As promised, here are some pictures of the raid fortress.
Earlier, I created my iron farm below ground in a particular chunk on the far side of the sorter building from where I normally post base pictures. So I decided to create the raid fortress centered in that chunk with an entrance from below ground that can only be accessed from other buildings.
Here is the entrance from a tunnel that goes under the sorter building.
I laid out where the wall will be along with a "moat" around it where I will have lava that I can turn off or on with a switch.
Underground, I dug out an area for redstone, repeaters and sticky pistons to make the moat deeper and open it up for lava to flow into.
I didn't take pictures of all the repeaters and sticky pistons, but you can see the corners that I couldn't put pistons because there was no good way to activate them that I could find.
After the pistons were in place, this is a shot of them "off", in other words lowered. Again, you can see the corners that don't move.
The intent was to have lava source blocks on top of where you see the stone brick under the edge. When the pistons are lowered, then the lava flows into the moat. When the pistons are raised, the lava is blocked off.
And here's the pistons raised, it just looks like a nice green grassy square around the fortress.
After building the tower up a lot higher...
I added some extra overhang area on the top with pistons that control lava source blocks that I can turn off and on.
It adds some character to the tower as well so it isn't just a tall rectangle or square.
Once the pistons are retracted, the lava falls
After seeing how the lava flows into the moat, I decided, I may not need lava around the outside edge underground.
As you can see, once the moat pistons are lowered, the lava flows through all of it with no grass showing.
Anyway, here's a couple more shots from the tunnel and inside the tower.
The switch is for the pistons that raise and lower the level of the bottom of the moat.
At the bottom of the tower looking down towards the tunnel.
And now looking up towards the top of the tower where a platform is in place.
And finally the top of the tower where the pistons are blocking off some lava. I have obsidian around the lava so you know not to accidentally expose the lava at the top.
In the next post, I'll add final pictures of the tower. I added a couple more levels, one inside and one above. I didn't want to add that many more pictures to this post because it is already getting pretty long as it is.
And here's the rest of my fortress pictures, as promised.
First, a base shot at night. Obviously, you can see the raid fortress in the background.
Here's a picture from the top level of the tower. You can see my base photo tower in the background.
The end rods double as something to keep you from accidentally walking into a hole from the end as well as providing light.
Inside the tower, I've added another level as well
You can see the bottom of the level from here,, also, there's windows that open with trap doors so you can shoot at raiders.
Here's the middle level, with more windows that open.
Finally, as you go up, before you get to the top. the inside view, where I've added some trap doors to use to shoot straight down if needed.
Previously, I posted the outside view with and without lava. Here's a couple more shots of the same, but of the finished building.
And the same with the lava flowing down.
So, now I need to have a raid and see how well it works. Since I finished building it, I haven't actually seen any pillager patrols. If I do, I'll make sure to annoy them and see how this works out.
One other thing I added was tunnels that connect my house, mine, and sorter building so I can avoid going outside if I want to go from one place to another. But those pictures seemed somewhat boring so they didn't get added.
Edit...
PS. I finally figured out how to add those spoiler buttons so I've gone back to add them to previous posts, and this one as well.
I enjoyed reading this and following along. I have only recently started playing MC, mostly because of my kids and my son wanting to start a YouTube channel. I find the game amazing and relaxing. This has inspired me to perhaps share progress updates of the builds we come up with in our shared world we play on for YT.
I enjoyed reading this and following along. I have only recently started playing MC, mostly because of my kids and my son wanting to start a YouTube channel. I find the game amazing and relaxing. This has inspired me to perhaps share progress updates of the builds we come up with in our shared world we play on for YT.
I'm glad you enjoyed it. I never got interested in creating videos, but I did like reading through other people's survival threads showing their builds so I figured I'd create one of my own. And like you, I got started playing the game from my kids coming home and talking about it after school and whatnot.
Anyway, it has been a few days since my last update. I've done a few different things to my world as you will see below. First the base shot
You might notice something different above the raid fortress, and also by the house.
I realized that the top of the fortress would make a great spot to deal with phantoms when I stay up too many nights in a row while mining. So, I added some cobwebs that I collected from the abandoned mine I found.
