First of all, I got the top floor built. With it being done, the skeleton for the tower is complete.
The first thing I did from there was begin clearing out the bottom level. This will have eight wedge-shaped rooms that could be used as shops or something, and the main road of the village will pass through it.
An unfortunate pig was encased in the dirt. I excavated the little creature, hopefully it learns its lesson.
A sequence of images showing the bottom floor be hollowed out and have the outlines of the road and rooms be put in place.
I'll need to get pictures posted of the rooms for the upper two levels. I also did exterior work, putting in some logs to make it look like there were support beams.
This Iron Golem always seems to reappear inside this fence if it's not broken open...
One of the things I envision myself ultimately doing in this map is having tools with high level enchants that I repair using diamonds and an anvil. In order to do that, however, I need lots of iron and lots of diamond. That's not something that you can just walk around and get (well alright maybe you can, but it takes a real long time). To get those, you need to mine. A lot. So I took a break from building and went back to my makeshift cave home. I found that Endermen had stopped by and played with some blocks...
When I first started up this map, the best animal for me to breed for later food was chickens. The creatures haven't been able to get outside so they've been wandering around in the cave. Unfortunately, now they're getting into the mines. I'll need to fish them out one day.
During the time I was mining I picked up several experience levels. These went into enchants and I'm pretty happy with the outcome.
Minecraft 1.5 is out, and I'm pretty happy about it. I'm looking forward to hoppers in particular, because they are going to feed my laziness quite well. There is something I have in mind, an automatic smelting-sorting system. Here's the scenario: I come back after a long trip of mining and in my inventory is coal, iron ore, gold ore, diamonds, emeralds, flint, cobble, and other things. I want all these to go to their respective chests, with the ores getting smelted. Upon entering my home I dump everything into a master hopper. Using things like water, dispensers, droppers and chests, whatever needs to get smelted will be funneled through furnaces. These furnaces automatically smelt what is in them, feeding on the present coal supply. A comparator alerts me when coal reserves are running low. One the smelting is done, the output is sent to a chest. That last step can be turned off with a lever, in case I want to manually take out the ores and receive the XP.
I hope to be playing 1.5 in the next day or two. ModLoader is updated to 1.5, so now I'm waiting for OptiFine. It looks pretty close to being done, which makes me happy.
