Whenever new Rock Band DLC comes out, I give it a listen, and buy it if it looks like fun to play. The problem is that I don’t actually get around to playing it, so I had a bunch stacked up. So on Saturday night, Liesl and I went through that (on regular guitar/bass respectively); not much to report, though I am a bit embarrassed to report that the two songs that I got 100% on were Paparazzi and Tubthumping…

Today, I put in my Pro Guitar practice. I went through some of the harder training sections again: it’s no longer a surprise when I make it through those, but it’s not yet so routine that I’m not learning something. I may dip into the Expert lessons in an upcoming week: I’m sure that many of those are beyond me, but there might be some that are worth trying, and I would like to learn about alternate tunings.

After that I went through three songs. The main takeaway from Good Vibrations is that I can’t strum nearly fast enough: I could mostly keep up with that one, but I got the impression that Expert will be noticeably harder on that song, and it’s only Apprentice level!

Outer Space was rather interesting: like Yoshimi, it has a lot of chord strumming, with a bit less repetition of individual chords this time but with more variations in the chords themselves. In particular, G chords in the song had you playing the third fret on the B string, which I’m a little less used to but which makes for a pleasant transition coming out of a D chord, since you can leave your ring finger in the same place. Also, in the last of a sequence of G chords, they frequently dropped the bottom string down to an F#, which took a while to get used to but which sounded good once I got it right. (I appreciate the hint of polyphony instead of chords or single notes.) Eventually, I got to where I could get to a 4x multiplier on that song, which I was rather proud of; coming out of that chord success, I went back to try Yoshimi again, and I’m still not very good on that song, though.

The third song I went through was Break on Through (To the Other Side). That’s the first song with Hammer On / Pull Offs; I could play them reliably with the mute on, but when I plugged in the guitar, they were barely audible. So clearly I need to work on my technique there, to make them a lot crisper.

Playing through my DLC backlog reminded me that I had a bunch of Billy Joel DLC that I hadn’t gone through seriously on Pro Keys, so I decided to start chipping away on that instead of continuing with Pro Guitar. Which was a good idea: I’d forgotten how big his first DLC pack was, and I had 18 songs waiting for me!

Of which I made it through a grand total of two. In Captain Jack, I scored over 700,000 points, which wasn’t enough to put me in the top 1%; lots of chords in that song! I made enough mistakes that it looked like it’s possible to make over a million points on that song, which a look at the leaderboard confirms; the leaderboard also shows that I’m in 42nd place, I guess not that many people have played it. The other one I tried was I Go to Extremes, which was rather harder, I spent more than an hour on that song alone and there was still room for improvement at the end.

I don’t think my Pro Keys skills have slipped too much, at least, but I have another 16 Billy Joel songs to go, and there’s some non-Billy Joel DLC with keyboard parts that I should give a try on as well. So I’ll probably be trying to find time for both Pro Guitar and Pro Keys for the next month or two.

At the end of last weekend, the final outlines of the train station were taking shape; the remaining tasks were to flesh out the west side (in particular, how the alcove would merge into the station roof lines), and to actually dig out the back (north end) of the station.

I decided to continue another line of windows around the edge of the roof of the alcove, and then put a layer of dirt with a skylight in the middle:

The side of the west alcove roof

Skylight on top of the west alcove

As I went to clean up the lines of the train station roof, though, it became clear that the alcove was a little larger than I thought, so I extended the skylight a bit.

Sunset over west alcove, with inappropriately small skylight

Enlarged skylight

The west side of the station roof

With that in place, it was time to start digging out the back of the train station!

Just beginning to hollow out the top

Looking down from my perch on top

When I came down from my digging that night, a duck had stopped by to check on things

One issue that I had to deal with at this point was that the stairs going up from the back of the fourth floor of my house now didn’t work: they ran straight into the glass roof of the station. For now, I removed the top of the stairs but left the door in place near the top (which, conveniently, was right at the back of the station), and I also made a left turn near that door to start hollowing out a potential viewing area in the top back of the station.

