Wednesday, January 18, 2012

City Construction Challenge

As you have likely noticed by now, I'm not one for great architecture. I have a tendency to build things that accomplish their function, without necessarily emphasizing their appearance. In a game like Minecraft that revolves around building good looking stuff, I'm kind of at a disadvantage.

Several weeks ago I saw this thread about the City Construction Challenge. It has a sort of Age of Empires feel to it. You build certain buildings and accrue enough supplies to advance to the next stage. After some deliberation I went ahead and began it in my Main world. I left the supplies from my base and headed to a different corner of the map.

I decided to use Insane mode of the challenge due to its heavy building requirements. This will give me ample chance to practice architecture and design. Something I've been wanting to do is look at designs on the Web and copy them if I like them, so as to add a little variety to my style. The only two exceptions to Insane mode rules are: I'm playing on Easy mode and I can use seeds from tall grass to make bread, which I can eat. I'm also making this a little more difficult by doing this in a mountain biome. I find mountain biomes to be the most magnificent and beautiful.

I have already made it past stage one: three buildings, a wheat farm, and 10 units of edible food.







A couple hamlets for Millenaire spawned not too far from me. This enables me to have more convenient access to supplies, but has the unfortunate affect of introducing a lot of FPS issues. At times I will have four Millenaire settlements all active at once. Because of this, I've been playing on Peaceful. I probably would be on Peaceful anyway when exploring caves.

One of the Millenaire settlements actually spawned right next to a Testificate village. There's really not too much to it.

That's a combined shot of the Testificate village and the Millenaire hamlet. Yes, a whole four buildings in that village. Three Testificates dwell in it.

I have begun with stage 2. One of its requirements is a town hall. I've decided to build it on lower ground. I really want to have all my projects on high, level mountaintops.


Something I hope to do is, after getting the challenge completed, add another stage: the redstone/piston stage, where I utilize redstone and pistons to automate things and generally make them cooler.