top for more players to see. This is a nice and detailed guide and more players deserve to see it!
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Nice castle you got there. Though it's a little bit dull for my taste...functionality and historical accuracy is cool, but I definitely don't usually make plain stone walls without wanting to raise arches and pillars everywhere
Speaking of which, I don't think real castles had lava pouring from their towers :3 Wouldn't make a note if it wasn't otherwise realistic. Maybe replace it with wooden platforms/watchtowers/torches?
They would if their builders could figure out how to set it up.
You're right though my castle incorporates fantasy elements and ignores realism where I think unrealistic stuff makes it better. The difference is that I am making a conscious decision to abandon realism not simply ignoring realistic castle construction because I don't know any better.
This is a pretty useful tutorial, and I like the MST3K reference, since it's my fave show, I believe, i think.
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Hmmmm it seems like adding any more to the OP deletes everything after the section on gates so I'll just add my update here until I figure out what my malfunction is.
Here is a portcullis from one of my gatehouses, I just changed the wood to dark oak to give it a sturdier/reinforced look. The edges of a portcullis should be hidden behind a single wide row of blocks so it looks like its in a track. I've found the portcullis should be at least four meters tall with at least its top layer hidden in the gatehouse. Remember to include a space big enough to fit the entire portcullis if it were to be raised all the way. Proper use of redstone and sticky-pistons can be used to mechanise the portcullis so it can raise and lower (only 2 meters though).
There are many different designs for crenellations, I favor a one block high continuous wall topped with a block high layer of alternating solid blocks and gaps. I favor this design because it is actually fairly close to scale (it covers most of Steves body and if he ducks behind a merlon it will cover him completely. Also this design lacks halfslab or stair blocks that allow you to accidently walk off the edge of the battlements. The main drawback of this design is that the crenellation will be thicker than it should be so your field of view is far more obstructed once baddies get fairly close. I place torches every other merlon and this provides a good level of illumination. (crenellations won’t look right unless you have a consistent light source on your battlements.
Castle walls always enclose a courtyard and are always continuous (they prevent approach from any direction) unless terrain features such as cliffs negate the need for walls in a given direction. The wall surrounding the courtyard/bailey (as opposed to a wall separating the courtyard into sections) is called the curtain wall. A castle can have several curtain walls. In Castles with more than curtain wall the innermost curtain wall is almost always the tallest with each subsequent wall being shorter than the one inside of it so that the inner walls always have a clear line of fire on an outer walls battlements. Each curtain wall is separated by a stretch of empty land much like the courtyard called a ward so that each curtain wall is separated from the next. Castle walls vary widely in size though no castle wall is short enough for a man to jump up and grab the edge of the battlements. One story high to four stories is a good rule of thumb range. Sheer curtain Walls are typically between 1/3rd and 2/3rds their height in thickness.
Each section of a curtain wall’s battlements is separated from the others by a tower which must be passed through to reach other sections of the wall, this keeps any baddies who reach the top of the wall contained on a single section of the wall battlements.
Access to the walls battlements was typically provided by stairwells in the towers and/or gatehouses lining the wall. Placing them in these structures provides another layer of defense when enemies make the top of the wall: until they can force their way into the tower and fight their way down its stairwell they're stuck on top of the wall because the drop off the back of the wall will kill or cripple anyone jumping down. (first attackers have to get up on the wall then the barrier becomes how to get down).
The staiwells in towers were intentionally narrow and inconveniently winding for easy defense so it wasn't uncommon for a wooden stair to be built against the inside of the wall for the sake of convenience. These temp stairs could be torn down quickly if battle seemed likely. (historical note: as these stairs were built not by carpenters or architects who would view them as nothing but a tactical weakness but by peasants or guards who were tired of going the long way such staircases were typically shodilly built and their sudden collapse or fall over (thats right they would actually just fall over sometimes) made their use not entirely without danger. The Wall in George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire has a stair that seems similar in function)
During an assault the top of the walls would get very busy. A row of defenders with melee weapons and axes at the edge of the battlements would stab anyone coming up with scaling ladders and cut grappling hooks and scaling ladder anchors loose. behind them any archers available can fire volleys over the melee defenders that arc up and over so they fall on the attackers from directly overhead. Peasants and children scurry about with additional arrows or droppable nasties and behind all of them injured men are getting carried out of the way. The wall should be wide enough to accommodate these things without the defenders getting tangled up in each other.