Stairs running into glass

Looking back as I dig down at door and alcove in wall

After that, it was dig, dig, dig.

A bit of the top is cleared out now

Hitting a patch of gravel part way down

Looking east as we dig down

Nighttime view from the bottom of the progress we've made digging

Another view from the door in the wall, much further down now

After I’d gone down further, the window pattern on the west side changed; that meant that I’d hit the top of the alcove, where the windows loop around the alcove instead of continuing to the north. So I started digging it out as well.

The end of the windows shows the alcove location

Starting to dig out the top of the alcove

Sunset through the alcove windows

A wider view, showing how the station is taking shape

As I reached the bottom of the train station, I ran into that cave on the east side; it turned out that its bottom was indeed lower than the station’s floor. I decided to mostly leave the cave in place, but to finish it off a bit and put in stairs.

Looking out through the cave on the east wall

The view into the station from the cave

The finished cave area

And, shortly after that, I was done digging out the station. Which is huge!

A sheep has come to inspect the final stages

The complete station, looking towards the front

The complete station, looking towards the back and west side

There was still that door and hole way up high in the back wall of the station. I ended up removing the door and putting a glassed-in viewing area that I could reach from my house.

Looking out from the viewing area

The viewing area's window from beneath

Here’s a tour of the completed outside, going counter-clockwise from the west alcove. I like how the house and train station work together.

The entrance to the train station alcove; you can also see the balconies on the house

The west side of the station

The south side of the station

The east side of the station

The east side of the house, and some of the station

The arch at the north side of the house

The main entrance to the house

The next step, I suppose is to lay tracks! And then I’ll build a (much much smaller!) train station at the other end of the tracks, and connect that to my second house.

My favorite part of last week’s VGHVI Minecraft session was that we (Pat, mostly) finally finished the underwater tunnel! It goes to a fairly large snowy island in the middle of the sea; maybe we’ll push on beyond that to greener climates?

The ocean tunnel through the snow

These bumps were originally intended to prevent water from flooding the tunnel if we accidentally broke a wall

The tunnel has reached land

Chicken-proofing the tracks through the tunnel

A strange stone bridge leading off of the island where the tunnel lands

Eric decided to build a fortress next to last month’s Skull Mountain project:

Looking down from the top of the fortress

A side view of the fortress, looking towards Skull Mountain

A better view of the skull

Looking up from inside the fortress

The walls of the fortress are tall!

Speaking of tall things, Jonathan used his TNT to produce a truly stunning pit under one of the corners of the train track loops:

Looking down from the middle of the pit

Looking up from that same location

Looking up from the bottom. (Though he blasted more after this)

I died right after taking this photo

Finally, Miranda (with help from Pat and, I believe, Jonathan) built an apartment building near the temple.

Starting work on the apartments

The bottom floor is mostly complete

Working on the upper floors

The entrance to the building

Inside one of the apartments

The view out of one of the windows

Ovens, a workbench, and a garbage disposal

The door to Jonathan's apartment

My apartment door

Pat's apartment door

Inside Pat's apartment

A lamp in Pat's apartment

And I returned to the cave from our first session in this world (from which I sadly don’t have any pictures). And it turns out that our tree farm has finally grown its first tree! (Still not much of a farm, though…)

A tree grows underground

Lava and bedrock

Finally, I got a request for an updated world picture, so here it is. (I used Tectonicus to create it.)

The (almost) full world map

The parts where we've built stuff

The area around the temple

The underwater tunnel

As always, we do this on the last Thursday of every month, please follow the VGHVI blog and come join us!

I’ve been slacking on my Minecraft blogging: not only do I owe you last week’s post (which this is), I owe a VGHVI post! My apologies, I’ll try to get caught up this weekend.

When I last mined, I was hollowing out a train station from my home mountain. I really liked the way the windows looked and its height and width; but it was far too stumpy. So I knew I needed to expand it, at least doubling but hopefully coming close to tripling its length. (And even that wouldn’t be correct proportions for a real train station, but at least it wouldn’t look ridiculous.)

I’d set the front of the train station (the south end) based on where the mountain started turning into sand; the back (the north end) was partly determined by a tower in the middle of the mountain, and partly by the shape of the mountain. In particular, the mountain got quite narrow on the east side, and bulged out in the west, and I didn’t want to completely homogenize that. Also, I wanted to leave room for my house in front, so I couldn’t go too far north.

After walking back and forth over and around the mountain, I decided that I could go a reasonable amount further north. I didn’t want to go so far as to bump into a window on the east side of my house (the glass enclosure from this post), and I also didn’t want to encroach on the rooftop garden (from that same post), but I could comfortably go further than the tower. And on the east side, I figured I’d just build walls past the side of the mountain; that actually makes my life easier because it creates space that I don’t have to dig out. On the west side, however, I wanted to leave the bump in place, so I decided to break the symmetry and turn that into an alcove.

Even that wasn’t going to make the station long enough, however. So I decided to extend forward (south) into the sand part of the mountain. Which was convenient, actually: I use a lot of windows in my train station, and if I’m going to enlarge it, then I’ll need a source of sand to smelt into more glass. So it was convenient to have an excuse to dig into the sand in the front.

With that plan in mind, I started firming out the details. First, I started building up the wall on the east side.

Mountain where I need to extend the east wall

Building out the east wall

There's a cave under the east wall, it turns out

The space between the new east wall and the old side of the mountain

The view of the east wall from the house

That forced me to fix exactly how far back I was going to go. Next, I worked on the front (the south part) of the train station, figuring out how far forward to go. I found a reasonable distance, extended my window lines, and started digging it out.

Looking down while digging out the front of the station

I continue to be a sucker for sunsets

Done digging out the front of the station

At this point, I’d finished digging out the front of the station, but I needed to figure out exactly what the front would look like, because I’d left a gaping hole:

I need some windows here

It took a little experimentation, but I ended up with a layout I was happy with. (It’s asymmetric because the front of the mountain is asymmetric.)

My first pass at a window layout

This layout is much more elegant

The view of the windows from inside

Next, I had to tackle the west side of the station. Here’s the view looking west before I started working on it, with the extension I wanted to preserve some of in the foreground.

The original view to the west

Eventually, I decided to wrap the lowermost windows in the station around an alcove on the west; the ground on the northwest part is rather lower, so I added an extra set of windows there.

Starting work on the west alcove

The alcove is taking shape

The north side of the alcove, with two sets of windows

With that, the outline of the station was mostly clear, though I had to work out the details of how the alcove on the west side would transition into the roof. Also, I have a lot of hollowing to do: I’d finished hollowing out the front, but there was quite a lot of digging remaining in the back. And I need to figure out what to do about the stairs coming up the west side of the mountain from the third floor and fourth floor of the house. But still, the end is in sight!

The view of the front of the station from where the tracks will be

I only got in one Rock Band session this week, but it was a good one. I repeated the hardest of the barre chord lessons and all of the scale lessons, this time trying to use hopos on the chromatic scale one, and they went well. And I managed to make it through the remaining of the Hard lessons, on arpeggiation within chords, which was another fun one. (I’m sure I could have made it through it earlier, I was just tired when I’d tried it before. Though my increased fluency in shifting between chords certainly helped.)

After that, I went back into the songs, continuing through the Warmup songs. Which I was expecting to have to spend a fair amount of time on, but so far that hasn’t materialized: quite to my surprise, I made it through the remaining nine Warmup songs! I’m sure the time I’ve spent on barre chord lessons helped, as did the fact that many of the Warmup songs don’t actually use barre chords (preferring instead power chords or single notes), but for whatever reason, I went through each song at most twice with the mute on and once plugged into the amp (except for one or two songs using an alternate tuning, which I haven’t yet tried to figure out), and felt satisfied enough to move on at the end of that.

