Bodiam Update #3 Once the structure is completed all the steps will be compiled into one update But, for now, I will keep the steps broken into groups and linked as individual posts as I update over time
Step Ten → The Courtyard
Who knows what the origonal courtyard held. For all we know, considering the target period and all, it was a glorified farmyard. Annnnnd, as I do not yet have a livestock farm of any kind on this build, it just might be one again very soon. But for now, it is going to look just like the modern day courtyard seen in aerial photos... dead flat, green grass and boring.(But in no way easy to build )
Before
We're looking at a space that is roughly 80 X 90 blocks or 7200... yep thats ~113 stacks of materials to build this flat courtyard. Now, me being the MC noob that I am, I didn't know how grass spreads. As you can see, I built much of the construction ramparts and runways out of dirt, and somewhere along the line, I noticed that they never grew any grass. In my brilliant ignorance, I decided that it must be because there was water underneath them. Hey... couldahappened.
Realizing that I couldn’t grow grass in here, I set out to collect grass blocks... 100 stacks of them. And that's what I used to build the grass parts of this courtyard... then EPIPHANY!! when I placed them touching the already laid dirt... whalla, the grass spread. Oh well, it didn't really take any longer to harvest the grass blocks than the dirt, and in the process, I started the excavations for the future stone quarries (biome size).
So here you see the south side laid out and starting to get the sod down.
About here is where I put my head up and realized that grass spreads.
retreat for night
And some 8 or 9 MC days later
Notice the light blue water in the above pic.... that only happens when the water is shallow, huh? And that is exactly what the water is at this point... one block shallow. Honestly, I gave up on foundation integrity for this structure a LONG LONG long time ago, due to the pain of deep water building. But there are going to be pathways down the center, and around the walls of this courtyard, and even though I did experiment with non-sinking blocks like clay or stone.... NOTHING looked as good as plain old vanilla gravel. So good ole Swervish, making things harder than they need to be, decided to build a support layer to rest the gravel on.
Here it is going in And on top of that, a bunch of gravel.
And the courtyard is done
Step Eleven → Finishing the Towers and Walls
Not much to say... this is all repeats of building techniques and elements that we've already seen. But here's some in-order shots.
Some finished shots
Even though, for now they can still spawn inside... they cant GET inside anymore!
And last but not least, and incredibly impossible to show in pics... the parapet walk all around the entire structure is complete and unbroken (you can run laps if you like). The part on top of the walls is simple enough, but nine times, I had to build a 'tunnel' through a twoer or a gatehouse somewhere around 25 feet high inside the structure, and not destroy the ability for that structure to later have rooms inside. So, exactly like ancient castle builders, the 'tunnels' run inside the solid walls (my walls are not solid... deal with it). This tunnell inside the walls is of accurate dimensions from what I remember of touring Italian and French castles; 2ft wide and 5ft high. People were smaller back then (look at suits of armor that survive) and they wanted the wall weakening voids to be as small as possible. Here's what they look like, even though most are not straight.
If you DL the worldsave, you will have a chance to tour the structure as it is in this update. (there is no lag of build to thread at the moment).... the parapet run is kinda cool, but be aware of two things; 1- there are places in the towers where it seems unfinished... that is because it is unfinished. Eventually rooms or spiral stairs will appear there. 2- there are no stairs yet, so access is only available by ladder. Find one and go up. You will be wearing featherfall boots, so don’t be afraid to jump off one of the towers onto the wall, if you get lost. Beware a jump all the way to the ground though.
I do think, rather, that by now you know that a lot of us are aiming to say that your latest update is awesome. AWESOME! Your dedication, must I repeat it? I think not. You dun'in good Swervish, you dun'in good.
I just took a little tour and I must say this is gigantic. Due to me playing on a 32 bit
system with render disatance on normal I sometimes cant even see the opposite end of the
castle when im standing on one side. Great work.
One question tho: How do u farm XP? Just for a pickaxe with Efficiency V and Unbreaking III you need like 65 levels if im not mistaken.
Wait until it turns dark... then take a tour of the courtyard, the farm, the mine entrance... No shortage of exp there.
or go deep underground at the black tower and find my skelly pump. I have another area with three mob spawners that are within 15-18 blocks of each other. cant remember where it is, but eventually I could make a 3X mob pump there too.
It is also probably of note that one of my mods (enchanting plus) allows for repair of enchanted items. As long as I dont break them, I can repair them for about 1/3 the cost of enchanting a new one.... it costs me about 65-90 exp to repair all my armor, my sword, and all my tools.
Also, I was hyper diligent to max my libraries around my enchanting tables... I believe my picks are only 39 exp to enchant w max efficiency / unbreaking / silk touch.
I read somewhere that the max benefit you can get from adding bookcases is when you get to 15. I don't buy it. I dont know if the wiki I read is out of date, or more likely, this 'Enchanting Plus' mod changes the setting somehow... but here is what I do.
I simply surround my chanting table with as many book cases as possible. simple.
Now maybe its simple to me because I take the time to carefully develop farms for EVERYTHING, and therefore have tons of sugarcane growing and in storage. Its no big deal then to make a full stack of bookcases.
