Minecraft - Kakariko Village Continued and Other Projects

Work has been continuing on my recreation of Kakariko Village as well as a few other side-projects within my Minecraft world. I have also been spending some time on Minecraft PC, but I'm not finding it nearly as fun as I thought I would. I guess I'm too used to the Xbox version. Anyways, lets get into it and I'll show you what I've been working on.

We'll start with Kakariko Village. Last time, I left off after finishing up the basic framework of the Village and I was getting ready to go into building mode and create the buildings. As you can see from the screenshot below, all of the buildings are now at least roughed in and a few are complete. However, I'm not overly pleased with them due to their size. I'm finding it difficult to lay out their interior's due to the side difference between the inside and outside of the buildings in the game. The insides are much larger than the outside meaning I cannot recreate all the little details. At least it still looks good from the outside.

All structures roughed in and "tall grass" grown where it should be.

In the upper right corner of the screenshot, you might notice a new tunnel opening. This is the "main" entrance into my village. Since all the ground on the right-hand side will eventually be cut out and made into a river, I needed a new entrance into the village. This location fit in with the in-game entrance as well as gave me an opportunity to easily connect it to my minecart tracks. So, within this tunnel opening is three things: the entrance to Kakariko Village, a Minecart stop and the base of my massive tree complex.

"Kakariko Station" with access to my tree complex (ladder), Village (right)
and Castle (behind ladder).

The massive "tree complex" started off as an experiment suggested by my wife. I had several trees growing on top of this small mountain and she asked if it would be possible to put a dirt block on top of the tree, plant a sapling and see if it would grow. Needless to say, it grew, so I did it again and again and again until my tree reached max height. I shaved one side of the tree and added a ladder from ground to top and with this access, I continued to expand my tree on top of tree side project. This thing grew massive and has been a lot of fun growing it even bigger. I now have several trees that grew to max height and am planning on trying to get more to do the same. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do with this yet. I may build a tree-house in the future. In the meantime, it's just a fun diversion.

Standing next to my castle (it's on the left) looking at my tree complex.
This screenshot is a few days old and it has grown even more now.
Kakariko Village is on the other side of the trees.

I have also began expanding and redesigning parts of my Minecart Depot to add three new locations. One is shown above at Kakariko Village. That track is complete and already integrated into my station. One of the other two will lead to my cavern that we blew out in my world a few weekends ago. (See: Minecraft - Fun with TNT) The second new destination is to a Snow Fort in the air I created several weeks ago (see below).

The 3 new destination switches and new Departure area on right.

I believe I have mentioned this before, but the majority of my world is either Tundra, Ocean or Hills. Off in one of the Tundra sections, my brother and I proceeded to create a floating platform in the sky and on top of that we built a Snow Fort. Gathering snow blocks was a lot more work than I had first anticipated. It took a ton of shovels to gather a ton of snowballs to make enough blocks. I had to wait for two snow cycles to let enough re-accumulate. Needless to say, I'm quite proud of how it looks, especially from a distance at night. The towers are domed with glass pyramids and lit with flaming Netherrack. I did some testing and discovered that Netherrack does not melt snow blocks when lit. In fact, you can see my "testing ground" in most of my Kakariko Village progress shots in my previous post (upper right of the photo).

Looking at it from a distance.

Closeup view from the front.

I'm thinking about creating my first in-air minecart track to get to the Snow Fort and having it circle all the way around it before taking you back to the underground entrance. So far, all my minecart tracks have been underground, but I keep seeing people putting them up in the air which I think looks neat. The place where my track will be is in a semi-remote place of my world, so it won't interfere with any of my other builds (yet).

In my PC world, I'm still playing in creative mode, which I think is ruining it a little for me. I'm getting spoiled by being able to build things without fear of falling or running out of materials. If I misplace a block, oh well. Bust it away and don't worry about it. The world I'm playing in is the seed "Temple" which starts you out close to an Extreme Hills biome. There was one such "hill" that looked a little like the logo from OBLIVION, and that's the one I decided to build my house on top of. I then created a staircase down one of the "legs" of the hill to the surface. Next, I created a small desert town nearby and manually populated it with Villagers using their spawn eggs. I have 10 houses, a Tavern / Inn, a Blacksmith and a Temple as well as a few wheat farms. It's also built right next to a surface level spider dungeon.

My Minecraft PC house. The staircase to get to my house winds
up the right hand "leg". I love this location.

The village I created. My house is behind me from this perspective. The
fenced in area on the left is the spider dungeon.

Inside my temple (shown on the upper left hand side of the previous photo).

Speaking of dungeons, I have actually discovered 3 of them right under my desert village. Two spider dungeons and one zombie. I thought these things were supposed to be harder to find?

I think I'm about done pre-creating my world and I need to start actually playing and exploring the old fashioned way like I do on Xbox. I also need to look into a plugin / mod that will allow me to use my Xbox 360 controller to play the game instead of the keyboard and mouse. Since that's what I'm used to, I think it's part of my problem with playing it on PC; it just feels weird.

On a semi-side note, I logged into Raptr this morning and looked at my total time playing. I've been playing at least 273 hours. I know it's more than that because there have been times I've played while the Internet was down. Absolutely insane! I also looked at my stats on the in-game Leaderboard and I'm ranked about 25,000 for the total number of blocks mined. That may not seem very good, but you have to consider just how many millions of copies of this game were actually sold.

My Raptr Dashboard.

I'll keep playing and building and post more when it's ready. I'm in the process now of collecting enough colored wool to make the roofs. Then I'll do what I can with the interiors and start the smithy.

• Part 1 - Beginning the build
• Part 2 - A Quick Update
• Part 3 - Bigger update with lots of photos.