I’d been thinking that I’d want to spend a lot of time going through the Hard lessons over and over again. And while I’m still planning to return to them, it’s also looking like the difficulty curve even on Hard might be shallow enough that I can improve my barre chord skills by spending most of my time playing through actual songs. That would be pleasant if it remains true (which may well not be the case!): the lessons are well done, but playing through real songs is more fun.

I still sound pretty bad on the real songs, though. Some of that is because there is (copious!) room for improvement in my skills, but some is that playing a stripped down version of an easy song doesn’t sound that great. We’ll see how that changes when the songs get harder, maybe I’ll get inspired to put in more time on individual songs then.

And there was one song that was a total outlier, namely Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. When I got to it in the menu, I noted that Dan Bruno‘s score was over 600,000 points, which is extremely high for any song, let alone a warmup song! What turns out to be going on there is that it’s full of chords, and you have to play them pretty quickly; the chords are all easy ones to play (though you shift between five or six different ones, three-chord music it isn’t), but there’s a lot of notes to play (if you’re Dan) or to miss a fair portion of (if you’re me).

It’s also the first song where I haven’t been able to do the training sections accurately. They’re long, they both have multiple chord changes and individual chords that are repeated a lot, and that adds up to something that I am so far unable to hit 100% on. (Or, I seem to recall, get particularly close to.) It’s also a song where I’m feeling more dubious than normal about the strum detection and the string mute; the flip side is that it’s a song that’s relatively rewarding to try to play well plugged in, I think. I’m not currently planning to return to it to try to get better, but that would be worth considering.

The main bit of Pro Guitar excitement this week: I bought an amp! At the recommendation of a guitarist friend of mine, I went for a Fender Vibro Champ XD, and I have no regrets so far: I like the way it sounds, and it allows for what seems to me a decent amount of experimentation, which will help me get a better idea of the possibilities that are out there when/if I decide to move up to something fancier.

And it turns out that, indeed, playing Pro Guitar on Hard is good preparation for the real thing! I’ve only gone through three songs on Hard so far, but in all cases, when I played them plugged in I could definitely hear the music. Flourishes were missing, so I clearly have something to look forward to when I learn those songs on Expert, but buying the amp when I hit Hard was definitely the right choice. (And, conversely, I tried out a few songs on Medium with the amp on, and it just wasn’t the same.)

It was also very educational from a musical point of view. Most notably in learning how notes sustain on an electric guitar: when you’re playing in game, the game is in complete control of that, and when you play unmuted but not plugged in, notes don’t sustain very well. When I’m plugged in, though, notes sustain for a quite long time. In particular, it was quickly clear that I need to mute notes that I don’t want to sustain; for now, I’m doing that with the pick, but I should play around with other possible ways to mute.

That also raises the question: what should I do when the game gives me notes that are marked as muted? The game doesn’t really care, though it gives me advice to not hold down the strings very much; I’ll need to experiment with the different sounds I can produce with that. And hammers-on and pull-offs are much more real to me now: I’d been playing them for years without really believing that they could work (at some subconscious level, of course I trust Harmonix to represent music accurately within the game’s constraints), but it turns out that, yup, they work well! Though that is very much an area which I need to explore more, in order to figure out how to get notes to sustain best across transitions.

The amp aside, though, I’ve only played very little this week. We have guests in town (summer being when grandparents come to visit their granddaughter), and yesterday in particular was quite busy with brunch, a musical, and dinner. So I didn’t have time to learn any new songs; I did manage to put in most of an hour on practice mode, though.

