Sunday 21 April 2013

Burntcustard's Log - Entry 1

Get it? Log! I use lots of logs in Minecraft!...

This is the first entry in this series, and I have no idea how long it will last. Hopefully I manage to finish this article! I'm going to try to keep these "in character" and not mention real world stuff. The first few will be in the past, describing the older stuff in the world, and then they should catch up with my castle building. I'm keeping the GUI up in screenshots to give it a more "survival-ey" feel.

EDIT: This got quite a few views from new people, so I feel like I should introduce myself. I'm Burntcustard, and I like overcomplicated redstone contraptions, fancy houses, and gold hats. I've been playing Minecraft since Alpha, and would like to think I'm pretty good at it. Look at my older blog posts to see some cool stuff I've made in the past.

Now, about what I'm standing in front of...
In a brand new world, with Tattysaurus, we started on a hill next to a small lake. For once exactly in the right place to build a house. After deforesting a huge section of land, fishing, and a bit of mining, we built a house. We also found something extremely convenient underground that I'll go into next episode. I then built a very fancy new structure to supply us with enough food to stop us having to spend so much bloody time fishing. Oh and there's a small entrance to the mine. It all ended up something like this:
The cows and sheep were collected and bred for the massive project that is going to be the main focus of this series ;)
The balcony out the back of the house is for fishing from. It has a redstone lamp in, that with the other redstone lamps in the house, turns on automatically at night.
Inside the house is all the standard fittings, chests, beds, etcetera. The chest you might be able to see in that picture currently has a stack of diamonds in. Fortune 3 woo!
The automatic redstone lamps in this picture were deactivated (redstone torches swapped with normal torches), because they interfered with industrial size furnace setup we had to fit for cooking all the clay for the.. secret... okay the castle. Wearing our swimming hat (Respiration 3, Aqua Affinity) really helped when collecting the clay. There's also a retractable table that had to be broken :(

So why is the top of the house so wonky? Well, firstly someone put some gravel up there *grumpy face*, and secondly, there's a semi-auto wheat farm up there!
Getting all that to fit was a struggle, but it works pretty well. Press button -> water pushes the crops forward -> press button -> water stops -> pick up and replant. Speaking of food...
This is the drop-off point for the output of the medium size building to the right of the house. At first it delivered fresh goods every morning. I later changed it to keep the minecart in the house, and collect 32 more of each item when the button pressed and the cart is sent off. An industrial-sized setup like this is currently in development for the castle. The food systems linked to the castle will need to supply food for at least 4 people, so is at least 2 times as big. Lets have a closer look at the building creating the goodies.
This is the pumpkin pie factory! Ignore the hole on the right.. missing sign, missing door, damn monsters. On the left is the daylight sensor, which causes the crops to be harvested once a day.
There's no close up of the redstone or chest-feeding point. It's quite simple, but I could give some sort of explanation if requested. I know that nothing in there is very efficient, but it was half done for looks.

Now back to the house, specifically the basement:
As sign-ed this is the Nether room. The Nether portal is turned off when the doors are closed, to stop the annoying noises and Pigmen coming through (it has happened!). Behind the portal are two dispensers, one with flint and steel, one with a bucket of water. Fiddly redstone timings are used to get them to "fire" at the right times.
And down to the extend basement... You'll have to wait until log 2 to hear about the inhumane contraption that's located in the deep down there.

Here ends part one of the series. Was there too much text, not enough pictures of redstone, not enough dragons? Any feedback is appreciated. I'll leave you with a picture of the sunset from the fishing balcony:

Friday 19 April 2013

Still alive and castle building!

It's been nearly a year since I posted here, but.. I still play Minecraft, and still have my stuff spreading around the internet with no credit to where it came from (grr).

So... what have I been doing? (That you might care about) I started playing some other games more, like Natural Selection 2, Cobalt (which I made maps for), CS:GO, Far Cry 3, Bioshock Infinite, the list goes on. I got back into playing Minecraft in a big way a month ago though, and I'm currently working on... something interesting. Yes, yes it is a castle. No, it is not like any survival-mode-created castle you have ever seen.

I hope to cover my new creations over the next few weeks. I had hoped to show them in a YouTube series, but the people I play with haven't got reliably decent equipment to allow that to happen, plus, I like pictures. Part one, showing my "starting" base should be coming tomorrow! Until then, here's a picture of a sword I just made for smacking Endermen with: