You can download all the images as a tarbomb.
Morbus created our Minecraft world yesterday. After configuring the server, we all joined at pretty much the same time. After getting over the shock of finding out that Sean would be joining us on our adventure, one of the first things I suggested was that we race to see who could craft a compass and a clock first. At this stage, we were all off doing our own thing.
Eventually, though, I realised this might be a bit silly, and I went to go see what Sean was working on. He’d dug a hole into the side of one of the local hills. So I suggested that we work on this as a sort of shared base. Pooling our resources together, and all that. I think this was the right decision.
On of the first things I wanted to work on was the entrance, as I get a bit obsessed about things looking nice & pretty. So I gathered some sand, planted some cacti, and made some jack-o’-lanterns for the porch. I might add that I have been killed at least two or three times from falling into those cacti. Oh well. And pretty quickly after this, the base expanded to include a crafting room, a huge storage room, an water ladder down to the bedrock, and at least two secondary entrances. There was a huge mineshaft that I built while looking for iron, but we abandoned that after what seemed like an age, when not a single vein of ore was found. Shocking!
(by Noah)
The entrance to our first base, with a cow on the hill.
(by Noah)
Our massive storage room, and exit from the base.
(by Noah)
Our crafting area, with a painting for relaxation.
(by Noah)
By the time we had set up the base, Morbus had installed Minecraft Overviewer on the server so that we could have Google style maps of the world. After playing around with this a little, I decided that I wanted to build something that could be appreciated on that kind of scale. Something that would look great from a birds-eye perspective. After having seen it elsewhere, I decided that I wanted to attempt to build myself a Weighted Companion Cube from the game Portal. This may or may not have something to do with my eager anticipation of Portal 2 being released later this month.
One of the first things I did was look around for reference images. Then, it occurred to me that there might be some pixel art that I could extrude into three dimensions. Strangely enough, I found a post by remisser that explains how he made a Weighted Companion Cube coaster with beads. Not exactly what I was looking for, but the beads are essentially pixels, and so I decided to use this as the base of my design. Thanks remisser!
I started by finding a patch of beach that seemed big enough for such a large object, and then went about clearing the mountains of sand, so that I would have a large flat expanse of ground to build upon. This took much longer than I expected! And I found a big underground cave, which I filled with sand. As I did this, Sean occasionally came past to hoover up all the coal.
When I was done with that, I made the foolish decision to double the dimensions of the reference grid, so that it might look more impressive from the sky. I started work on this with stone, and laid out four massive squares on the beach. I even got as far as building up the walls around one of them to 50% completion. But after a few hours, I realised I had bitten off way more than I could chew. Moreover, when I took myself (through jumping and creating new blocks) to the projected height of the finished cube, I am pretty sure I was blocked by the upper boundary of the sky.
I took a short break, and when I came back, spent about an hour undoing all of my work. A little annoying, sure. But I was determined to build this. So once I had my blank sheet again, I adjusted two things. I would build to the original dimensions of the bead coaster I had found, and I would build with wool to make things easier. Stone is a little awkward to destroy if you place a block wrong. And anyway, I would be using wool for half of the cube anyway, as it is one of the only blocks you can dye.
I decided to play it safe at this point, and drew out the design on the sand in one dimension. I waited for the map to update, so that I could check to see if everything looked okay. And indeed, it did. So next was a, confusing at first, process of extruding that design into three dimensions. One of the only modifications I made was to extend the width of the corner braces so that the cube would be held above the ground. This, along with a few other tweaks, should make the final object more faithful to the original design.
Once I had the first few layers down, the rest was fairly easy. I decided pretty early on that the core of the cube should be a big pink cube. I might decide to put something in there later. Perhaps a ladder in from some secret underground passage way. It occurred to me that I could fill the whole thing with cake! Anyway, using the walls of the pink cube, constructing the whole cube is simply a matter of moving around the walls in sequence, building things up from the plan. The only exception to this were the white disks with pink hearts on, which I constructed separately, as soon as I had something to affix them to. Annoyingly enough, the positioning of the heart is one block too high on two of them. I only noticed this after looking at them again this morning. I will have to dismantle them and start over.
The whole thing is probably half finished at the moment. Tiredness eventually won over, and I had to go to bed. Before I did, I placed a cake at the front of the cube, and a sign that reads: “FIRST THERE WILL BE MINING / THEN THERE WILL BE CAKE.” You can use the map to see the cube, and monitor it’s progress as I complete the rest of it.
(by Noah)
The design for the strange bead coaster I found.
(by Noah)
A one dimensional plan, composed on the sand.
(by Noah)
Starting to extrude the plan into three dimensions.
(by Noah)
Adding the disks with pinks hearts on.
(by Noah)
A half finished cube, with a cake on the beach.
(by Noah)
The approach to the cube, with Chankillo Observatory on the left.
(by Noah)
Stood next to the cube.
(by Noah)
Cake and grief counseling will be available at the end of the construction.
(by Noah)
The moment I realised the hearts weren’t lined up.
(by Noah)
Since Noah’s been making his big cube, I thought I’d make a nice base in the best looking location close to his cube. There’s a hill which has lots of dandelions on it, so I made a place there. Then I put this window in the side so that you over the valley which leads up to our main base. This was it as the moon was setting.
(by Sean)
This is the hall that I made this morning inside the dandelion hill. The window to the left is where the previous shot of the moon was taken from. If you go towards the end, the main base is to the left. Just behind where this shot was taken was the entrance to the dandelion hall. If you look in the opposite direction, and go outside the door, you’d be looking towards Noah’s cube.
(by Sean)
This mysterious door in the side of the dandelion hall, which you can probably just about see in the background of the main hall shot, leads up to a terrace. From there it’s a short walk up some steps that I made to the top of dandelion hill above the hall. I mainly put the hall here because there are so many nice views from around this area, and it’s pretty central to where all of our stuff is.
(by Sean)
This is a view of the valley which leads to our base, taken from the top of dandelion hill over the hall that I made this morning. You can see the entrance to the base to the right, with the Jack-o’-lanterns and cacti. Pretty much in the middle with the sandy bit is where our default spawn point is. The water that comes in up the valley from the left was made by me when I terraformed the area to make it better when Noah started to make his cube some distance away.
(by Sean)
This is a shot towards Noah’s cube from the front of the great hall inside dandelion hill. The cube is not quite visible, even with fog turned off! The long sandy isthmus that runs towards Noah’s area from the seashore was made by me to make it easier for him to get back to the base and so on. There’s also a tiny base at the foot of the hill, below where the sheep are. To the left is eight lights island, inspired by Chankillo. The tree filled island to the right seems a possibility for development, but it’s also quite picturesque.
(by Sean)
I was a little bored, so I logged on to Minecraft to go watch a sunrise over the Eight Lights Peninsula. You can see the dim light of the torches as they shine against the twilight sky and sun just starts to poke its head between the towers. Also, there is a chicken swimming in the water. Silly chicken.
(by Noah)
I have been busy all evening on work, but I decided to bring up the map to quickly see how things were progressing on Minecraft. As you can see from this quick screenshot, some jester has decided to plant a sapling on top of my cube. I shall be investigating this vandalism when I have time to sign in.
(by Noah)
You’re probably all cubed out by now. But don’t blame me, blame my co-authors who should be blogging about their own projects more than they are doing! Early days. Anyway, I have removed the vandalism, and I have fixed the hearts so that they all align. As you can see from the screenshot. Now, if only it was that easy to mend a broken heart in real life. Sigh.
(by Noah)
This is the view from the front of the main base, just next to the pumpkins, towards the sea. Noah seems to have done a little sculpting of the water coming up the valley, because there were a few areas of flowing water which hadn’t been bucketed in. You can just about see the little secret hidden base on the right hand side at the end there, which I noticed only from its torch shining at night visible from the side viewing gallery at the great dandelion hall. I’m not sure who built the little base, and it seems to have been abandoned!
(by Sean)
This is the natural lava flow just outside the backdoor. Lava is very rare in our world, and this is the largest outdoor flow of it that we’ve found so far. We’ve had some animals around there congregating and leaving us some nice food when they get a bit too close to the flow. There’s another small pool of lava way in the lands to the south, and that’s right next to the ocean. I’ve been thinking about trying to get some water and lava interaction set up there, but I’m not sure what sort of things it’s possible to make there since I’ve been told that it just turns to stone or, rarely, obsidian.
(by Sean)
This is a view down the stairs of my new tower, made of iron and capped with lapis lazuli. The stairs were handy because I built the main tower without any scaffolding, but then I discovered that I’d need scaffolding on each side when putting the roof on. The roof was pretty difficult, and I’m not actually all that pleased with the results. This was intended to be part of a large castle complex, but I’ll probably work on something different in the same area instead.
(by Sean)
This is the tower on the island, or really a peninsula. I had good fun using a lot of TNT to flatten the peninsula. I noticed that if you use too many boxes of TNT together, they get thrown out and then explode in places that you don’t want cleared. The waterfall on the right hand side is the only natural waterfall I’ve found so far, and it’s a pretty nice area. The cacti were already there when I found the island, but they provide a good landmark to aim towards when sailing to the island from the shore of the main continent. It only takes a few minutes to get here from the main base area.
(by Sean)
This is what it looks like after you fall off half way through construction and die. This happened quite a few times, actually. It’s pretty precarious up there when you’re running around in circles trying to build up the sides of the wall. This time, however, I noticed that both the middle braces were too small, and that the starts of the top corners were wrong. So I had to go back and fix all of this before continuing with the build. What a chore!