And I would seem to be making progress. There are 10 barre chord lessons; the first four went rather smoothly, which isn’t something I’ve been able to say in the past, and I made it through the last of them for the first time. The open chord lessons also went well, so probably I’ll soon reduce my frequency of practicing those. (Or maybe not, it’s core muscle memory and the better I get the less time it will take for me to go through them!) I also finished the strumming pattern lessons for the first time; those, I wasn’t so impressed by (it wasn’t even clear which strings I was supposed to strum when or what mistake I had made in a given attempt), and I don’t plan to return to them particularly often. I didn’t have time to go through the arpeggiation lessons (which I haven’t yet finished) or the scale lessons (which I have finished but plan to return to frequently).

I’ll happily dive in full force next weekend, though. My current plan is to go through songs like I have been and then play each song a couple of times unmuted and plugged in to see what it sounds like. And I have no idea what my rate of progress will be; I’m sure it will be slower than on Medium (both because of the difficulty and because I’ll be wanting to listen to myself), but how much has yet to be determined.

Last week I started on barre chord training, and my main takeaway there was that it was going to require a lot of (painful!) practice. Which I dutifully did: every weekday this week I pulled out the guitar after I got home and practiced for a bit. (Outside of the game: I didn’t plug in the guitar and left the strings unmuted.) Which was a good choice: I made a lot of mistakes while doing that, and learned something about the pitfalls of different finger positions.

And I still have a long way to go. I went through the game’s barre chord training both yesterday and today; I did better both times than last week, making it through nine of the ten sections, but it was a struggle, and I had to give my wrist frequent rest breaks. And the game was surprisingly generous: it doesn’t actually require you to be holding down the barre chord perfectly, though I’m not sure exactly what mistakes the game allows. (Maybe it lets you miss one of the high strings?) Still, it’s progress, and I’ll keep at it.

I also tried out the other Hard training lessons. And I was surprised to find that the barre chord lessons wasn’t the first group: there’s an open chord group of lessons before that, which (among other things) teaches you about E and A chords, which is kind of useful when working on barre chords! I did manage to go through all of that group, and all of the scale lessons; actually, I rather enjoyed the latter. Oddly enough, the chromatic scale was by far the hardest of the scale lessons for me—a chromatic scale should be straightforward on a guitar, one would think, but it didn’t turn out that way. There were two other groups of lessons that I dipped into but didn’t complete, I’ll give those a try again next week. (Actually, I’ll give all of them a try again, this is all core knowledge, and I’m not nearly solid enough at any of it to be able to move on.)

I also went through three songs. None of which had barre chords in them: they all had three-note chords, with open fifths. Which raised a fingering question: should I finger it like a barre chord where I happen to only be strumming three strings, or should my index finger be vertical? For now, I’m going with the latter, but any advice would be welcome. Also, the game kept on claiming that I was missing the three note chords when I thought I was fingering them correctly; eventually, I realized that I was in fact fingering correctly, I just wasn’t strumming through all three strings. (A bad habit I picked up from the two-note chords on Medium, where the game/controller really only makes you strum one of the strings.) Once I figured that out, I did a pretty good job on I Love Rock and Roll, which was nice.

I also took a break from pro guitar, going through London Calling on regular bass. Which was awesome, it’s a wonderful album with some pleasant bass lines. The only weird thing was trying to go for the all-upstrum 100% expert goal: for the second time, I thought I’d finished the goal (I certainly got 100%!), but I wasn’t credited with it. No idea what’s going on there.

And then there were the equipment events of the week. The said one is that the Squier controller is being discontinued. It’s still available at Best Buy; talking it over with Liesl, we actually decided to order a second one, on the theory that she’s dipping her toes into the instrument as well and having a second one available would also be welcome if the first one breaks. (She has quite a bit more experience than I do playing an actual guitar, though she usually plays bass in our Rock Band sessions.) If you’re finding this series of posts interesting and are on the fence about buying one yourself, I encourage you to take the leap: I’ve obviously found mine to be more than worth it.