Aside from the crenellations and any pulleys or whatnot to lift things to the battlements the top of the walls should be unadorned and empty. Just like the clear field of fire around the castle the tops of the walls should be free of anything an enemy who makes it up on the wall can use as cover from defenders in the wall towers or the next layer of curtain wall.
Though tactically frowned upon placing a vine at the top of the walls interior face you can grow a photogenic ivy covered wall that allows easy access to the battlements.
I already posted this in the main section of the guide but I feel this paragraph bears inclusion here as well:
A common minecraft castle foe paw it crenellating the outside and inside edge of a wall. They only go on the outside edge of the wall. If baddies make the top of the wall you want them to be as exposed as possible to attack from deeper in the castle. Crenellations on the inside edge of the battlements will let assaulting baddies shoot at your people in the towers, keep, and courtyard from cover and this makes Notch cry.
My battlements, note my obviously superior crenelation design.
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a temp stairway as well as a good view of the vine covered wall.
Very interesting guide. Will certainly try and incorporate this into my castle build
Did you build this all in survival with no cheats?
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"It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you?"
I used to hack myself diamond tools back before enchanting and beacons and whatnot, I hacked myself some wither skulls, I hacked several stacks of buckets (which I immediately lost when I discovered my glassed over lava trench was actually missing a single glass block), I also hacked myself some mooshroom, rabbit, bat, and squid spawn eggs. and at one point I used a command to fill in a 20 block square section of ocean.
at one point I hacked an efficiency X pickaxe but it was so fast it was unusable I would inadvertently destroy everything.
With the new trades now I can get my tools legit without spending an inordinate amount of time mining.
Excellent guide, with a lots of tidbits I had not considered before.Further, your kitchen area has very nice details with the vegetables hung to dry, and shelves med of trapdoors.
I very much agree on the point of making walls plain, but I try to break the visual montony by including pillars of polished andesite or double stone slabs with stone bricks. However, I disagree with the machicolations. Done your way, you end up with the top of the wall hanging 2m out from the wall, which I feel is to much. While I do one block overhanging battlements on towers, I tend to keep my curtain walls flush, as was the case on most surviving english castles.
Further, a keep or tower would typically be in the order 15-30 meters on a side, not much larger. This is the thing most builders tend to get wrong, thus worth mentioning. It represents quite a challenge to get right, and the best advise I can give is to look at actual castle floorplans. This guy: http://www.carneycastle.com/index.htm has collected quite a few for making lego models, which are quite nice as well.
Oh my goodness, how exciting. I like, never get to have a good talk with someone else who's into medieval fortification. In defense of my battlements I must point out that A: english castles were typically smaller and less elaborate than the major castles on the continent and in the middle-east. B: many of the more advanced castles that were in england were "slighted" intentionally after one of their civil wars so the winners wouldn't have to retake them all the next time some scots got uppity so they don't survive. C: many castles did once have "hoardings" that did stick out but have since rotted because wood is a ****. D: my machinaolations DO stick out farther than they aught, not because my desighn is wrong but because minecrafts 1 meter scale doesn't allow the degree of detail needed to fit murder holes, their shielding stonework and the crenelation inside a one block space (this is the same problem that makes my crenelations chubby).
{note: I am actually in the process of redoing my machinolations (I hate typing out that word) which slims them down considerably. their previous design predates the inclusion of trapdoors so rather than constantly fall through holes in the battlements I included a floor below the battlements just for the murder holes.}
Yes it is easy to get carried away with towers, they needed to be tall enough to dominate the adjacent battlements and stick far enough out to provide enfilade and any more than that was usually a waste. since castles were so ungodly expensive there was no waste. Gatehouses could balloon up to incredible sizes though. keeps could get very large but as castle desighn shifted from a lone keep to increasing reliance on curtain walls the keeps got smaller as everything else got bigger until eventually in quadrangle castles the keep vanished and the walls were so large all that had been housed inside the keep was built directly into the inner side of the wall.