(by Noah)
The last touches before I finished the cube. At this point, I had completed the outside, but there was still scaffolding on the inside that I knew I needed to take down, even though you can’t see it. So, I tunnelled in from the bottom of the cube, and lit the place up. The inside is so huge, you literally can’t see the ceiling for the darkness. Before I left, sealing the place shut for future explorers, I placed a cake in the middle of the room.
(by Noah)
This pretty slope, with roses and trees, was to be demolished for our world’s first ever canal. Yes that’s right, in the hope of making the journey from our base area to my tower a little quicker, I decided to annihilate an entire hill. This isn’t a direct route, but this is the thinnest part of our continent, and it leads out right in front of the tower, so it’s not a bad place to built a canal. The main direction of the canal was to be exactly where the roses are going up, just right of centre. I dug up the roses and planted them on a hill to the left. As you look at this shot, this is looking north towards what would be the planned entrance to the canal as you come from our bases. The tower is behind.
(by Sean)
So how do you make a canal? Good question. I asked myself the same thing. “Sean”, I said. “What do you use in Minecraft to make a canal?” Having ruminated upon this question for all of half a second, the answer seemed entirely clear. “TNT, of course!” Lots of TNT. In fact, I think I planted about five stacks of 64 TNT, possibly even more. This is the path up where the roses were. Now there is TNT.
(by Sean)
After sealing the place shut, I ran a distance without looking back, so that I could witness the spectacle for the first time as if I had just discovered it anew. When I turn around, what do I find? A creeper chasing me!
(by Noah)
A picturesque shot of the cube.
(by Noah)
This is up the top of the slope, looking south towards the planned exit of the canal towards the tower. You can’t see the tower in this picture. I’ve put some TNT in the trees, because I figured that the trees will need blowing up too. I just started sort of spinning around throwing TNT everywhere at this point. As well as the TNT scattered joyfully in the trees, I’ve also stacked it quite deep on the ground, to two or three rows. The plan is to make a ribbon of it going all the way across the thing which isn’t quite a valley, to the sea on the other side. Then I’d set it off, and there’d be a canal there instead of land!
(by Sean)
The cube as seen from the isthmus of the Eight Lights Peninsula.
(by Noah)
Some prospective bacon in front of the cube.
(by Noah)
Looking south back towards the tower, you can see the roses that I planted on the right hand side. You can also see a lot of TNT. That’s because TNT is excellent for making canals. Also, I figured that I didn’t want to do this process again. I used some TNT to clear my island, but it kept not being enough, and I had to keep putting more TNT down. This made a bit of a mess, so I thought that I should just go all out this time and put tons of TNT down. Tons and tons. I’d made a ribbon half way across now, and you can see I’m stacking it more and more. More TNT, more! Then I started to stack it down the north slope, ever more thickly. There were walls to the side, and I put TNT in them. I had TNT in the trees. I had TNT stacked on every available bit of land. If I had to dodge around a bit of landscape, I put TNT there. I put down so much TNT that I had to make new stacks of TNT, despite filling up on TNT. This is a lot of TNT. But TNT, it turns out, is quite dangerous.
(by Sean)
Forgive the interface, but I had to take this screenshot in a hurry. As I was merrily planting TNT all over the north slope, I was having a bit of a problem with how steep the slope was, and how obsessed I was at making the TNT several stacks deep. I planted so many stacks of TNT around me that I was hemmed in with TNT. I instinctively decided to hew out one of the TNT blocks to my side and realised that I’d set it off. I had just set off over 500 blocks of TNT.
This is what it looks like when you set off 500 blocks of TNT in your face to make a canal. My advice is to leave your face out of the demolition phase of any canal building processes that you might enter into. I lost almost all of my stuff, except some glass cubes.
(by Sean)
Okay, so here’s one final shot of the cube! There’s something funny about the way this software renders the blocks, because the sides of the cube seem to have different colour shading applied, making it look like it has detail that doesn’t really exist. You can still see the cube at the farthest zoom available on the map, making this the world’s first superstructure. Also notice how I attempted to teraform the beach on the right to make it look more natural. I think I went too far with this, as now it looks sort of hyper natural.
(by Noah)
Although I did set off over 500 blocks of TNT in my own face, it did make a pretty impressive hole. This is the hole looking south towards the tower. The roses are looking on happily, probably smiling at seeing the person who moved them from their beautiful slope block himself up with over 500 blocks of TNT.
The slopes were gone, and there was now a passage through from one ocean to the other. Unfortunately, the canal demolition process had made a very messy hole, with a not very flat bottom. Also the water wasn’t pouring in very far. Not very far at all. I decided to fill the whole thing with buckets of water, assuming that it wouldn’t be a very difficult process. This turned out worse than the TNT.
(by Sean)
This is one hour after the previous screenshot, filling my newly shaped canal with water. If it looks very similar to the previous screenshot, that’s because filling a canal with buckets of water is somewhat inefficient. And somewhat inefficient is a synonym of “AAAAAARGH!”. No matter how much water I put in, it didn’t seem to fill up. Not only that, but whenever I did put some water in, the current would be so strong that they’d keep pushing me around, and then it would be extremely difficult to put any more water in. I’d already persevered with this for an hour, despite the obvious fact that it was not going to make a canal. I almost gave up on making the canal, but I really wanted to make a canal. So I decided to fill the whole thing in with sand and then see what it would be like to add the water then.