As for lava... nothing has been more deadly for me in my MC career than lava. period.
Rule 1... ALWAYS carry a bucket of water on your hotbar. That way you can hop out of the lava when you fall in and douse yourself quickly.
Rule 2... ALWAYS carry a stack or two or gravel/sand, and STOP what you are doing IMMEDIATELY when you find lava, and fill it in (unless you are going to save it for Obsidian farming).
Mining around lava!? No! I love to stockpile and I'm currently trying to stock pile a TOOON of obsidian for a project >.> So I just pour some water and go at it with Efficiency 4 on a diamond pick Of course I have very little life so it's no problem for me... I recommend sand/gravel like swervy said if nothing else.
And that's a really big castle ._.
Swevish, which castle shall you build next? And how much decoration do you think you'll put into these? O.o
Has anyone suggested going to the End and getting an Enderman grinder of some sort? Ender Pearls can be a great way to reach hard-to-get-to parts of your builds. They can also save you in a big fall, if you use one fast enough.
Mining around lava!? No! I love to stockpile and I'm currently trying to stock pile a TOOON of obsidian for a project >.> So I just pour some water and go at it with Efficiency 4 on a diamond pick Of course I have very little life so it's no problem for me... I recommend sand/gravel like swervy said if nothing else.
And that's a really big castle ._.
Swevish, which castle shall you build next? And how much decoration do you think you'll put into these? O.o
I plan to 'decorate' the outside pretty much 100% like the original (which in this case is pretty much, not at all lol)... as for teh inside? I plan to at least build the rooms complete with floors, windows and ceilings. After that, we'll see.
Because of the scale Ive chosen... there is pretty much no furniture, vanilla or mod based, that will work... dunno if Ill try the furniture thing.
--snipped--
Swevish, which castle shall you build next? ....
Dunno yet.
I'm not really putting any serious thought into it yet, because I don't want to get distracted from finishing Bodiam.
But, I do have plans finished on one small castle, and started on a couple more.
I'm considering if I might narrow it down to two or three, and put up a poll, but I dont know if there's enough actual interest in this thread/project to make a poll give useful info.
I would be open to the preferences of the community if the sample is big enough. But Id not want to act on poll results from only 3-5ish replies. Know what I mean?
Here are some sneak peaks at plans:
VERY small tactical port-access-denial fortress (Belem Fort)
And
MONSTER STRUCTURE.. two separate structures actually (Durham Castle and Cathedral Complex)
Bodiam is secure.
The Towers, Walls and Crenelations are complete.
The Parapets are continuous, including their corridors through the towers.
Still a LOT to do, but the shell is done!
Couple of shots
Some of the best legit building I've ever seen!
Good luck, and:
I'm stalking this thread
-Lungora.
“One arrow alone can be easily broken but many arrows are indestructible.” -Genghis Khan
I started to work on an update, but Imgur is down for maintenance, and I cant log in.
I have the afternoon off, so hopefully a real update later.
Once the structure is completed
all the steps will be compiled
into one update
But, for now,
I will keep the steps broken into groups
and linked as individual posts
as I update over time
Step Ten → The Courtyard
Who knows what the origonal courtyard held. For all we know, considering the target period and all, it was a glorified farmyard. Annnnnd, as I do not yet have a livestock farm of any kind on this build, it just might be one again very soon. But for now, it is going to look just like the modern day courtyard seen in aerial photos... dead flat, green grass and boring.(But in no way easy to build
Before
We're looking at a space that is roughly 80 X 90 blocks or 7200... yep thats ~113 stacks of materials to build this flat courtyard. Now, me being the MC noob that I am, I didn't know how grass spreads. As you can see, I built much of the construction ramparts and runways out of dirt, and somewhere along the line, I noticed that they never grew any grass. In my brilliant ignorance, I decided that it must be because there was water underneath them. Hey... couldahappened.
Realizing that I couldn’t grow grass in here, I set out to collect grass blocks... 100 stacks of them. And that's what I used to build the grass parts of this courtyard... then EPIPHANY!! when I placed them touching the already laid dirt... whalla, the grass spread. Oh well, it didn't really take any longer to harvest the grass blocks than the dirt, and in the process, I started the excavations for the future stone quarries (biome size).
So here you see the south side laid out and starting to get the sod down.
About here is where I put my head up and realized that grass spreads.
retreat for night
And some 8 or 9 MC days later
Notice the light blue water in the above pic.... that only happens when the water is shallow, huh? And that is exactly what the water is at this point... one block shallow. Honestly, I gave up on foundation integrity for this structure a LONG LONG long time ago, due to the pain of deep water building. But there are going to be pathways down the center, and around the walls of this courtyard, and even though I did experiment with non-sinking blocks like clay or stone.... NOTHING looked as good as plain old vanilla gravel. So good ole Swervish, making things harder than they need to be, decided to build a support layer to rest the gravel on.
Here it is going in
And on top of that, a bunch of gravel.
And the courtyard is done
Step Eleven → Finishing the Towers and Walls
Not much to say... this is all repeats of building techniques and elements that we've already seen. But here's some in-order shots.
