Minecraftyness.. part 4
It’s a bit graphic intense 
I’m a bit proud of it
Now with added youtubeyness!
We had a few problems on the server I was using, where some people were taking/destroying/using people’s stuff without permission… and after having some of that done to me, and having to deal with stuff that happened to other people (since I was a mod), a couple of us decided to start up our own server. So we set the server up as survival, but with the understanding that we can all switch ourselves to creative mode if we want (that means the server has monsters and you need to mine for stuff, but we can change our individual gamemodes so we’re not affected by monsters and have all the blocks available to use freely.
So, taking advantage of free build…. I’ve got a project underway. It’s not finished yet, but I’ve got to the end of stage one, so I figured I’d put pics up now. My fear is that stage 2 (which is adding a giant Goddess statue in the centre of the pool) will make the complex look crap, so I’m documenting it before I do that, just in case 
So here’s more or less what I started with. I chose a forest just because I felt bad taking a flat plain, only to dig a big hole in it… I ended up clearing most trees by hand in survival mode (I couldn’t see all that wood go to waste)… and I wanted to build up the edges of the land, with solid blocks so I don’t get mobs spawning in there.
(the sand blocks were to help me count by 5′s to make sure the place was square… and I still managed to stuff up and make it not square *sigh*)
Then came the fun with TNT… I had 3 other people help me blast the big hole…
Then came the laborious task of carving out the tiers. Since TNT is no good for fine work, there were HOURS and HOURS of work removing block by block. Luckily again I had help, or I doubt I’d ever have finished it!
I had a basic plan of “make a big square hole with a Goddess statue in the middle and tiers with houses carved into the walls” plan…. I didn’t plan out the size or how I was going to actually do it, so it’s just growing and taking shape as I go, with no real plan.
I had originally thought the stairs would go straight down, but I realised early on that to go down so deep I wouldn’t be able to make them straight… so I’ve had to make them how I’ve done them… going down in stages. But I think that probably looks cooler than just plain stairs anyway.
The stairs down are behind/under the stairs you can see.
The bottom has a sort of trellis thing… I’ve been experimenting with using fences for various different effects.
It looks quite pretty at night
Then I decided it needed a fancy outer wall… which we (the friend who was helping) and I ended up having to move, because I’d not planned the wall, and I wanted a specific pattern, so we had to fiddle around a lot to make it fit. (As it happens, we forgot to move one wall, so one side is not the same as the rest, but it was too much effort to correct it once I realised)
I’d been playing around making a building on my local server, so I wanted to build the same thing here, I was toying with the idea of making one as a sort of entrance gate… but then I decided to build one in each corner.
(love the sunsets!)
The plan was to have a water moat around each, but one corner of the land was in the swamp, so the water changed to swamp water in the moat and looked weird… so I decided I’d have to make that corner (and the opposite one) lava. Then I decided I should make each building a “temple” for each of the 4 elements.
I was going to have a village around the top, but I hadn’t really left enough room, so I’ve scrapped that idea.
Unfortunately we had issues with the server host so had to change hosts… and we ended up having to use an older backup when we moved, so I had 3 temples finished and I’d edged all the paths in nether brick, but the backup was when I only had 2 done and no path ending, so that had to be redone.
But… I got it completed tonight! Well, this stage anyway..
Each “temple” is the same, except for the colour of the open level, and the outside garden sort of thing. “Fire” temple has fire (red wool)… “Water” temple has water (blue wool), “Earth” temple has long grass (green wool) and “air” temple has nothing&glowstone (sandstone)
And the entrance gates