(by Sean)
This is what happens when you spend two hours filling up a hole, which you created with over 500 blocks of TNT, with sand. The paths across the canal were to let me get from one side to the other more easily, of course, but also to make it easier to work on the filling process in stages. I found that by pouring water source cubes along the sides, pretty much filling the sides, the spaces would almost entirely fill. Sometimes I had to supplement this with a bit more water in the middle or something, but in general it was a very good process. Apart from having to remove the paths across, the canal is basically complete here.
(by Sean)
After seeing Sean’s posts on here, and having finished my cube, I decided to go on a bit of an adventure. I crafted a boat, brought up copy of the world map, and set of to circumnavigate the islands neighbouring islands. I took a wrong turn under a bridge, and had to go back, but eventually I found my way to the canal. I noticed that Sean had placed some gold towers at various points which I took as an indication I was going in the right direction.
(by Noah)
Eventually, I found Sean’s iron tower!
(by Noah)
As part of the whole canal thing, I decided to make the rest of the coast between our base and the canal a lot more friendly to boating. Otherwise there wasn’t much point in building a canal, if you can’t easily reach it. One of the things that was in the way was the sandy path that I built across the sea to Noah’s Island, where his cube is. I decided to make a sandstone bridge out of it, and used stairs for the first time in the world. This is that little bridge, taken from Noah’s Island looking back towards the mainland. Dandelion hill, where the great hall and gallery are, is to the left in the background.
(by Sean)
Another thing that was in the way was the sandy island just in front of eight lights peninsula. I knew from canal building that taking out the sides of an island first is a bad idea because then the water pushes you around. So I took out the inside of the island with a diamond spade first, and then walked in a circle around the outside wall removing it. I didn’t have to place many water blocks down when it was done, which is good. This area is now navigable by water.
(by Sean)
To facilitate the activity of boating, I decided to put a few markers up between our bases and the canal. This is not only to show the way, but because from a distance it’s very difficult to see low lying bits of land that you might be hurtling towards. The markers are placed at the edges of bits of land that you need to aim for to take the optimum route. In this case, there is a narrow passage, the most difficult bit of the route, so I put some markers either side. I’ve still crashed into that bank on the right.
I wanted the markers to be orange like standard maritime markers, since apparently that’s the easiest colour to see at sea. But orange is a difficult colour block to give yourself, so I used yellow blocks, which are gold, instead.
(by Sean)
Once I’d made the route to the canal easy to navigate by water, I found that the route from the canal to my tower island was quite difficult. Thankfully there was another narrow gap across the land in a straight line to my island that I could easily make another canal out of. Now they form one long canal system. This picture was taken from the side of the north entrance to the new canal, looking back along the bay in front of, and down along, the main canal. Notable in this picture is the fact that there is no bridge over the canal yet.
(by Sean)
This is me, Noah, and deltab respectively from foreground to background zooming under the new bridge over the main canal. We’re heading towards my tower, as I’m giving deltab a tour of the interesting features of the world. The bridge is good for getting great views of the canal, but also serves as a landmark to make the canal more characteristic and interesting. It’s built out of sandstone, using the creep method after I decided that sand scaffolding would take way too long. We’ve actually entered the new canal section here. After we got there, deltab decided to hang about by my tower and help me with a new project idea that I had.
(by Sean)
This is the great underground grotto. I built this underneath my tower with lots of help from deltab. It’s much wider than I’d planned it to be, so I might try it again. The main idea is to have a central gap, and then pathways around which would lead out into other interesting things. I’d also planned to make it very colourful, though with all the torches it turned out a lot brighter than I’d planned. You can just see deltab down on the second level, on the right hand side.
(by Sean)
Whilst we were making the grotto, d8uv was making a treehouse! What a great treehouse it is too. He put it by the lake that Morbus made, which we call backdoor lake. So this is the backdoor treehouse. The tons of stuff that is lying around is because Noah accidentally clicked on d8uv’s pet wolf, and the pet wolf killed him. This is an interesting little peek at what Noah had in his inventory.
(by Sean)
Sunset from the backdoor treehouse. Visible in the hill at the middle are the “nipples”, a well known local landmark. To the left is the great curve of the mountain over the lava flow, so that tells you roughly where the backdoor to the main base is. The backdoor lake is clearly visible in the foreground.
(by Sean)
I’m not sure what’s going on with my Minecraft client, but every time I teleport I get a minute or two of glitches. They usually involve being able to see 50% of the area I am supposed to be in, as if the landscape was cut in half with a bread knife. This then zooms in and out, and spins around, until I get so close to the person I’m teleporting to, I can actually see the inside of their head! Then, suddenly, everything will go back to normal.