Some finished shots
Even though, for now they can still spawn inside... they cant GET inside anymore!
And last but not least, and incredibly impossible to show in pics... the parapet walk all around the entire structure is complete and unbroken (you can run laps if you like). The part on top of the walls is simple enough, but nine times, I had to build a 'tunnel' through a twoer or a gatehouse somewhere around 25 feet high inside the structure, and not destroy the ability for that structure to later have rooms inside. So, exactly like ancient castle builders, the 'tunnels' run inside the solid walls (my walls are not solid... deal with it). This tunnell inside the walls is of accurate dimensions from what I remember of touring Italian and French castles; 2ft wide and 5ft high. People were smaller back then (look at suits of armor that survive) and they wanted the wall weakening voids to be as small as possible. Here's what they look like, even though most are not straight.
If you DL the worldsave, you will have a chance to tour the structure as it is in this update. (there is no lag of build to thread at the moment).... the parapet run is kinda cool, but be aware of two things; 1- there are places in the towers where it seems unfinished... that is because it is unfinished. Eventually rooms or spiral stairs will appear there. 2- there are no stairs yet, so access is only available by ladder. Find one and go up. You will be wearing featherfall boots, so don’t be afraid to jump off one of the towers onto the wall, if you get lost. Beware a jump all the way to the ground though.
World Download
http://www.gamefront.com/files/22425201/.minecraft.rar
Fair warning 163427.45 KB
AWESOME BUILDS, everything is AMAZING!
Wait until it turns dark... then take a tour of the courtyard, the farm, the mine entrance... No shortage of exp there.
or go deep underground at the black tower and find my skelly pump. I have another area with three mob spawners that are within 15-18 blocks of each other. cant remember where it is, but eventually I could make a 3X mob pump there too.
It is also probably of note that one of my mods (enchanting plus) allows for repair of enchanted items. As long as I dont break them, I can repair them for about 1/3 the cost of enchanting a new one.... it costs me about 65-90 exp to repair all my armor, my sword, and all my tools.
Also, I was hyper diligent to max my libraries around my enchanting tables... I believe my picks are only 39 exp to enchant w max efficiency / unbreaking / silk touch.
I simply surround my chanting table with as many book cases as possible. simple.
Now maybe its simple to me because I take the time to carefully develop farms for EVERYTHING, and therefore have tons of sugarcane growing and in storage. Its no big deal then to make a full stack of bookcases.
Try it. I think you'll see a difference.
Could use a little help from you guys who have played for ages.
What Am I forgetting?
Here's what exists, but that you haven't seen yet:
Timber stand
Quarry
Rail hub
Mob funnel - exp grinder
I still need to build / create / plant the following:
Orchards
Sheep farm
Chicken Farm
Pig Farm
Cow Farm
Nether portal (Ive actually NEVER been there LOL)
Brewing stand
So.... what am I forgetting?
As for lava... nothing has been more deadly for me in my MC career than lava. period.
Rule 1... ALWAYS carry a bucket of water on your hotbar. That way you can hop out of the lava when you fall in and douse yourself quickly.
Rule 2... ALWAYS carry a stack or two or gravel/sand, and STOP what you are doing IMMEDIATELY when you find lava, and fill it in (unless you are going to save it for Obsidian farming).
I fill it. And I fill it IMMEDIATELY.
Mining around lava!? No! I love to stockpile and I'm currently trying to stock pile a TOOON of obsidian for a project >.> So I just pour some water and go at it with Efficiency 4 on a diamond pick
And that's a really big castle ._.
Swevish, which castle shall you build next?
Has anyone suggested going to the End and getting an Enderman grinder of some sort? Ender Pearls can be a great way to reach hard-to-get-to parts of your builds. They can also save you in a big fall, if you use one fast enough.
I plan to 'decorate' the outside pretty much 100% like the original (which in this case is pretty much, not at all lol)... as for teh inside? I plan to at least build the rooms complete with floors, windows and ceilings. After that, we'll see.
Because of the scale Ive chosen... there is pretty much no furniture, vanilla or mod based, that will work... dunno if Ill try the furniture thing.
Dunno yet.
I'm not really putting any serious thought into it yet, because I don't want to get distracted from finishing Bodiam.
But, I do have plans finished on one small castle, and started on a couple more.
I'm considering if I might narrow it down to two or three, and put up a poll, but I dont know if there's enough actual interest in this thread/project to make a poll give useful info.
I would be open to the preferences of the community if the sample is big enough. But Id not want to act on poll results from only 3-5ish replies. Know what I mean?
Here are some sneak peaks at plans:
VERY small tactical port-access-denial fortress (Belem Fort)
And
MONSTER STRUCTURE.. two separate structures actually (Durham Castle and Cathedral Complex)
I'd go for the one with the cathedral, that could be one epic build.
“One arrow alone can be easily broken but many arrows are indestructible.” -Genghis Khan
Its the second or third largest on my list.
Its about 4X the size of Bodiam.
I would expect it to take about 4-5 months to build.