And you can see I already fought off a few phantoms
I haven't had a raid yet with this fortress, and I'm not sure if these will slow down vexes, but if they do that as well, that would be awesome.
I started working on a much bigger house. I looked at a lot of pictures of houses online for ideas. I really liked one called "Falcon Manor" so I've taken most of my ideas from that Minecraft design. Apparently the Minecraft version is based on a real place. Either way, I'm not going to copy the entire design, but I'm using a lot of the same basic building styles from it.
After building some more
And more
Somewhere along the way, I also added the fourth row to the sorter inside the sorter building
The first row is almost completely full, I've got plans for most of the last row, and I'm thinking of adding another level at the top of the building.
The only drawback is that I've noticed some lag, especially when loading up the game at the beginning. I think all those hoppers and redstone devices may be causing the lag. We'll see how it goes if I add more.
One other thing I did. Some days ago, I created an experience farm out of a skeleton spawner. As you can imagine, I get a lot of bones and arrows, and not a little armor and bows out of it as well. So I decided to build a special sorter just for that stuff.
And here's the sorter, with some large chests to collect the drops.
So that's all for now. I need to finish the house, and I may have a raid at some point. We'll see what else I come up for the next post.
I've only been playing for about 4 months, but this thread is amazing (both inspiring and intimidating). Thank you for posting pics and details and links (especially the iron farm one). Redstone is the hardest thing for me in this game. I'm sure someday I'll get it... hopefully.
You folks have inspired me to start a family map. It is not nearly as complex as yours (since I lack the redstone experience; I just became a dad two weeks ago, so I have time to learn anyway). Thank you for the awesome ideas and posts! Following. :-)
I think the redstone sorter was one of the first redstone things I created. You can find multiple videos on YouTube. They're actually fairly simple to make as far as redstone goes. Once you've figured out how to make the basic sorter unit, putting together a row of them to sort multiple items is not that hard.
I have pictures of my house that I've been building, but I don't have time right now to post them. I'll be posting them later today probably.
Actually, as I'm writing this, I think my first redstone creation was a rail track. Before we had horses, rails were the only good way to get around very fast. When horses came out, I stopped making so many rail tracks. I used to create rail tracks between various bases just to travel between them faster. But that was also before I learned how to create pathways through the nether as well, which significantly shortens travel time.
You probably remember the old house from earlier posts, not very big, very square, and boring--just enough to start from. Well, I built around it.
Another angle
And then I got rid of it. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to remove. The mineshaft and shaft going to the iron farm, how I wanted to work around those. Eventually, I got it done. Here's the outside views after adding much of the 2nd level and starting on the roof.
And a little bit more...
Raid picture...
While working on the house, I saw a couple of pillager patrols go by. Eventually, we got to do our first raid with the new raid fortress. I didn't take many shots of that, but I can report that the raid fortress worked very well for the raids. The biggest problem was trying to hit the raiders from the top while they tended to run around an awful lot. However, many of them just ran straight into the lava when I turned it on so that simplified things a lot. The witches were the biggest problem because they tended to stay back a ways so they didn't come running towards the village center and die in the lava. Also, the ravager beasts seemed to stay out of the lava for the most part but since they are pretty slow, we could just shoot them with the bow and they'd die eventually.
I did find out that vexes can fly straight through the cobwebs at the top of the fortress without slowing down so they were a bit of a challenge when they spawned by the Evoker. Still, the raid fortress worked well for dealing with raids, so that was good.
In my next post, finished pictures of the outside of the house. I have some inside shots as well, and some plans for what different rooms are going to have in them. Some rooms are going to just be decorative, some will have functional purposes.
And finally, some pictures of the house, inside and out. The outside is done, at least for now. I still want to decorate the inside, but I have pictures of the different floors as they are right now.
First, the base shot
You can see the house has grown quite a bit.
Outside views
Here's the front view, looking back the opposite way
And I liked the night view as well
And here's a couple of other angles, first from the side
Well, front/side anyway
And from the back
First floor inside
Now for some inside shots. The first floor... you remember the nether portal in front of the old house, down below? Well, I never moved it, I just incorporated it into the newer, bigger house.