(by Noah)
Deltab came to join us, and Sean gave him a tour of the islands. I popped along half way through. This is the three of us, on the approach to Sean’s canal. Notice the golden water marker on the left. For some reason, my skin was reset to the default for the whole of this session.
(by Noah)
I came to explore Sean and deltab’s underground grotto. One of the more beautiful rendering glitches caused a bunch of cobblestone items to be suspended in the air around the grotto. So I naturally went about the place taking photographs. This was one of the best ones.
(by Noah)
Cody came to join the fun. Ah, I love his skin so much. Anyway, in hardly any time at all he managed to tame a pet wolf (I am very jealous of this) and build a totally great treehouse. While he was working on it, I stood around and made staircases out stone slabs, beds, and cake. Don’t ask. Oh, and I’d like to correct one of Sean’s previous posts. I didn’t attack his wolf, that was deltab. And that wasn’t me who died, that was also deltab.
(by Noah)
I am somewhat amused that Sean took an almost identical photograph of the sunset from Cody’s treehouse. I even mentioned the view when we were playing, but I’m not sure who’s idea it was first. Fortunately, the screenshots have timestamps, and mine says 01:25:20 on it. In fairness, we were all stood up there for quite a while, and it is obviously a very pretty view. Interesting that we both chose the same direction for the shot though.
(by Noah)
Inspired by Sean’s sailing adventures, I decided to take one of my own. I created a boat, got in it, and headed for the horizon. My goal was to tac around the islands, trying to keep the same heading, to see what new lands I could find. And then put a sign (flag) on to claim ownership. I was really hoping to find a snowy biome, but the closest I got was a sheet of ice. I promptly put a sign in the middle of it declaring it to be my property. This is a photograph of an island I passed that was on fire. I also placed a sign here. The island is now called Fire Island, and is the property of me.
(by Noah)
The screenshot explains it all, really. I set off on my epic night voyage across the seas of Minecraft. And half an hour later, I arrived in exactly the bay I had set off from. The process of realisation was a strange one. First I noticed the bridge, and then the windows of the Great Hall. Words fail to describe both the confusion and wonderment this caused. Like some ancient sailor who set out to find the Americas, spots land, sees some figures on the shore, and then recognises the familiar landmarks of his hometown.
(by Noah)
It took a while to update, but you can see what happened from the world map here. I set off from the top middle, took the canal to where Sean’s tower is located. Then I ventured into the great unknown. Thinking I was tacking south, I was actually tacking east. When I saw land towards the end of that stretch, I must have taken a northerly heading, and then again at the top of the map, a westerly heading. This brought me full circle! Reminds me of that guy who circumnavigated Britain by turning left around the coast.
(by Noah)
When you zoom in, you can see two sign posts. The one at the top there reads “FIRE ISLAND” and is the place I mentioned previously. Notice the lava flow on the beach, which probably caused the forrest fire. Also notice that it is not an island at all, but is in fact connected to the mainland. In the bottom left there is a sign that reads “LAND AT LAST POINT / Sailed to by sbp” and demonstrates that I may not have been the first person to discover this part of the map. I feel your plight, Christopher Columbus.
(by Noah)
Because minecarts are buggy in SMP, I realised that boats might provide a better alternative transportation system. I figured that all you’d need to do was provide running water, and a guide system. Then you could hop in a boat, and let the water carry you around the place. This is a first attempt at such a system, as a sort of proof of concept. Here you can see Sean (dressed up as the Tronman) in a boat, and about to ride the water elevator up to the glass canal. I still need to figure out how to make the boats less prone to being destroyed as they pass through the various parts of the contraption, but other than that, it works pretty well now.
(by Noah)
Sean figured out a way to build TNT cannons with obsidian. I’ll let him explain more about that in a post of his own. However, the first thing I thought of was wouldn’t it be cool to fire pigs out of the TNT cannons? So here’s a screenshot of us trying to herd pigs from the spawners into the barrel of the cannon. We failed pretty spectacularly at this.
(by Noah)
We were successful at filling the ocean with pigs though.
(by Noah)
Making a canal gave me a kind of lust for TNT, so I looked around for neat things to do in Minecraft with TNT. The most obvious one was building a cannon. I decided to build a cannon. I watched various guides and thought about how it works, and then I built a cannon. This is the cannon that I built. It is made out of cobblestone and can apparently hold 14 TNT. Building cannons is not as easy as it looks.
(by Sean)
This is what happened when I fired my first cannon. Building cannons is not as easy as it looks. As you can see, I had built the cannon in a new “ballistics and aerospace research centre” next to my tower, looking out into the pretty cow island in the ocean. The idea was to make not just a cannon, but a cannon that is capable of launching a player far into the ocean. This cannon wasn’t capable of launching anything, but it was capable of making a great big hole in my island. I decided not to repair the hole, but rather to make another new cannon in a separate part of the ballistics and aerospace research centre.
