Thursday, July 26, 2012

July 26th, 2012















It's finally done. I was really not satisfied with how the stone brick looked and how unsupported the spawning towers felt. It seems that you can only use 2-3 types of blocks effectively before other things start to look tacky, so I resorted to using sandstone and wood to complete the columns and the new lava blade setup.















First of all, I had to design the pillar that supported the spawning towers. I wanted to keep it mainly as sandstone, and took inspiration from the design style of the ancient Romans. That said, just plain sandstone wouldn't look much better, so I began changing the shape, making use of half slabs, and also accenting the sandstone with different colors to make it more vibrant (and I finally found a good use for lapis blocks). This is the result of that effort, though it was not the final result.

Night shot of the four finished pillars

Day, aerial shot of the four finished pillars



























In the middle of the second image, you can see the next part of the refurbishing project: the lava blades. Now, there actually had to be some function to this part, so the shape was sort of out of my control, though the style was not. The style actually changed quite a bit from first conception all the way through me finishing off the redstone for the lighting system.

Yes, you heard right. I finally got the redstone wiring for the lighting system all the way underground. Aside from the siding and the top of the lava blades, there is no redstone showing (and you can't see the redstone on the lava blades from anywhere in my base). The wiring was actually challenging to do, and I'm glad I thought of a few of these things in advance. For instance, the spawning towers actually sit one block lower now than they did before. I added an additional layer to prevent the water from dripping, but it also served to house the redstone without any bulges sticking out on the bottom of the towers.

The wiring wasn't initially below the spawner, where it would creep to the sides and move upwards from there. When I first tried wiring the rest of it, I had it on the side, but I didn't like the additional ring it made around the side. It made the towers feel like they are too close together, and it looked a little tacky.

Day shot of the finished base for the mob grinder

Top-down view of the lava blade section

What the pillar looks like after I installed the lighting system into it








































When all is said and done, this project went extremely well. I'm happy with the design, and think they add a lot to my base, which was previously very open. A lot of lines of sight were blocked, and a lot of space was taken up and is well lit from the pillars. This will make it immensely easy to light up the whole base with redstone lamps, which is an upcoming project for me.

Funnily enough, I discovered that I actually spaced out the spawning towers incorrectly. The north and west spawning towers are one block closer to the center of my base than the south and east spawning towers. I randomly discovered this problem when I was just looking up at them, but I still did my best to mask that mistake by making the sides of the lava blade rather plain. You can see the mistake most clearly in my top down view, where two sides of the redstone are three blocks long and two are four blocks long.

That's all for now. Signing out!

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