Friday, March 18, 2011

Another Project?

I've become quite comfortable at my new home server. The map itself is over 130 MB in size, which makes for quite the huge world. Sporadically placed throughout it are castles and generally excellent home bases other players have made... as well as a mini-Alcatraz just a hundred or so meters from my home, which is really nothing more than a hole in the side of a mountain with a staircase to my now extensive branch mine.

I want to do something spectacular on that server. And by that I mean, build a city. This city will be very ingeniously planned out and developed. One of the features I plan to include are city walls which are very tall and self-repairing, using water and lava streams that form cobblestone when they meet. Getting the water will be very easy. The difficult part will be procuring a large enough number of buckets and of course lava springs. Then again, there is a lava lake nearby (enclosed by a house, unfortunately) but others have clearly found more lava sources because I see them used for griefing purposes in at least two locations.

The city will have plenty of rural homes of various designs as well as a fancy central area. The core will be a magnificently large church and near it, a star observatory - along with markets and so on. The motto of the city will be "Ex Deus astrum" which means "From God, the stars." This is a play on the mottos "Ex astris scientia" which is the motto of Starfleet Academy meaning "From the stars, knowledge."

Speaking of cities, I'm satisfied with the beginning success I had with Nippon Hamlet. My next project is to build a prototype city which has things like a power plant, shipyard/dock, market of various goods, and so on. I picked an area which I thought could become the capital area of Yusaria and decided the fastest way to get rid of the dense forest in the area was to burn it. I took a flint and steel and set it aflame. The fire spread fast and the forest went up in flames. It was simply amazing to see what was happening. I checked Minutor to see the dense forest and a little while after the burn had begun, I ran Minutor again and saw there was a huge area of plains where forest had once been, extending from north to south coasts. The location is quite nice, with mountains to the east and hills to the west.

On the Minutor display I could see there were two waves of fire still spreading in opposite directions toward the east. I looked at the proximity of the trees and actually thought the entire continent, over a kilometer long and about 300 meters wide at the starting point, was going to be deforested. But a minute later the last tree was burned down, causing a nice empty field to work in and lots of wood still left.