(by Sean)
Since I didn’t want to mess about, I watched a video of a really successful catapult and tried to replicate that design as closely as possible. This is the business end of the second cannon at the ballistics and aerospace research centre on my island with the tower. The TNT in the middle is on the rails where a player is supposed to go. This one is no longer facing south towards the cow island, but rather west towards currently unexplored territories. It would be fun to explore them by cannon, surely?
(by Sean)
This hole used to be the second cannon at the ballistics and aerospace research centre. (also known as BAARC). I decided not to repair this hole either. I had carved my initials into the island, and this explosion actually managed to wipe some of that out. I also lost all of my stuff in this explosion. The BAARC was starting to look pretty messy, but I built three further cannons after this one, each one more successful than the previous. I didn’t do a successful player catapult launch until giving Noah and deltab a tour of the installations.
(by Sean)
Cow island is very pretty, but hard to get to. I decided to make an underwater tunnel to connect it with the mainland. This is the tunnel. This is during the daylight hours, but even at a depth of just one water, the tunnel is very dark which is quite disappointing. I did put a couple of Jack-o’-lanterns in the floor and thought about making the whole floor out of them.
To make the tunnel I had to fill in the whole ocean there with a three wide path of sand, which often went ten deep. Then I tunneled through the side of the sand, filling in the sides quickly with glass when it broke through to the water. This was a surprisingly effective method of making the tunnel, and the hardest bit was really filling it all that sand. The tunnel emerged just one block to the left of the stairs which run down to the great underground grotto under my tower, which was quite funny.
(by Sean)
This is the demo of the canal lift system that Noah was planning. The picture shows Noah himself testing it. He built this on cow island, which was annoying at first especially because the cows on cow island are very stupid and like to get in the way of building projects so Noah decided to kill one or two. But the lift is extremely cool and does add some character. This shows the finished design, but he went through what felt like hundreds of installations before plumping for this design.
Though it generally works, sometimes the boats catch on the side and sometimes they get destroyed just as they enter the bottom of the chute. I also think that the water wedges should be placed closer together so that boats get propelled along them faster. You also have to be careful not to go down the chute as somebody is coming up it on a boat, because I think I killed Noah once that way. The design is great, but Noah isn’t sure where he wants to build the canal yet.
(by Sean)
This is me in diamond armour by the fifth cannon at the BAARC, the ballistics and aerospace research centre on the island with the tower. The mess around the front of the cannon would appear to be the remains of Noah, who got too close to the cannon during a test firing. After this I managed to launch myself using the cannon, the first successful catapulting of a player at the BAARC, and we tried to use a pig subject for another test, but the pigs were somewhat unwilling.
(by Sean)
This morning I decided to make a base half way between the spawn point bases with Noah’s cube, and my island with the tower, BAARC, and other stuff. This way it would be easier to get to either place when spawning. I’d already selected the half way point on the map, at one of the ocean navigation markers that I put up, on a bit of the coast next to where I found a load of monkeys. It’s a pretty promontory. When I got there, I was exploring a natural route up the cliff face, and I found this. It’s a pig delivery system.
This is a charted area, of course, but it’s quite far from anything, and is in fact the furthest place away from anything of interest that is yet in the middle of the map. But there’s a pig delivery system there. This was quite an interesting discovery, to say the least. There are lots of pigs in the ocean which may affect shipping, but that can easily be fixed. Anyway, I decided to build the base just up and to the side of the pig delivery system, exactly where I’d been planning to put it. I wanted to use Noah’s water system to make it possible to chute a boat out into the ocean from the base, so I made something very similar to the prototype that he’d created.
(by Sean)
This is the new base over the water! Note also that I have a new skin for my player, which is a paladin skin. There is a bed inside, and a chest by the door which contains tons of boats so that you can take them out easily and put them on the water chute. Note the abundance of pigs to the left, which is where the pig delivery system is, the marker, and even a duck to the right. I wanted to put a clock in a wall or in a floor behind some glass, but I realised that this is impossible. I did find out through searching, however, that they plan to add wall mounted clocks to the game, so that would be nice. You can see how awesome this kind of promontory cliff is, and why Noah decided to make his pig delivery system here coincidentally right by where I planned to make the base over the water.
(by Sean)
This is the big cannon at the BAARC, with the redstone circuit turned on but with no charge or shot inside. A nearby pig looks at the photographer expectantly. Perhaps they are eager to be fired from the installations. Making the cannon out of obsidian not only makes it look great, but it also stops the cannon from being destroyed during bad tests. But even this went through a development phase. I made an obsidian cannon without an obsidian floor, and it blew a massive hole around the cannon even though the cannon itself was fine. This big fifth cannon also suffered a leaking explosion before I plugged the back where the water source is.
(by Sean)
Since the ballistics and aerospace research centre, BAARC, is the scene of a lot of ingenious explosions, I thought it deserved a sign of its own. I tried to design it in the style of the old NASA emblems, but used the characteristic iron and lapis lazuli materials used in the tower on the island. I also made a port in the top of that tower so that you can use it as a viewing station, which is where this picture was taken from.