From the opposite direction, looking up towards the second floor. Conveniently, the steps going up also contain the stairway going down to the iron mine, underneath what you see here.
Here's looking out of the same room, but at night and at the sorter room and raid fortress through the windows.
Back in the room with the nether portal, looking out the other way towards the tower containing the spiral staircase
Second floor inside
Now on the 2nd floor, looking down the stairway containing the path to the iron farm, and out the front windows towards the raid fortress
I plan to make a room just for brewing potions here.
Same angle, but backed up a bit and looking down the mine shaft
There's a porch on the front accessible from the 2nd floor, here's a night view looking at the raid fortress
Looking back the other way, there's a circular room with a view of the ocean. I plan to make this look like a dining area.
From closer to the window, you can see the bridge to the fishing island. It looks cool at night.
Bonus room level 1.5
Below this, there's another circular room that I haven't decided what to do with it. It is sort of level 1.5.
Attic
As you go up the spiral staircase in the tower, you enter into the attic area
As you can see, I have a bunch of armor stands and barrels with armor in them here.
Another view of the armor stands looking towards the front.
Above the circular room, in the attic is the enchanting room
Lots of storage here as well.
There's a lot of pictures in this post. It took a while to do all of this. Maybe next time I'll have more inside shots after I finish some of the rooms. Or I may start working on a trading village/fortress. I've got a plan to put that some distance away so it doesn't interfere with my iron farm.
I don't have any new pictures for this post, but I thought I'd post a word of warning. As I've stated before, these pictures are coming from a server I set up for me and my family. My son has one or more friends who log in and play as well. In order to ease the ability for friends to log in, I've left it up without a whitelist, and had it that way since the beginning--more than a year at least. Anyway, last night, someone found the IP address and joined the server. They started spamming a web address that resolved to some discord channel. This player did some griefing on the server as well. I banned the player but didn't do anything else at the time. A short time later, another player (or the same one using an alt) joined and started doing more griefing, etc. At this point I took the server down, changed it to a whitelist, and reverted it to my last backup. We lost a couple of days worth of changes, but nothing serious.
The main point of this is, remember to backup your servers regularly. And a whitelist is your friend.
I've been kind of busy the past few days and haven't had as much time to play or post images. But here I am again, with a few more pictures.
First, the base so far:
There's a few differences here. First, I changed my render distance so you can see clearly a bit farther out. Second, I added a bit to the top of my sorter--basically a stairwell so that I can get onto the roof. In the future, I may add a couple more whole layers, but for now that's all for that one. Finally, I got some bees! You can see the hives to the left of my sorter building. Some may also note on the bottom right that my automatic farm is empty at the moment. I remedied that quickly after taking this screenshot.
Anyway, the bees.
As many probably know, bees were part of the 1.15 update. It wasn't until the 1.15.2 update that they added the ability to grow birch or oak trees and have a chance of getting a hive to spawn as well. Since much of the area around my original base is explored, we'd have to travel a long ways to find bees naturally generated, so this was a welcome addition to the game. But even though every post in this thread so far is from 1.15.2, I haven't taken the time to actively try to get bees until now. But here they are.
In this first nest, there were 3 bees. For some reason, quickly after they started flying around, one flew off never to be seen again. I don't know why. But I was glad to have at least two so I could breed some more.
I dug a single block hole, put a campfire in it, and placed a carpet over it so the bees wouldn't fly into the fire.
Then I built some more hives, and bred some bees.
If you look closely, you can see all 5 of my bees flying around in this picture.
And here's a wider shot with all the hives and most of the bees visible.
I'm kind-of hoping the next version (1.16) will come out soon. I've got a number of things I want to do when it comes out. Meanwhile, I'll probably start working on my trading village soon.
As promised, here are some pictures of the raid fortress.
Earlier, I created my iron farm below ground in a particular chunk on the far side of the sorter building from where I normally post base pictures. So I decided to create the raid fortress centered in that chunk with an entrance from below ground that can only be accessed from other buildings.
Here is the entrance from a tunnel that goes under the sorter building.
I laid out where the wall will be along with a "moat" around it where I will have lava that I can turn off or on with a switch.
