The main theme for this past week has been building my first settlement outside of spawn. In past maps I would try to find a plains, forest, or swamp. But I think sandstone builds look pretty nice, so I opted to settle in a desert. It ended up being by a savannah, giving me plenty of acacia wood. Birch planks remain my favorite blocks in the game, but acacia planks are pretty good, too.
My desert house is based upon something I saw on the Mindcrack server's 3rd season map. I ended up going in a fairly opposite direction from it, though. It has a bit of a Medieval feel, which I didn't expect. It's rather nice. As the front entrance shows, this building is under the authority of House Youssarian (I'll explain that in a moment), with its blue, white, and yellow banner.
Here's a few pictures walking around the house.
The inside. The bottom floor is mainly storage. I wasn't too sure about keeping the granite floor but it's grown on me.
Top floor. It's kinda bare but I presently don't need much.
The latter to go up and downstairs.
When I first picked this spot to build, I knew there was a desert well near it. What I didn't realize was the existence of a second one. Both are in view of the house, but because of my slow laptop I keep the amount of rendered chunks low.
Up close the place looks nice. From far away it's really quite something.
Some Lore
I want for the map to have castles and kingdoms and villages and whatnot. Certainly, there will be other things, but I'm going for a bit of a Medieval feel. I spent some time studying how real castles are built, and I'm hoping to adapt that into the game. Each "kingdom" will have its own banner style. Castle Youssarian is going to be pretty nice, realistic, but not overly complex. I'll make it somewhere in the desert. Later on, I'll track down an ice spike biome and use the packed ice to build another castle somewhere in a snowy biome.
Exploration
I also did some exploring. I found a desert temple and a village. The village was darn near the smallest you can find in the game. I named it Creepersfont, because of the Creeper which was hopping in the well.
The desert temple is located on the shore.
Next Week
I think this next week will be more about building up supplies and getting ready to build Castle Youssarian, a large sandstone-based castle. It'll have wood and stone and other stuff, of course. I want it to be realistic but also able to fit my own building style. I also need to get a mob farm up and running as soon as I can.