Notice the annoying inventory help message at the top right. This is to coerce the player into opening their inventory to get an achievement for it. When I follow this message, however, I do not get the achievement. I have tried both “e” and “E”. So this message doesn’t go away, even when I’m in screenshot mode. Excellent. At any rate, it’s difficult to miss the BAARC sign. The fire towers are experimental lighthouse components.
(by Sean)
Beta 1.5 dropped, and with it came powered rails. I found the flattest expanse of land that is close to the base over the water, and put this track there. Then it started to rain. The redstone torches in the rain used to power the tracks look really atmospheric. After this two creepers came, and one of them hit me and damaged the track, but the other got set on lightning. I know the expression is usually “set on fire by lightning”, but this one was actually set on lightning. It started glowing blue.
(by Sean)
The bay of pigs.
(by Sean)
Noah had famously made a slaughter house right next to where I wanted to build the base over the water. He improved it a little, so that it actually dispensed one or two pieces of pork, make some more improvements, and then bricked it up. Meanwhile I had gone to a nearby island to conduct my own slaughter machine experiments. When I got back Noah was in the middle of bricking his up, and this is a picture of him doing that. You can see deltab next to me watching on, too.
When Noah had bricked this up, he found that it had stopped working. It seems that the new improvements that he’d made, more lava to burn the pigs more thoroughly, had actually started to destroy the food that came through. It stopped dispensing food altogether. We all three of us went over to the island and I showed them my experiment. Noah then started to make a new device for the mass slaughter of pigs.
(by Sean)
This is the new slaughter machine that Noah made on the place we started to call bacon island. As with most of the islands in our world it’s actually a peninsula. The pigs are generated into a little pen which is enclosed with a fence so that they can’t wander out. Then an array of arrow dispensers, which fire arrows through a wall of lava, setting them on fire before they reach the pig pen. The dispensers are redstone button operated, so you hit the button and a shower of flaming arrows descends on the pigs. Later, Noah tried to put in remote wiring and also added a water system to try to collect the resulting bacon.
(by Sean)
Earlier in the day, just after my powered rail experiment, I had created a 200 block long tunnel between the island with the tower and the end of the canal. Hilariously, where I got bored of digging and made a spiral staircase to the surface, it came out a single cube to the side of my underwater tunnel entrance. The torches are on the right here, so you can see that this is moving back towards the island with the tower. I put redstone torches on the wall every ten blocks, and then put the powered rail sections there. I also made a station to automatically boost minecarts forward, but it had a strange bug and didn’t work very well. The minecart takes 27s, and the canal takes 37s to do the same length of journey, so that’s a significant improvement, but I tend to find the canal much more fun. Minecart underground systems would be good for long journeys under large continents.
(by Sean)
This was the pig slaughter machine that I had been experimenting with as Noah was bricking up his slaughter house on the mainland. I call it the picticle accelerator. A row of ten generators spawns pigs onto a grass path, and then they get funnelled towards a lava blade. They are usually able to run a block or so away from the lava, so the bacon gets deposited on the tube coming out of the machine. It’s an easy matter to walk in and collect it, but you have to be careful not to get too close to the lava blade. I was going to make a water collection system, but I was worried that the water would put out the pigs. At some point the machine stopped working as well, yet I hadn’t changed a single thing to it, so that was very mysterious. It wasn’t particularly efficient even which it was working at its best.
(by Sean)
When Noah put in an extension to the button mechanism on his flaming pig pen arrow machine, I looked for traps that other people had made. Some were drowning traps, some were TNT traps. Most looked terrible, but then I found one on Youtube that looked pretty good, even though it was developed in Alpha. I decided to try to make a version of it, and deltab helped me. This is the feed end of the completed installation. The pigs spawn, and a small grass verge gives way into a strong current of water. That meets a facing lava blade which overlaps the water, and below the overlap is a drop into another water transport mechanism to the exit.
This system proved to be extremely effective. It creates tons of bacon, and it’s an interesting mechanism that a player can go through without dying as long as they’re at full health when they enter, and don’t enter from the sides. Sometimes the bacon that comes out is uncooked, but it seems more often to be cooked. I asked Noah permission to change his non-working slaughter house for this design, and he said that I could.
(by Sean)
I replaced Noah’s slaughter house, by his permission, with the new design. This is the resulting collection trough. You can see lots of nice cooked and uncooked bacon, and a sign saying “MYSTERIOUS BACON”. In fact, if you want to see the mystery there is an iron button operated door that you can go through to see the workings, or go to the base above the water which retains a floor that Noah put in to create a viewing gallery to the slaughter house mechanics.
