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Not much to report today. What little time I spent in Arkel was spent opening up the other two walls of the Cotton Mill identical to this first one, so now it's surrounded on 3 sides by Mob-drowning traps. No pictures yet. They each look the same as what's above, but made almost all out of dirt. I'm not sure I like the art style of the first wall anyways, so I might wind up redecorating the whole building. Or just being lazy and leaving it dirt for a while, who knows?

It might be time to take a break from Konoso and the Cotton Mill and either pick a new project to work on, or just go exploring. I've still got a cavern in Selvoscur to explore, or I could break a trail to a new area, or I could start laying out the Tower at Rackpoint. My son and nephew have pretty much taken over the village of Belhatom, so I'll leave that to them. I'm not sure what to do with a village anyways, since there's no trading in MCPE yet.

It took me a while last night to find a cavern worth exploring in Selvoscur. Most of them were shallow and didn't go very far. Finally found one that was fairly complex and extensive and did my Indiana Jones routine. Only problem is, I wandered so far looking for this place, now I'm not sure which way is home. I put up a lit spire marker so I can hopefully find my way back to the cavern some day for further exploration. If I can't run across a familiar landmark soon I'll have to go looking for some redstone to make a compass. That's the benefit to building your homebase on your original spawn point. Unfortunately I failed to grab a compass before heading out this time. So I'll just have to rough it for a bit. I'm currently in a Birch forest, which is odd, since I hadn't run into one of those before. I'll have to take the opportunity to refresh my birch wood stacks while I'm here though. I used it all up road-building.

Unfortunately, I also failed to take a bed with me, so I have to work at surviving the nighttime instead of sleeping it away. Easy enough to fix, I just haven't yet given up hope of finding familiar territory first.

Oh lordy, was I lost!! I found a cavern that went deep enough and found some redstone to make a compass and followed it back by the shortest straight-line path back to Rackpoint. If I had left the cavern at dawn, I would have gotten to Rackpoint about dusk, that's how far away I was. Selvoscur is North and West from Rackpoint. When I got back to Rackpoint from my wanderings, I came from the South and East. (If you haven't figured out the cardinal directions in your maps yet, watch the sun rise: that's east.)

New resolution: Always keep a compass with me!

I spent some time last night in Creative mode working on a design for the Spire at Rackpoint. It's not going to be any masterwork of construction, but it should stand out and be a decent navigational beacon. Unfortunately Minecraft doesn't quite work like real life, where the taller something is, the farther away you can see it.

Oh, thinking about Rackpoint, I realized we'd made a discovery that you might or might not already know about. In the pictures of the Netherrack Workshop, you can see how I laid out the main floor with torches and such. The hope was that the next time we summoned a fortress that the torches would make the room pre-lit. Didn't work. The torches were erased when the new fortress appeared. Oh well, it was worth a shot.

Started work on The Spire at Rackpoint tonight. Will probably do some more later on, but here are some screens from it. Stage 1 is finished, although undecorated. I'm not sure how I want to decorate it. By substituting colored blocks into it in places, using flaming netherrack, or even lava flows.

View from the top, north along Creeper Way:





Same type of view, but showing the water I use as ladders and landing pads during construction. As I raise the walls I move the water source upwards:



View of the base of the Spire from the bridge seen in the views above:



It's all made of obsidian, a surprisingly easily obtainable building material with all the lava I ran into underneath Rackpoint. I'd originally been going to use netherbrick until I realilzed how much obsidian I had stored away.

Minor little fact I'd overlooked... MCPE has a ceiling cap. No construction higher than 128 blocks. So I ran out of altitude before I ran out of obsidian. But, I was on Stage 3, the pinnacle, when I hit it, so it's not too horrible.

View from the top of Stage 2:

Side view of the bridge and Stage 1:

View of the top of the tower (yeah, it's still big enough I can't get a good view of the whole thing from top to bottom):

I have no specific plans for the interior of the Spire. The primary plan was for it to be a navigation beacon. Funny enough, the glowstone block I put at the top is so high up that it's not visible from the ground at night. Although it could have been the angle I was looking at, hard to say. I've started on putting a chicken pond in there, so I don't have to listen to the flapping noises when I walk by.

BTW, a little trick I came up with for laying roads: Plant torches underneath them

Before:



After:

Nothing much to report again. A bit of landscaping here and there, raising chickens, punching trees. I'm not really a Minecraft Artiste - these gigantic projects of art and architecture aren't really my thing, as you may have guessed already. I'm more about the practical little touches, like the two-tone path, or mapping out Konoso using carpet fragments. I was reading some of the other threads about projects people have done, like the Titanic one, and trying to think of something I might have the interest and attention span to do, and came up with a couple of possible ideas: a (smaller) boat on one of the many rivers nearby; a dam; converting the hillside behind Rackpoint into a large house.

I decided to start with that last one, although I might just wind up doing all 3 of them. I don't have any pre-planned layout or anything, but will build as the hillside suggests to me. Since it's lakefront property, the main entrance is a waterway, currently with a mob trap, although that's easily blocked and unblocked as needed.

Another day's worth of work on the Manse.

The facade at night:



The inside of the foyer, with a glass viewport into the Mob Trap:



The inside of the second floor:



The surprise layer of the Mob Trap:

The Mob Trap is more than enough for pretty much everything, but if I'm feeling vindictive, or want to play a nasty trap on a visitor, all I have to do is light one of those and it will drop on their head. Since it's all in water it won't damage the building at all, but any mob or person underneath will have a big headache.

I thought I'd give you all a break from daily updates with not much change, and give you a single big update instead.


As you've seen from the pics above, I decided to work on the house idea first. But I did give it a little bit of extra; it has a dock and a fairly dumpy looking boat. It's hard to make a good looking boat out of full size blocks.