Underground, I dug out an area for redstone, repeaters and sticky pistons to make the moat deeper and open it up for lava to flow into.
I didn't take pictures of all the repeaters and sticky pistons, but you can see the corners that I couldn't put pistons because there was no good way to activate them that I could find.
After the pistons were in place, this is a shot of them "off", in other words lowered. Again, you can see the corners that don't move.
The intent was to have lava source blocks on top of where you see the stone brick under the edge. When the pistons are lowered, then the lava flows into the moat. When the pistons are raised, the lava is blocked off.
And here's the pistons raised, it just looks like a nice green grassy square around the fortress.
After building the tower up a lot higher...
I added some extra overhang area on the top with pistons that control lava source blocks that I can turn off and on.
It adds some character to the tower as well so it isn't just a tall rectangle or square.
Once the pistons are retracted, the lava falls
After seeing how the lava flows into the moat, I decided, I may not need lava around the outside edge underground.
As you can see, once the moat pistons are lowered, the lava flows through all of it with no grass showing.
Anyway, here's a couple more shots from the tunnel and inside the tower.
The switch is for the pistons that raise and lower the level of the bottom of the moat.
At the bottom of the tower looking down towards the tunnel.
And now looking up towards the top of the tower where a platform is in place.
And finally the top of the tower where the pistons are blocking off some lava. I have obsidian around the lava so you know not to accidentally expose the lava at the top.
In the next post, I'll add final pictures of the tower. I added a couple more levels, one inside and one above. I didn't want to add that many more pictures to this post because it is already getting pretty long as it is.
Join me on World Community Grid and help find a cure for COVID-19!
And here's the rest of my fortress pictures, as promised.
First, a base shot at night. Obviously, you can see the raid fortress in the background.
Here's a picture from the top level of the tower. You can see my base photo tower in the background.
The end rods double as something to keep you from accidentally walking into a hole from the end as well as providing light.
Inside the tower, I've added another level as well
You can see the bottom of the level from here,, also, there's windows that open with trap doors so you can shoot at raiders.
Here's the middle level, with more windows that open.
Finally, as you go up, before you get to the top. the inside view, where I've added some trap doors to use to shoot straight down if needed.
Previously, I posted the outside view with and without lava. Here's a couple more shots of the same, but of the finished building.
And the same with the lava flowing down.
So, now I need to have a raid and see how well it works. Since I finished building it, I haven't actually seen any pillager patrols. If I do, I'll make sure to annoy them and see how this works out.
One other thing I added was tunnels that connect my house, mine, and sorter building so I can avoid going outside if I want to go from one place to another. But those pictures seemed somewhat boring so they didn't get added.
Edit...
PS. I finally figured out how to add those spoiler buttons so I've gone back to add them to previous posts, and this one as well.
Join me on World Community Grid and help find a cure for COVID-19!
I enjoyed reading this and following along. I have only recently started playing MC, mostly because of my kids and my son wanting to start a YouTube channel. I find the game amazing and relaxing. This has inspired me to perhaps share progress updates of the builds we come up with in our shared world we play on for YT.
New Minecrafter - Dad of Minecrafters
Our Family Gaming Minecraft Channel
I'm glad you enjoyed it. I never got interested in creating videos, but I did like reading through other people's survival threads showing their builds so I figured I'd create one of my own. And like you, I got started playing the game from my kids coming home and talking about it after school and whatnot.
Anyway, it has been a few days since my last update. I've done a few different things to my world as you will see below. First the base shot
You might notice something different above the raid fortress, and also by the house.
I realized that the top of the fortress would make a great spot to deal with phantoms when I stay up too many nights in a row while mining. So, I added some cobwebs that I collected from the abandoned mine I found.
And you can see I already fought off a few phantoms
I haven't had a raid yet with this fortress, and I'm not sure if these will slow down vexes, but if they do that as well, that would be awesome.
I started working on a much bigger house. I looked at a lot of pictures of houses online for ideas. I really liked one called "Falcon Manor" so I've taken most of my ideas from that Minecraft design. Apparently the Minecraft version is based on a real place. Either way, I'm not going to copy the entire design, but I'm using a lot of the same basic building styles from it.