(by Sean)
This is the viewing gallery adjacent to the base over the water that lets you see the new design of the slaughter house. This is almost exactly the same design as the pig feeding area on bacon island, except using different materials and made more compact to fit the space. A pig is being processed into bacon using lava in the centre of the picture. This is a strange thing to have at the back of such a nice base, but that comes from this being prime territory for building, I suppose. Also it is handy to have a good supply of bacon.
(by Sean)
Noah had made some modifications, shall we say, to the base over the water to integrate it into the slaughter house. One of the things that I had taken great care about when making the base was to modify the cliffside as little as possible when creating it. That way it felt like making the most out of the natural resources. In changing the base, Noah made it into a giant concrete cube, so this morning I tried to put the front of the base back more or less to how it was. He did improve the inside of the base, so I didn’t change that. I did however change the configuration of the water chute, because my old design had been very difficult to launch a boat from, and made it difficult to walk about along. This new design is much better. Note the snazzy little wooden steps to make access to the edges of the chute easier.
(by Sean)
This is a lighthouse which I made. I’d spent ages agonising over where to place it, but just went with my instinct. Happily my instinct was to place it on a large and mainly circular sandbank out in the middle of nowhere. This meant I didn’t have to put down the usual 256 blocks of sand that I start my projects with. I based this mainly on Plymouth lighthouse, but also especially the top on the Needles lighthouse. The superstructure is all out of iron, and the red blocks are a woollen cladding. The top did set on fire, even though there was no direct route to lava, so I replaced this with a layer of cobblestone. The stairs up the inside were actually the most difficult part of the construction, and they’re quite messy. The outside looks really good though.
(by Sean)
This is the site of my new secret project, which has to do with geology. The project does not look so cool on the map as I’d hoped, but the actual thing is quite good. Making this project was harder than I thought, so I abandoned it quite early. It’s something that can, however, be gradually added to. As usual I tried to hasten the project with TNT, but there was a secret underground lake, so this wasn’t entirely successful. The lesson with TNT seems to be that it is rarely entirely successful. All the same, the project is coming along fine, and perhaps people will help me out.
(by Sean)
I was ready to give up on the original pig killing machine. My original intention was to have a little hole in the side of a hill with a button next to it. And by that button would be a sign that read “PUSH BUTTON / RECEIVE BACON” or whatever. When I logged back on again, I decided to give it one last shot. This is a view of the machine as it was before I restarted.
(by Noah)
It’s probably getting old, but here’s an OCEAN of pigs.
(by Noah)
Here’s a picture of deltab as he watches over the construction. Notice the promising bits of cooked bacon that had been collecting as I worked. It would turn out that these were more of a fluke than anything else.
(by Noah)
This is a side view of my modified pig killing machine. Notice the double set of lava blades. This was in an attempt to thoroughly kill the pigs. I had noticed that occasionally, well mostly, they would just wander through the lava and walk out. I don’t know how much you know about slaughterhouse etiquette, but let me assure you, that’s just not proper!
(by Noah)
Yo dawg, I heard you like boats?
After my second failure, I decided to give up. What do you do after you construct a massive device to murder pigs? Well, of course, you brick it all up and pretend it never happened. So I dutifully went about hiding all the brutality, with a massive wall of stone. I got a bit carried away with this, and pretty much demolished Sean’s base in the process. Out of guilt, I rebuilt his base with stone. I also replaced the chest of boats I had destroyed, and spent about 5 minutes filling it up to the brim with new boats.
(by Noah)
After I had bricked up the pig murdering device, Sean took me to see his experiments on what is now locally, and incorrectly, called Bacon Island. I was inspired by this. So inspired, in fact, that I came up with a new plan. One so grand, I committed it to the above sketch. You should see the sketches I make for my lesser grand plans. Seriously.
(by Noah)
Massive success! My automatic firing squad contraption worked marvellously. I will spare you the details of construction. But I will draw your attention to how faithful the design is to my original sketch. As you can see here, a volley of flaming arrows is about to turn some more of those annoying large pink things into those small delicious pink things.
(by Noah)
Here’s a view of from a viewing platform I built especially for viewing the pigs die. Oh, and laughing. I was laughing quite a bit while all this was going on. It was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in Minecraft so far.
(by Noah)
One problem. How to collect all that delicious bacon?
(by Noah)
I went to go check up on Sean after finishing the firing range, and I found him proudly observing the results of his own pig killing machine. A little later, I fell in his machine and I was also slaughtered. I hope the machine was cleaned afterwards. Here he is, dressed up like a Paladin. Now, if only deltab would get a different skin, all would be right with the world.
(by Noah)
Before logging out for the night I went to go check out another contraption Sean had built. One of this theories was that if you set fire to the pig, and then throw it from a great hight, it might burn and die and not get put out by water, before it hit the ground. Unfortunately, the pigs just fall a massive distance, oink, and walk away. But while I was up there, I managed to get this great shot of two of our devices. In the front there is Sean’s most productive bacon machine, and similarly for me in the background. You might notice that by this point I had attempted to create a bacon delivery system within the pig pen using water. This is a work in progress.
(by Noah)