I feel this is a good time to clarify my building philosophy, while I do go on quite a bit about the IRL my intent is primarily to aid in the creation of badass MC castles and as such I mention IRL info when I think it might help. real castles were limited by several factors that there is no need to feel encumbered by in minecraft so I talk about castle design IRL more in its ideal form than what actually got built because the duke only has so much money and those peasants really do need to get back to their real jobs or we'll all starve. While keeps essentially disappeared as curtain walls became the main thing I feel that in MC a caslte absolutly should have a keep as well as the most advanced curtain walls etc, it is more secure and ye old builders would have gone that way if they didn't actually have to get it built within budget. also keep in courtyard in curtain walls is definitely the most visually impressive.
In this vein many of my dimensions will be a bit larger than most real castles achieved without getting so big they look silly. In MC I can construct Ideall Castle using all the techniques developed over the centuries and combine them all together in the same castle without cutting corners: IRL this castle would never be built because defensibility has diminishing returns, past a certain point the builders assume it just isn't going to be taken by assault and therefore they don't need to include any more castlecraft.
Also my own castle contains fantasy elements as do most MC castles so my guide skews to accommodate that as well.
Oh man thank you for this amazing guide. Now I know how to build a real castle, and realize that a general(common) minecraft castle is really just some walls an stuff. *Kisses le hand* Thank you VERY much!
Tips for the actual assembly of castle:
2. stairwells in particular are particularly problematic for some reason. I would highly recommend designing the structure around the stairwell instead of just plunking one in somewhere otherwise it will always be awkward and in the way. also if they are awkwardly placed it will mess with the entire structure because they extend all the way from the top to the bottom of the castle.
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I love castles. As far as I'm concerned Notch released Castlecraft. Having recently read a thread in which a ‘crafter asked “how to build a castle” I became interested in how other castlecrafters and noted that, while most all of them were very much my superiors in terms of making their structures beautiful, they seemed to lack basic knowledge about castles themselves. I felt I was uniquely qualified to write a castle guide outlining things a crafter might benefit from knowing before beginning construction as well as eventually outlining specific tips for realizing a castle in minecraft. Pics and additional guide-ness will be added over time.
I would like to start this by mentioning what exactly a castle is. Most people assume anything with crenellations is a castle and in doing so miss out on some cool castle features. A fortress is a major fixed strategic defensive structure and all castles are fortresses however, like squares and rectangles, not all fortresses are castles because in addition to their military function castles also served as the seat of power and home for a feudal lord. This means that unlike a pure fortress a castle includes administrative offices, local records, government resource stockpiles, treasury vaults, and the organs of the criminal justice system (dungeon=jail). Castles were also the permanent home of the lord, his family and usually many others who served the lord’s administration. This status as a high class residence meant that castles had far more creature comforts than a pure fortress and were frequently designed to be aesthetically pleasing as well as defensible. The cold depressing stone walls were typically covered with brilliantly colored tapestries, trophies, mounted animal heads, and all other manner of posh decoration. Castles were designed not to merely survive but to impress.
Still the primary architectural priority was defensibility. Castles were designed so that each line of defense was totally defenseless against the subsequent lines of defense so that as attackers overcame each obstacle the defenders could withdraw and continue fighting without losing the advantage of their fortifications. In general the upper floors of towers and keeps were designed to defend against attackers moving up floor by floor from the bottom so as not to lose the high ground and each layer of defense was vulnerable to the ones behind it. Concentric castles in particular focused on this second principle and featured not just one but several rings of walls nested inside each other like those funny Russian dolls. These two priorities allowed a small number of defenders to stand against many times their number as it forced attackers to pay dearly for every inch they advanced into the castle until they had stormed every last room of every last structure.
Castle Anatomy:
Typical castle features include A: big walls and/or a keep (a single large multistory stone building) C: a courtyard (open land inside of walls) a castle composed of just a keep doesn't have a courtyard. You should decide if you want to build a keep by itself, a walled courtyard without a keep inside the courtyard, a courtyard whose walls incorporate a keep as an oversized tower or gatehouse, or a keep surrounded by a courtyard surrounded by walls.
Castle buildings should never have wooden roofs and the land around the outside of the castle should be cleared of all trees and other obstructions approaching baddies can take cover behind.
