End of September

Due to some crazy events happening in life, this has been fairly sparse as of late! Rest assured I have still been gaming (I'm sure you were worried)!

I will now summarize.

MINECRAFT.

My sister, some friends and myself decided that we wanted to make our own server where we could build together unmolested by other random nubs and jerks. Since I'm the most experienced in computers, servers and such (not sure that's saying much) of the group, I decided that I would try my hand at setting up a server. They've made it fairly easy these days, with a wiki and all to help you set it up and configure. It was even quite easy to get it set up so that people outside my LAN could join! The only real downfall is that it's being run from an $80 refurbished Dell computer, so it can't really handle more than a handful of people at the best of times. In any event! This post will be rather image heavy, I do apologize.

We started off setting up a village around the spawn point with the intention of protecting any newcomers from the monsters outside, until they get their bearings and such!

We started off with an initial 'landing pad' (the black and red setup in the center) where players would exactly spawn in the first time, though later the game/server goofed and started spawning people into the ocean the first time instead. Still haven't fixed that quite yet.

After we created the landing pad, we branched out, leaving it as the city center as it were. We decided to create some 'temples' in the surrounding that would act as useful locations for newcomers. The first was a 'Temple of the Day' with a cute little galaxy/sun thing on the roof courtesy of yours truly. The inside is merely a gathering place with chairs and tables that you can't use but look nice anyway.

Next we created the 'Temple of the Night' in contrast! It's got a big glowing crescent moon on it. It also serves as a dormitory, which seemed appropriate. Beds do however serve a purpose in Minecraft and can be used. They help set your spawn point, so that even though the game likes to spawn people in the middle of nowhere under water, once we've got them to the city they can reset their spawn point to a safe location.

Next we decided to cater to the real purpose of the game- building! This often requires players to craft things however. So we created the 'Temple of Fire', which is really just a cool looking forge (with multiple furnaces for all your cooking/smelting/burning needs)! Look at all that lava! Must be toasty.

To go with this, we created a sister temple to house the crafting stations (on top) and chests of useful goods (inside). The last and largest of the temples, a giant tree house: The Temple of Forest.

We made sure to fill in the village space with other things like a farm and some giant mushrooms (one actually making up a house!) as well as a glowing lake that can be seen from a small viewing area.

Pretty!

Next we branched out, deciding to create even larger towns and villages further on from 'Newbville'. We created far-stretching roads lined with glowstone(to shed light on them) and lined with small canals to discourage certain monsters that can move blocks.

 

 The first road divides after a while to lead to two separate temples. The colours are meant to match the temple they are leading to appropriately. This road leads to the new Forest Temple and village (left) and the Desert Temple and village (right)

It seemed appropriate to make the desert temple a giant pyramid. On the inside will be ruins starting to be excavated, and we will create a village around the end of the road in time.

The other path lead to the Forest Temple, which we decided to make an even giant tree, one on a massive scale to match the pyramid. So far it's just a 'stump', but even that took a massive amount of work, several hours at least to excavate the inside and make the ground flat, as well as build the stump to such a height.

The surrounding village we decided would be a series of tree houses and platforms connected. It's still under construction as well but here's an example!

The original road we created was by far the longest, long enough that you couldn't see the city even with the farthest viewing distance selected in settings, not by a long shot. It was a pain in the butt to make, let me tell you, and I didn't even make it the first time! I merely helped my friend re-colour it when we decided it would lead to the Sky Temple (and village) and that more appropriate colours were needed.

 

At the end of the path was a giant floating island, as well as more in the distance that we decided will someday house a village of sky-island-houses. My sister had claimed this one though, wanting to build a giant tower that extended past the clouds. Unfortunately they changed the height limit so that you can't build past the clouds anymore, so until I find a mod to change that, my sister's poor little tower will be unfinished for now. But in lieu of that, we built an awesome and giant winding and glowing staircase that lead up to the island as well as cascading waterfalls leading off from it! Hopefully that makes up for it a bit.

We've also created little 'easter eggs' around our server world for anyone that comes to explore, like a mushroom village and a house in the middle of a lake. There's also secret rooms with special loot, but it would be cheating to show you those!

I hope you enjoyed this little 'tour' of our Minecraft server! Further bulletins as events warrant. Expect an update on Warhammer Online: The Reckoning next!