VGHVI Minecraft: September 28, 2017

In the September Minecraft session I got too distracted figuring out what to do next on my building to take pictures of what other people were doing; sorry about that! But at any rate here’s pictures of what I was looking at; at the end of August my question was what to do with the chasm that my building was over. So I started out spending lots of time looking at that.

The door over the chasm in question

The view across the chasm

Further down the wall of the chasm – it’s pretty tall!

There’s water at the bottom

And a cave behind the water

I hadn’t actually realized how interesting that part of the mountain was: the top part of the chasm is just stone, but when I got to the bottom, there was a rather lovely tree, waterfall, and cave. So that made me think that the bottom of the chasm was a strong center of its own, and whatever I did had to acknowledge that.

But first: explore the cave.

There’s light at the other end of the cave, it’s actually a tunnel

The view when I exit the tunnel

The mountain near the exit

So that’s not just a cave, there’s something really interesting going on there. I think that, ultimately, I probably want to build out the interior of the tunnel, with small buildings of some sort near there, and then have more buildings by the exit? Probably a train station, too: the tunnel exit is on the side of the mountain towards the spawn point, and it’s not that far away from the spawn point, so if I built a train between the two, it would help bring the world together.

Which just makes the problem bigger, it doesn’t actually answer the question of what to do with that exit over the top of the chasm. I wandered around a while thinking about that:

The building at moonrise

The sun is going down on the other side

If you wander further down the chasm, the top slopes down and there’s a notch

This is the water off the end of the green area behind the building

There’s a cave here too! (But it’s not as interesting.)

I can’t remember where this water is

Looking around near the tunnel exit, this is probably the best place for a train station

The water inside the tunnel

A few torches so you can see the inside of the tunnel better

Returning to the doorway

After all that wandering around, I basically had two options. One is go straight down the chasm from the doorway; the other is to go along the edge on the right side of that last picture, until you get to a gradual slope. I might actually ultimately end up doing both of those; for now, I’m going to concentrate on the former, but I am also going to establish the area on the right as worthy of its own, in a nod towards the latter.

Putting a railing in towards the front of the mountain

A higher up view, so you can see the viewing area I’ve created

Starting to build a path down, but regular stairs are a little steep

Half blocks work better, though these ones are the wrong color

Let’s go with this

Done with one row

Almost done with a second row

Going back to the top, adding railing on the inside

Here’s the third row

I’m actually not sure what to do next

After three rows of steps, I was starting to reach trees. And I’m honestly not sure what to do next: I can build a fourth and fifth row, which should get me to the bottom, but I’m not sure it will gracefully merge into the bottom area with the tunnel entrance. Or I can start crawling around the back of the chasm; that will let me avoid the need to solve that problem directly, and will instead give me a point of entrance in a second place in the bottom of the chasm? I’m tentatively thinking the latter sounds better, because it seems easier and gives me a hint in how to turn the bottom of the chasm into a space of its own, but I’ll need to look harder at the details next time, I seem to recall something about the shape of the walls made that not entirely straightforward either.

While thinking about that, I decided to add a few more safety features to the path:

Let’s add a railing in front of the door, so people don’t step out and immediately plummet to their doom

Here’s the other side of that new railing