Castle walls typically have towers at their corners and in the middle of longer stretches of wall, these towers are taller than the walls and extend out from the wall a ways so that soldiers in the towers have enfilade (crossfire: ie if a soldier approaches the wall behind a big shield to defend himself from arrows shot from the wall an archer on a tower can shoot him in the side) on troops approaching the walls as well as the ability to drop nasty hurtful things on any enemy soldiers who manage to reach the top of the walls. (Soldier avoids boiling substances and heavy falling rocks from defenders on the wall and congratulates himself on reaching the top of the wall when he is then doused in boiling bad-juice and crushed by large rock dropped from tower.)
Baskets of rocks, arrows, and pots of boiling oil have to get up on top of a wall somehow and are quite heavy. While smaller castles can simply have some peasants suck it up and haul a single round of boiling nastiness up on top of the wall the hard way once and leave them there until they’re attacked a castle that expects to need refills on their boiling vats and head smasher rocks needs some faster way to get their ammunition up top. Some castles solved this with the use of cranes powered by dudes in hamster wheel looking things called peasant wheels (I swear I’m not making this up). Others had counterweighted elevators. Most had simple pulley systems that could carry up arrows and baskets of rocks and just hopped they didn’t need more than one dump of boiling fun time. These castle features are not well known today because they were made mostly out of wood and rope which had long rotted away before the castles became tourist attractions. As a result most Minecraft castles lack anything like them and that’s a shame because it seems like a good MCers bread and butter.
Crenellation: this is the crown of up and down stone topping walls, towers, keeps, and most anything else people would stand on and shoot at attackers from. Not surprisingly they were designed to give defenders both a clear field of fire and cover.
A common minecraft castle foe paw it crenellating the outside and inside edge of a wall. They only go on the outside edge of the wall. If baddies make the top of the wall you want them to be as exposed as possible to attack from deeper in the castle. Crenellations on the inside edge of the battlements will let assaulting baddies shoot at your people in the towers, keep, and courtyard from cover and this makes Notch cry.
Murder Holes: once baddies reach the base of the wall someone in cover behind crenellations on top won’t be able to attack or even see them unless they lean waaaaaaaay out over the edge of the wall which is stupid on a number of different levels. Eventually castle design advanced so that the battlements extended out a bit past the face of the wall and included little hatches (that looked more or less EXACTLY like MC trap doors (when Notch introduced trap doors I think I teared up) these little hatches were directly over the base of the wall and they were very aptly named because they made smashing baddies head as easy as pick up rock then let go of rock.
Spiral staircases: all spiral staircases, even today spiral in the same direction so that a man armed with a sword and shield has an advantage against armed men coming up the stairwell (the baddies shield arm will have awkward positioning making it easy to stab them on their exposed side while staying protected yourself. Also arrows, slingstones etc can’t be shot up the stairs because they fly in a straight like however gravity will make sure boiling butter (far more frequently used than oil which was too expensive to use without the castle steward stabbing the commander) rocks and any other debris will find its way down the stairwell. Stairwell were thus frequently designed as defensive choke points with hidden compartments at their entrances where men with stabby things could ruin whoever used the stairs day with impunity.
Gatehouse “Oh look ANOTHER gate”: The weakest part of a castle is the gate and as a result defenses around the gate were steadily beefed up until any sane commander knew attacking the gate was a death sentence. Gatehouses would extend out in front of the walls a good ways and include a walled-in corridor with several redundant varieties of door (like Mystery Science Theater 3000 style). In between these gates there would just be empty space, a space whose technical name was literally the killing ground as attackers would have to charge down this tunnel as murder holes overhead dropped all manner of nastiness on them the entire way. In fact some castles were designed to allow enemies through the first drop down portcullis and wait for a bunch of dudes to cram into the killing ground as they back up behind the dudes actively hacking at the next gate. Once the baddies were crammed in like sardines the defenders would drop the first portcullis and slaughter the dickens out of all the dudes trapped between gates. These poor soldiers would have to charge in and start hacking through the thick reinforced gates by hand because Gatehouses also typically included the medieval equivalent of speed-bumps or stop sticks to prevent mean nasty ol’ battering rams from accosting their poor gate. More common than this fish-in-a-barrel scheme however were gatehouses that simply placed their gate behind so many overhanging murder holes that any soldier ordered to assault the gate would laugh and then go “but seriously sir where should we actually attack?” Eventually gatehouses became so massive and elaborate that castle builders just made them the keep.
