Monday, September 10, 2012

Where Trees Are Square, Part 4

Welcome to Greycliffe. I've been building it ever since 1.0 came out. I'm not sure if it's bigger than my previous project, but there certainly was more building in this one. And all those stonebricks did not make themselves -- once again, everything was built on Normal from start to finish. And I think I did get this in a more finished state than Stoneforge.


Creepers sure did cause grief and frustration because of Normal difficulty, and I died a handful of times to various other things too, often losing all the stuff I had been carrying. But bigger the challenge, bigger the achievement. The added food clock brought its own extra distractions as well.




My intention wasn't to build a castle, really -- a thing most do first when they are starting their Minecraft career. Instead, I wanted to make the Lordaeron throne room from World of Warcraft. I still remember when I entered it for the first time as an undead rogue and thought "Wow, it's exactly like in Warcraft 3." I think it's one of the coolest locations in WoW and I wanted to recreate it in Minecraft.




However, as a throne room kind of requires a castle around it, Greycliffe was born. And in the end, I didn't quite recreate the room, as I realized it would've needed to be huge to have all the details. But I think one can see the influence in there at least.





The wizard tower and the dome over the throne room were built with the aid of this handy tool, which I discovered from this video. I had to limit the tower's size a bit because of the height limit, though. The top blocks actually sit as high as things went. Then the limit was raised in a later patch, and I believe you can now build twice as high.




Upside-down stairs and slabs were also introduced at some point, and they make smaller scale arcs so much better looking. The textures are once again provided by eldpack, by the way. I'm not a fan of its brown clay bricks, though. And wool blocks also have outlines that make some things not as cool -- the floor of the throne room, for instance. Otherwise it's a quite fancy texture pack, and it doesn't differ too much from the default textures.




I even built a small sewer system under the town. Rather dark and dangerous in there...




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