After building some more
And more
Somewhere along the way, I also added the fourth row to the sorter inside the sorter building
The first row is almost completely full, I've got plans for most of the last row, and I'm thinking of adding another level at the top of the building.
The only drawback is that I've noticed some lag, especially when loading up the game at the beginning. I think all those hoppers and redstone devices may be causing the lag. We'll see how it goes if I add more.
One other thing I did. Some days ago, I created an experience farm out of a skeleton spawner. As you can imagine, I get a lot of bones and arrows, and not a little armor and bows out of it as well. So I decided to build a special sorter just for that stuff.
And here's the sorter, with some large chests to collect the drops.
So that's all for now. I need to finish the house, and I may have a raid at some point. We'll see what else I come up for the next post.
Join me on World Community Grid and help find a cure for COVID-19!
Awesome idea re the phantoms.
A redstone sorter is on my to do list but the idea for this newbie seems very complex
New Minecrafter - Dad of Minecrafters
Our Family Gaming Minecraft Channel
I've only been playing for about 4 months, but this thread is amazing (both inspiring and intimidating). Thank you for posting pics and details and links (especially the iron farm one). Redstone is the hardest thing for me in this game. I'm sure someday I'll get it... hopefully.
You folks have inspired me to start a family map. It is not nearly as complex as yours (since I lack the redstone experience; I just became a dad two weeks ago, so I have time to learn anyway). Thank you for the awesome ideas and posts! Following. :-)
Very true about the peaceful game😉
And here I thought I was the only over 40 person playing minecraft. Awesome guys. Keep it up and have fun surviving.
GoldenRatioMan (aka GRM), Owner of the MeleeCraft Network
▸ Join Me On Discord For A Chat | http://discord.meleecraft.com
I think the redstone sorter was one of the first redstone things I created. You can find multiple videos on YouTube. They're actually fairly simple to make as far as redstone goes. Once you've figured out how to make the basic sorter unit, putting together a row of them to sort multiple items is not that hard.
I have pictures of my house that I've been building, but I don't have time right now to post them. I'll be posting them later today probably.
Actually, as I'm writing this, I think my first redstone creation was a rail track. Before we had horses, rails were the only good way to get around very fast. When horses came out, I stopped making so many rail tracks. I used to create rail tracks between various bases just to travel between them faster. But that was also before I learned how to create pathways through the nether as well, which significantly shortens travel time.
Join me on World Community Grid and help find a cure for COVID-19!
And here they are... progress on the house!
First, the base so far
You probably remember the old house from earlier posts, not very big, very square, and boring--just enough to start from. Well, I built around it.
Another angle
And then I got rid of it. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to remove. The mineshaft and shaft going to the iron farm, how I wanted to work around those. Eventually, I got it done. Here's the outside views after adding much of the 2nd level and starting on the roof.
And a little bit more...
Raid picture...
While working on the house, I saw a couple of pillager patrols go by. Eventually, we got to do our first raid with the new raid fortress. I didn't take many shots of that, but I can report that the raid fortress worked very well for the raids. The biggest problem was trying to hit the raiders from the top while they tended to run around an awful lot. However, many of them just ran straight into the lava when I turned it on so that simplified things a lot. The witches were the biggest problem because they tended to stay back a ways so they didn't come running towards the village center and die in the lava. Also, the ravager beasts seemed to stay out of the lava for the most part but since they are pretty slow, we could just shoot them with the bow and they'd die eventually.
I did find out that vexes can fly straight through the cobwebs at the top of the fortress without slowing down so they were a bit of a challenge when they spawned by the Evoker. Still, the raid fortress worked well for dealing with raids, so that was good.
In my next post, finished pictures of the outside of the house. I have some inside shots as well, and some plans for what different rooms are going to have in them. Some rooms are going to just be decorative, some will have functional purposes.
Join me on World Community Grid and help find a cure for COVID-19!
And finally, some pictures of the house, inside and out. The outside is done, at least for now. I still want to decorate the inside, but I have pictures of the different floors as they are right now.
First, the base shot
You can see the house has grown quite a bit.
Outside views
Here's the front view, looking back the opposite way
And I liked the night view as well
And here's a couple of other angles, first from the side
Well, front/side anyway
And from the back
First floor inside
Now for some inside shots. The first floor... you remember the nether portal in front of the old house, down below? Well, I never moved it, I just incorporated it into the newer, bigger house.
From the opposite direction, looking up towards the second floor. Conveniently, the steps going up also contain the stairway going down to the iron mine, underneath what you see here.
Here's looking out of the same room, but at night and at the sorter room and raid fortress through the windows.
Back in the room with the nether portal, looking out the other way towards the tower containing the spiral staircase
Second floor inside
Now on the 2nd floor, looking down the stairway containing the path to the iron farm, and out the front windows towards the raid fortress
I plan to make a room just for brewing potions here.
Same angle, but backed up a bit and looking down the mine shaft
There's a porch on the front accessible from the 2nd floor, here's a night view looking at the raid fortress
Looking back the other way, there's a circular room with a view of the ocean. I plan to make this look like a dining area.
From closer to the window, you can see the bridge to the fishing island. It looks cool at night.
Bonus room level 1.5
Below this, there's another circular room that I haven't decided what to do with it. It is sort of level 1.5.
Attic
As you go up the spiral staircase in the tower, you enter into the attic area
As you can see, I have a bunch of armor stands and barrels with armor in them here.
Another view of the armor stands looking towards the front.
Above the circular room, in the attic is the enchanting room
Lots of storage here as well.
There's a lot of pictures in this post. It took a while to do all of this. Maybe next time I'll have more inside shots after I finish some of the rooms. Or I may start working on a trading village/fortress. I've got a plan to put that some distance away so it doesn't interfere with my iron farm.
Join me on World Community Grid and help find a cure for COVID-19!
I don't have any new pictures for this post, but I thought I'd post a word of warning. As I've stated before, these pictures are coming from a server I set up for me and my family. My son has one or more friends who log in and play as well. In order to ease the ability for friends to log in, I've left it up without a whitelist, and had it that way since the beginning--more than a year at least. Anyway, last night, someone found the IP address and joined the server. They started spamming a web address that resolved to some discord channel. This player did some griefing on the server as well. I banned the player but didn't do anything else at the time. A short time later, another player (or the same one using an alt) joined and started doing more griefing, etc. At this point I took the server down, changed it to a whitelist, and reverted it to my last backup. We lost a couple of days worth of changes, but nothing serious.
The main point of this is, remember to backup your servers regularly. And a whitelist is your friend.
Join me on World Community Grid and help find a cure for COVID-19!
Minecraft is a haven to all sorts of strangerous people.
I've been kind of busy the past few days and haven't had as much time to play or post images. But here I am again, with a few more pictures.
First, the base so far:
There's a few differences here. First, I changed my render distance so you can see clearly a bit farther out. Second, I added a bit to the top of my sorter--basically a stairwell so that I can get onto the roof. In the future, I may add a couple more whole layers, but for now that's all for that one. Finally, I got some bees! You can see the hives to the left of my sorter building. Some may also note on the bottom right that my automatic farm is empty at the moment. I remedied that quickly after taking this screenshot.
Anyway, the bees.
As many probably know, bees were part of the 1.15 update. It wasn't until the 1.15.2 update that they added the ability to grow birch or oak trees and have a chance of getting a hive to spawn as well. Since much of the area around my original base is explored, we'd have to travel a long ways to find bees naturally generated, so this was a welcome addition to the game. But even though every post in this thread so far is from 1.15.2, I haven't taken the time to actively try to get bees until now. But here they are.
In this first nest, there were 3 bees. For some reason, quickly after they started flying around, one flew off never to be seen again. I don't know why. But I was glad to have at least two so I could breed some more.
I dug a single block hole, put a campfire in it, and placed a carpet over it so the bees wouldn't fly into the fire.
Then I built some more hives, and bred some bees.
If you look closely, you can see all 5 of my bees flying around in this picture.
And here's a wider shot with all the hives and most of the bees visible.
I'm kind-of hoping the next version (1.16) will come out soon. I've got a number of things I want to do when it comes out. Meanwhile, I'll probably start working on my trading village soon.
Join me on World Community Grid and help find a cure for COVID-19!