Gate(s): Because castles were not just military structures but administrative, legal, and often economic seats of power wagons full of delicious taxes and such had to be able to get in and out of them conveniently, this required large openings that were tactically problematic; thus the gatehouse was born. While at first castle gates were simply set into gaps in the wall with a little walkway overhead they and the gates they housed grew more hardcore over time. Everyone has seen the classic drawbridge, a massive thick super-door hinged at the bottom instead of the sides. Castles also frequently employed main gates that were hinged at their sides like a typical western door except they were massive (these are the kind of gates that have bars dropped into slots on their backside to lock them (like the one at Helms Deep [which was a fortress not a castle]
Portcullis: In addition to these kinds of solid heavy gates castles typically used at least one portcullis: hardened wood lattice grates reinforced with iron and or steel (they looked almost exactly like rows of MC fence stacked on top of each other). Instead of swinging open and shut like most gates (portcullis were hipsters and hinges were just too mainstream) portcullises were winched up over the entryway so that by pulling a single lever they could be closed in a second giving the ponderous heavy main gates time to close during a surprise raid or emergency (several castles were taken when the attackers simply charged in as fast as they could and managed to reach the gates before they could close all the way). The non-solid nature of portcullises also meant that arrows, crossbow bolts, and spears could be used on the attackers trying to hack their way in.
Winchroom: Every gatehouse needs a winchroom(s). Located directly above a portcullis they also typically housed the mechanisms for opening and closing the main gate if the main gates used something more advanced than a bunch of dudes pushing or pulling them. There is a really fantastic winchroom scene in the Snow White movie the Twilight chick was in. The winchroom needs to be incredibly well defended as if a baddie gets inside he could basically just open the doors (depending on the setup, many castles needed a couple of buffed out dudes to slowly crank the portcullis up).
Barbican: the most advanced gatehouses actually had a pair of independent towers located out in front of the gatehouse on either side of the road to the gate. Like little independent keeps they were only connected to the rest of the castle by skybridges which were often made of wood so if they were captured the bridges could be burned and the attackers would be no closer to getting in. A barbican allowed defenders to begin doing horrifying things to those intent on harming Mr. Gate even sooner for maximum day ruinage. Be aware a properly executed barbican is one of the sexiest looking things in minecraft.
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Great Hall: The great hall was the primary feature of the keep. Frequently called a throne room nowadays they were actually what my college would call an MPR (multipurpose room) they were dining hall, ballroom, courtroom, field hospital, throne room, oh-my-god-its-cold-bring-the-cattle-in-before-they-freeze room, etc. The great hall needs to be big and impressive ideally new visitors should pee themselves a little the first time they enter both with aawe and with fear. High ceilings are common. The great hall usually was not on the first floor so that attackers who penetrated the keep would still have to fight through narrow hallways and smaller rooms instead of being able to spread out like they would in the open great hall. This is where the gifted Minecraft interior decorator can really let it all hang out.
Stores: One often overlooked part of a castle are its stores, any castle needed a secure stockpile of food and water on hand in case of a siege so that the garrison would be able to hold out until friendly forces arrived to break the siege or the attackers said screw it and went home.[/url]
Kitchens: larger castles require not only a garisson of soldiers but an army of servants, cooks, clerks, stablehands, masons, carpenters, and all the lords obligatory sycophants of indeterminate purpose. In addition to feeding all these people any castle will host numerous feasts thrown by the lord so any castle worth its salt requires some heavyweight kitchen as well as a bakery which is typically separate.
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Smithy: any medium-large castle needs a smithy. even more than the obvious use in creating and maintaining of stabbies and defenses against said stabbies the castles gate mechanisms, which absolutely have to be 100% reliable, will include numerous parts which need frequent repair and replacement as well as the oddments of daily medieval life. Most any castle with a curtain wall will have at least a small smithy inside.
This is data from LeslieGilliams' testing in this thread.