On a more pleasant equipment note, I also ordered an amp! I talked it over with a guitarist friend of mine, and it seemed like the Fender Vibro Champ was the best tradeoff between price and quality. (I’m obviously quite enjoying my guitar learning so far, but I’m not committing to trying to become a really solid guitarist; so while I may well eventually buy a better guitar and amp, I may decide that sticking with playing the guitar in game is all that I’m up for.) So I’m really looking forward to its arriving this week and seeing what the guitar sounds like; I’m thinking that, every time I go through a song in game, I should try it once or twice plugged into the amp as well.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to practice next weekend—we have guests in town whom I might not want to inflict too much bad guitar playing on, and we have theatre tickets for Sunday afternoon. Which is okay: at worst, that means that I won’t have time to do much beyond regular barre chord practice, and that’s what I need much more than anything else.

At the end of last post, I’d figured out where my first stretch of track was going to be, and where my first two stations would be: a large one inside my home hill, and a small one near my new house. So now it was time to start work on one of those; I decided to tackle my home hill.

Miranda decided to help me design, so first we walked around the top of the hill a lot figuring out where things should go. Eventually, we noticed that the track location went in a line that connected a tower on top of the hill with a tree on top of the hill. That seemed to be too much of a coincidence to pass up, so we decided to go with that. After looking at pictures of train stations, we decided go go with a window at the top window of the roof, along with further windows down the sides.

A sunrise we saw while looking out the side of the hill

Leveling off the top of the roof

The skylight is in place

A view of the tracks from the roof

The tower, which we widened to match the skylight

After that, we had to figure out what to do with the sides. We decided to put windows and dirt in rows on the sides; also, the east side of the hill was quite a bit steeper than the west side, so we ended up building up the east side more. Once we had the windows in place, we went back up to the top and started hollowing out the inside.

Adding more windows on the west side of the hill

Extending the east side of the hill

Starting to hollow out the middle

Sunrise through the windows

Hollowing it out wasn’t too tedious at first, because it was narrower at the top and because it was dirt instead of stone. As we got further down, it started to drag on a bit; fortunately, however, the space started to look pretty amazing as it got taller, so the effort was worth it.

Space is starting to form inside

Lots of blocks bouncing around

It's getting taller

Now it's really tall

By this point, we were getting close to the track level, so it was time to figure out exactly how the sides would look where they met the ground. (Which was actually a few blocks above track level, because of the hill that we were on.) Eventually we decided to add vertical sides with double-height windows; they were in slightly different positions on the two sides, because of the different configurations of the land.

The windows on the east side

Looking through the station

And now we’re done hollowing out that part. And it looks great! Except that it’s clearly too short in comparison to its width: we’ll have to extend it further in to the hill, and possible also further out the sand dunes; I guess I’ll work on that next weekend. That will require some amount of fiddling with the shape of the hill, but now that I’ve gotten past my need to leave natural features exactly as they are, I think that will probably improve the look of the hill: in particular, the east side was way too steep before.

An inside view of the full height

The west side of the station

The east side of the station

And, of course, we have to furnish the station. Not least, laying at least one set of tracks! (There’s probably room in the station for around ten sets of tracks, it’s something like 26 squares wide.) I think I’ll put half-height blocks on the ground, to provide a raised bed above the tracks. Also, I’m not sure about the lighting: Miranda was lobbying for having minimal torches, but I’m not convinced that’s the way to go, so I may end up climbing way up the walls to add more torches. And we’ll want some sort of big window high up in the front of the station, once we figure out where the front of the station actually is.

A good day’s work, I’m glad to see this finally taking shape.

Watching the sun set through the station

As expected, I finished the last eight Medium Pro Guitar songs this week. Which, honestly, weren’t my favorite songs: too many guitar solos with the vast majority of the notes missing, and which I actually don’t think I would have enjoyed that much even if the notes had been there. Still, there were some fun bits. And still: I’m done with Medium Pro Guitar!

