VGHVI Minecraft: October 29, 2015

In the October Minecraft session, I continued building out the cave that I’d been working on in September. I’d been vaguely thinking that I would build a room on the other side of the water from my earlier room, but there really wasn’t a good space there for a room; while figuring that out, I decided to at least build a passage from the right side of the water (if you’re facing up the waterfall to the entrance) to the left side.

The left side was somewhat lower; I decided the best way to connect the two was to dig a passage through the rock behind the waterfall.

The entrance to the back hallway

Inside the back hallway, with stairs down to the far side

Needs a door

Here’s the exit on the other side

I still wanted a room, though; I’d been digging through a fair amount of stone, so I wondered if I could fit a room in there, with a glass front that you could use to look out through the waterfall.

Starting to dig out a room behind the waterfall

First version of the glass wall

That was too cramped, let’s go three blocks deep

Add a bit of a fence to demarcate the entrance in the back

At this point I had to deal with Minecraft fluid dynamics. I tried various locations for the cutoff, and I was frustrated by the fact that, as far as I can tell, adding a block and then remove it can permanently alter the water flow. So, while I don’t think the front of the room stuck out more than had been there before, the water didn’t flow as gracefully as I remembered it.

Here’s a view again from the earlier room

Here’s a view from a higher angle, so you can see the glass

Once I had the outlines fixed, I added some more decor.

Adding some furniture

The view towards the rear

The bottom of the stairs needs a door, too

With that finished, I needed to figure out how to use the space at the bottom of the stairs. The part next to the water was pretty narrow, so while it made a nice viewing area, it wasn’t going to turn into a room. But when I turned around and faced the back wall, I realized that there were a series of passages there that I could turn into a wide, graceful set of stairs that ended up curling back to the water, beneath the new viewing area.

The water viewing area by the bottom exit from the passage behind the water

In the other direction, there’s a place for a passage to start curling around to the left

The stairs continue to curve

The bottom of the stairs

At the bottom of the stairs was a lovely little pond. If I’m remembering correctly, the dirt was already there, but I added the grass. And then if you follow the water along there, you’ll see where it starts connecting back to the end of the waterfall.

A pond at the bottom

Following the water back

Standing on the stairs, so you can see both the pond and the viewing area above

The view from the viewing passage up top, facing the stairs instead of the water

That’s what I spent my time on; Pat was also there, and he finished detailing his pyramid:

The finished pyramid

Then he followed me to my cave, stopping off at the fort (which I think we’re calling Pinetown?) to make sure villagers were doing okay and rescuing some golems from the water.

Rescuing golems

This lookout pig does not, however, need rescuing

After looking at my cave, he poked around a bit in the surrounding terrain, and found some places where he’s considering building next.

A dramatic floating island

A mountain rabbit

I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do next, but I think I’ll continue with the cave: I suspect that there are more spaces that are worth paying attention to, and for that matter some of the spaces that I mentioned above could probably use some refinement. I’m also going to look up and see if there’s scope to do something interesting there, with bridges crossing the space.