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oh and here's Marienburg
[META] That's how the forums work. If you just update the OP, the thread doesn't get bumped up. So when you do update, just make a little note as a reply. This will bump the post at the top for more players to see. This is a nice and detailed guide and more players deserve to see it!
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Good work!
Speaking of which, I don't think real castles had lava pouring from their towers :3 Wouldn't make a note if it wasn't otherwise realistic. Maybe replace it with wooden platforms/watchtowers/torches?
You're right though my castle incorporates fantasy elements and ignores realism where I think unrealistic stuff makes it better. The difference is that I am making a conscious decision to abandon realism not simply ignoring realistic castle construction because I don't know any better.
Click on this spoiler to see mods and ideas that I support!
Here is a portcullis from one of my gatehouses, I just changed the wood to dark oak to give it a sturdier/reinforced look. The edges of a portcullis should be hidden behind a single wide row of blocks so it looks like its in a track. I've found the portcullis should be at least four meters tall with at least its top layer hidden in the gatehouse. Remember to include a space big enough to fit the entire portcullis if it were to be raised all the way. Proper use of redstone and sticky-pistons can be used to mechanise the portcullis so it can raise and lower (only 2 meters though).
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There are many different designs for crenellations, I favor a one block high continuous wall topped with a block high layer of alternating solid blocks and gaps. I favor this design because it is actually fairly close to scale (it covers most of Steves body and if he ducks behind a merlon it will cover him completely. Also this design lacks halfslab or stair blocks that allow you to accidently walk off the edge of the battlements. The main drawback of this design is that the crenellation will be thicker than it should be so your field of view is far more obstructed once baddies get fairly close. I place torches every other merlon and this provides a good level of illumination. (crenellations won’t look right unless you have a consistent light source on your battlements.
Castle walls always enclose a courtyard and are always continuous (they prevent approach from any direction) unless terrain features such as cliffs negate the need for walls in a given direction. The wall surrounding the courtyard/bailey (as opposed to a wall separating the courtyard into sections) is called the curtain wall. A castle can have several curtain walls. In Castles with more than curtain wall the innermost curtain wall is almost always the tallest with each subsequent wall being shorter than the one inside of it so that the inner walls always have a clear line of fire on an outer walls battlements. Each curtain wall is separated by a stretch of empty land much like the courtyard called a ward so that each curtain wall is separated from the next. Castle walls vary widely in size though no castle wall is short enough for a man to jump up and grab the edge of the battlements. One story high to four stories is a good rule of thumb range. Sheer curtain Walls are typically between 1/3rd and 2/3rds their height in thickness.
Each section of a curtain wall’s battlements is separated from the others by a tower which must be passed through to reach other sections of the wall, this keeps any baddies who reach the top of the wall contained on a single section of the wall battlements.
Access to the walls battlements was typically provided by stairwells in the towers and/or gatehouses lining the wall. Placing them in these structures provides another layer of defense when enemies make the top of the wall: until they can force their way into the tower and fight their way down its stairwell they're stuck on top of the wall because the drop off the back of the wall will kill or cripple anyone jumping down. (first attackers have to get up on the wall then the barrier becomes how to get down).
The staiwells in towers were intentionally narrow and inconveniently winding for easy defense so it wasn't uncommon for a wooden stair to be built against the inside of the wall for the sake of convenience. These temp stairs could be torn down quickly if battle seemed likely. (historical note: as these stairs were built not by carpenters or architects who would view them as nothing but a tactical weakness but by peasants or guards who were tired of going the long way such staircases were typically shodilly built and their sudden collapse or fall over (thats right they would actually just fall over sometimes) made their use not entirely without danger. The Wall in George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire has a stair that seems similar in function)
During an assault the top of the walls would get very busy. A row of defenders with melee weapons and axes at the edge of the battlements would stab anyone coming up with scaling ladders and cut grappling hooks and scaling ladder anchors loose. behind them any archers available can fire volleys over the melee defenders that arc up and over so they fall on the attackers from directly overhead. Peasants and children scurry about with additional arrows or droppable nasties and behind all of them injured men are getting carried out of the way. The wall should be wide enough to accommodate these things without the defenders getting tangled up in each other.