Here is the Foyer. To the right is the Water Trap Entrance.
Behind the camera is a door onto the dock and boat.
The doors on the left open into the workshop.
The middle entrance is the 'dining room'.
The far entrance leads into the mines using a spiral stairway or a water elevator.

The ladder leads to the upper floors.

Here is the Kitchen, right above the Dining Room.

"Refrigerator" on the left, a "Sink" straight ahead behind the Crafting Table. It's a 2x2 permanent water source. 2 ovens behind the door to the right of the sink. And an incinerator on the far right. Stairs leading down to dining room are just onscreen in the bottom right.

Master Bedroom:


Attic:

Roof access is out that door.

With Storage Room:

Fixed the post so that the thumbnails are clickable links to the full-size versions.

Well, aside from the spam post, it's been another week since my last update. So, here's the NEXT UPDATE!! WOO!!! PARTY!!! .... or, not.

I went exploring from the Cotton Mill and found some pretty scenery.

And I completely replaced the entire Cotton Mill with non-dirt and cobblestone:

I expanded the Sheep farm underneath the Cotton Mill into 5 different levels, each with its own color of sheep. You can sort of make out the carpet color codes telling me what color sheep is on which level:

Here's a fun photo of two drowning creepers:

I've been working in Konoso, laying carpets down to mark the passages. White carpet on the right side to show the path back to the Spider Spawner. Black carpet to indicate passages that have been completely explored. Red carpet to mark passages leading to lava.

And, finally, a funny story: While working down one passage in Konoso, it was partially flooded by a single water source. It wasn't particularly in my way, but rather than listen to me splash up and down the passage I put a dirt in front of it to block it off. So I'm working on down the passage when all of a sudden I hear an Enderman scream. I look up and see a wave of water coming down the passage at me, tearing up the carpets and torches I'd laid. And the Enderman is vibrating on one side trying to teleport out of the way. After a moment I hear it give its death scream and fade away. The silly blighter had stolen the dirt block in front of the water source.

First off, another picture of the Cotton Mill from the other side, showing the hut on the side:

Pretty Sunset:

And some days, you just have to drain a lake:

Well, I found out that Spawners can be destroyed. They might be minable, but not with an Iron Pickaxe. Probably should have read the wiki to find the answer rather than by experimentation.



i don't think its minable

And here's the final dam. It's no Hoover Dam, but that 'yacht' I built is no Titanic, either. Yes, you can ride the water all the way through.

Last night I managed to mark the trail through Konoso from the upper entrance down to the Spider Spawner, so now I can leave by either exit without getting lost. The cavern is far from completely marked, but that's a pretty huge task, and will require a lot of carpet and time to achieve.

Until I manage that task, I'm kinda drawing a blank on what to do next. I have all the resources I'll need for a long time. About the only things I can think of are road mainenance (dropping the Long Bridge so it's ground level and installing torches along the whole route) and exploring for exploring's sake. If you've got any suggestions, I'm open to hearing them.

PS - over 1000 views for this thread, if that's worth anything. Woo! I hope it's proven interesting for you.

Went to go to bed in the Mansion yesterday, and when I opened the door I got jumped by a Creeper and a Spider. I have no idea how they managed to spawn inside a closed 4x5 room with 2 Glowstone blocks in it. But the Creeper made a complete mess of the room. I've gotta change my default reaction from 'back away' to 'hit it in the face'. Or even better, 'hit it in the face while backing away'.

I built a road connecting the dam to the Mansion. Rather than going up and over a big hill, I decided to dig a tunnel through. Lining it was an interesting puzzle. It took me a couple of tries to get the right pattern for the ceiling blocks to keep the arch.

And while I was relining the edge of the dam lake (need to come up with names for this place), I broke through into a dungeon with a spawner in it. I'd missed finding it while digging the lake by a single block. *sigh* And, as a result, the room flooded with lake water, and it put out the fire in the spawn cage. I have no idea what mob was supposed to spawn there now.

"Nice"

That is the only word I can think of to describe the current situation. I set off exploring in a new direction, looking for anything interesting. I took a dog with me, just to give them a chance to do something. They've spent most of the game cooped up in an underground room. I've got my compass and a bed, and a good amount of wood. So I'm fairly far out and I find a nice large cave system. Too big to completely explore right now and still be able to carry everything.

So I start building a road back to Rackpoint, using the compass for a guide. I'm following my road pattern, laying the birch slabs on the left and oak on the right, so that the keeping the light wood on the right will lead me back to Rackpoint.

The dog isn't much of a hindrance, and has been useful a few times. One time, after leaving the game and coming back in, my dog gets duplicated; so now I have two of them running around. *shrug* Okay, I won't turn it down. And later, after over-feeding one of them to heal it, I go ahead and feed the other one so they produce a puppy.

Now I have 3 dogs running around, and I'm starting to get closer to home and the trees are getting denser, so the dogs are bumping into me more and more often, or getting between me and the block I'm trying to dig on, and it's getting more and more annoying dealing with them. I'm pretty sure already that this road is going to have a dog-related name, but it's looking more like it won't exactly be complimentary.

This morning, I'd finally gotten almost all the way home, when I looked back and realized I'd been laying my road tiles backwards the entire time. *Normally*, when I'm laying a road, I'm headed away from Rackpoint, so I want to lay the birch on the left side so that when I turn around to head to Rackpoint it's on the right. But this road is unique in that I'm starting from the wilderness and headed back toward Rackpoint, so I should have been putting the birch on the right side. This is, like, 3 days of road laying here, that I'm going to have to tear up and put back down correctly.



*HEAD DESK*

Cute.