Which means that the fun is about to start. Which I dipped into today, making it about halfway through the barre chords training; it turns out that “fun” is another word for “my left hand is hurting in new and different ways”. Fortunately, my twitter feed is filled with people named Dan who give excellent guitar advice, but clearly I have my work cut out for me.

I have more to say, but I think I’ll leave that for my other blog. I imagine that I’ll spend the next few weeks going through tutorials, hopefully finding time to practice barre chords (without the game, just playing the guitar unmuted) most evenings during the week as well. And I’ll probably dip into a couple of actual songs, just to see what those are like.

First, an interlude: I was sick a week and a half ago; and, while I didn’t feel like doing any design, I was up for some mining. Some pictures of that:

Lava beneath the latest pool I'd found

Redstone and iron

Gold and lava

More redstone and iron

Yes, I got 223 bits of redstone dust from this mining expedition alone

My current total stash

I did find some time for more serious Minecraft work this weekend, however. And after finishing the first floor of my new house, the natural next step was to extend above it. My plan of record was to connect it to a train station on the other side of the hill that the house is against, and I decided that it made sense to work on that, since that would affect the design of the second floor. So I dug some stairs into the hill, planning to join up with the train station.

Stairs in back of the house

Looking down from the top of the stairs

Once I got up to the top of the stairs, though, it wasn’t at all obvious what I should do. I looked around in various directions, and eventually came to the conclusion that it would be a lot easier to design and build the station if I actually had train tracks entering it.

The view across the top to the stairs

The train station location

The train tracks are going to approach from this direction somehow

So I decided to get more serious about planning exactly where the tracks will go. But first, a couple of shots of the house:

This house really needs a roof!

The graphics glitch on the stairs is fixed, yay. (And I removed the wood logs above the door, though I may put them back.)

So I marched across the desert. And marched back. And back, and back, and back. I was pretty sure that I wanted a track going in a straight line from the hills, which meant that I had to decide: 1) What elevation should it travel at? 2) Where exactly should the line be?

Eventually, I found an elevation that I was happy with, at a location that went between the two hills in question. The next issue was: where exactly should the station part be in the home hill? The problem was that the end of the home hill was entirely made out of sand: and that’s not a stable building material to hollow out. Again, after pacing around a bit (and climbing up and down the hill), I came up with a tentative plan: I’d dig a (quite deep!) trench through the sand part, and then a tunnel through a part where there was sand on top and rock underneath. And when I finally came to where there was dirt on top, I’d hollow out the middle of the mountain, making a gloriously large station.

The trench approaching the home hill

Looking out from the trench

The tunnel where the tracks enter the hill

With that plan in place, I built the bed for the tracks. I built it out of cobblestone: in some places, I replaced sand with cobblestone to provide a firm building material, while in other places I ran the tracks through the air.

Looking down while building an elevated section of tracks

The end of the tracks at the station near my new house

A view of tracks from below, heading towards my home hill

Another view of tracks from below, this time going towards the station near the new house

A random sunset picture I took while figuring this out

Finally, I started hollowing out the train station inside of my home hill. I still haven’t figured out the details: I’ve figured out how far it will go (the first picture below is a tunnel at the edge, going perpendicular to my tracks, though I may eventually fill in that entrance on the side of the hill), but the details of the interior layout are still quite unsure. It’s not even obvious to me what space I have to work with: I want to use the existing shape of the hill as much as possible, but it’s hard to figure out how much space there is inside without digging until I hit the outside.

A tunnel going into the side of the station

Looking up at some of the space that I'm just starting to hollow out inside the hill

So I’ve got a lot of thinking ahead of me; in fact, it’s not clear to me whether I should work next on my home hill train station or the train station near my new house. (I now have enough context that I should be able to work on the latter, unlike at the start of this post.) And I’ve got an awful lot of digging ahead of me in the home hill! Fortunately, I recently moved my Minecraft folder to Dropbox, so I can dig away at the hill on the laptop downstairs while watching TV or otherwise occupying myself.