Aside from the crenellations and any pulleys or whatnot to lift things to the battlements the top of the walls should be unadorned and empty. Just like the clear field of fire around the castle the tops of the walls should be free of anything an enemy who makes it up on the wall can use as cover from defenders in the wall towers or the next layer of curtain wall.
Though tactically frowned upon placing a vine at the top of the walls interior face you can grow a photogenic ivy covered wall that allows easy access to the battlements.
I already posted this in the main section of the guide but I feel this paragraph bears inclusion here as well:
A common minecraft castle foe paw it crenellating the outside and inside edge of a wall. They only go on the outside edge of the wall. If baddies make the top of the wall you want them to be as exposed as possible to attack from deeper in the castle. Crenellations on the inside edge of the battlements will let assaulting baddies shoot at your people in the towers, keep, and courtyard from cover and this makes Notch cry.
My battlements, note my obviously superior crenelation design.
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a temp stairway as well as a good view of the vine covered wall.
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Did you build this all in survival with no cheats?
"It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you?"
I used to hack myself diamond tools back before enchanting and beacons and whatnot, I hacked myself some wither skulls, I hacked several stacks of buckets (which I immediately lost when I discovered my glassed over lava trench was actually missing a single glass block), I also hacked myself some mooshroom, rabbit, bat, and squid spawn eggs. and at one point I used a command to fill in a 20 block square section of ocean.
at one point I hacked an efficiency X pickaxe but it was so fast it was unusable I would inadvertently destroy everything.
With the new trades now I can get my tools legit without spending an inordinate amount of time mining.
I very much agree on the point of making walls plain, but I try to break the visual montony by including pillars of polished andesite or double stone slabs with stone bricks. However, I disagree with the machicolations. Done your way, you end up with the top of the wall hanging 2m out from the wall, which I feel is to much. While I do one block overhanging battlements on towers, I tend to keep my curtain walls flush, as was the case on most surviving english castles.
Further, a keep or tower would typically be in the order 15-30 meters on a side, not much larger. This is the thing most builders tend to get wrong, thus worth mentioning. It represents quite a challenge to get right, and the best advise I can give is to look at actual castle floorplans. This guy: http://www.carneycastle.com/index.htm has collected quite a few for making lego models, which are quite nice as well.
{note: I am actually in the process of redoing my machinolations (I hate typing out that word) which slims them down considerably. their previous design predates the inclusion of trapdoors so rather than constantly fall through holes in the battlements I included a floor below the battlements just for the murder holes.}
Yes it is easy to get carried away with towers, they needed to be tall enough to dominate the adjacent battlements and stick far enough out to provide enfilade and any more than that was usually a waste. since castles were so ungodly expensive there was no waste. Gatehouses could balloon up to incredible sizes though. keeps could get very large but as castle desighn shifted from a lone keep to increasing reliance on curtain walls the keeps got smaller as everything else got bigger until eventually in quadrangle castles the keep vanished and the walls were so large all that had been housed inside the keep was built directly into the inner side of the wall.
I feel this is a good time to clarify my building philosophy, while I do go on quite a bit about the IRL my intent is primarily to aid in the creation of badass MC castles and as such I mention IRL info when I think it might help. real castles were limited by several factors that there is no need to feel encumbered by in minecraft so I talk about castle design IRL more in its ideal form than what actually got built because the duke only has so much money and those peasants really do need to get back to their real jobs or we'll all starve. While keeps essentially disappeared as curtain walls became the main thing I feel that in MC a caslte absolutly should have a keep as well as the most advanced curtain walls etc, it is more secure and ye old builders would have gone that way if they didn't actually have to get it built within budget. also keep in courtyard in curtain walls is definitely the most visually impressive.
In this vein many of my dimensions will be a bit larger than most real castles achieved without getting so big they look silly. In MC I can construct Ideall Castle using all the techniques developed over the centuries and combine them all together in the same castle without cutting corners: IRL this castle would never be built because defensibility has diminishing returns, past a certain point the builders assume it just isn't going to be taken by assault and therefore they don't need to include any more castlecraft.
Also my own castle contains fantasy elements as do most MC castles so my guide skews to accommodate that as well.
Play minecraft.
NOW
I'm building a fortress in a survival server, and your points on defences will be a great help.