Minecraft - You Wanna Build What?

According to Raptr, I was about 40 or 50 hours into the game by this point in time. I only recently finished this project I was about to start, and now Raptr is telling me I'm at over 200 hours of game play. That should give you an indication of the size and scope of the project I tackled. Without further ado, my big project is...
...a scale recreation of the entire castle from The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past.

The in-game castle and surroundings.

And after about 150 hours or so of work, I think it turned out fairly good.

The Minecraft castle and surroundings.

What I find even more amazing is that this is what I started with:

The land before construction started.

Looking at that photo, you'll see a good sized hill there, meaning phase 1 was to tear the hill down. This was where my wife came in. She's not really a gamer and rarely plays anything with me, but she offered to help out and her help was tremendous. She's getting better now, but when she started out, it was easier for her to go in a straight line. She would line up the cursor on the row of blocks she was going to remove, hold down the trigger and walk forward. When she got to the end, she would turn around, line up again and off she'd go. It worked and save me a ton of digging.

During the digging phase, I stumbled upon something I wasn't expecting. I ran into my first natural cave. This cave turned out to be huge and spanned a massive area of my map. I also discovered my first dungeon towards the bottom of it. I'm actually still finding spots in the caves I haven't explored yet. This was awesome to stumble upon, yet a huge hindrance later on. When I began digging out the dungeon levels of the castle, I kept running into the stupid thing. It figured. I'd spent a lot of time digging around and hoping to find something like this and hadn't. Then, when I didn't really want to find one, I did.

It took some work, but I managed to restructure parts of the cavern to make them accessible by other paths. If that didn't work, or the room I uncovered was really small, I'd simply fill it in and move on. Eventually, I'd create a series of pathways through this cavern, but that's a story for another day. Back to the castle building.

It took a lot of time and work to level everything out to sea level. But that was only the beginning. Once it was leveled, it had to be expanded too. The ground wasn't wide enough to give me the scale I was looking for. Fortunately I had a lot of sand and dirt to do that with so it wasn't too bad.

I wish I had saved photos of the progress of the castle from start to finish, but unfortunately I didn't think I would ever actually write about my experience building it. I didn't even think about creating this blog and posting screen shots until my brother had mentioned it. But that will change in the future. I'm on my next big Hyrulian build now, and I'll be sure to get progress shots of it.

My guide to the first floor.

So, now that I have a leveled and expanded patch of land, I began building the castle. I started with the front door and went from there. To get my scale, I used the actual in-game layout and put a grid overlay on top like what's shown in this photo.

I didn't always follow the exact structure 100%, but it's still the castle and feels like you're walking through it. For example, the room on the right is cut down by 5 blocks and the upper right and left rooms are both shortened by 10 blocks. I cut these short because I was running into more mountain despite the huge amounts we already removed and didn't feeling like cutting out any more. In the end, this turned out to be a good decision.

When you're programming a video game, you are able to take a lot of liberties with in-game space. When recreating the 2D game in an actual 3D space, you soon find the liberties they took and they actually become a hindrance. It was because of this that I had to take some "artistic liberties" of my own to modify the design slightly. Plus, it had to fit in the Minecraft world meaning no angles, no half blocks, limited materials, etc. A good for instance would be the throne room. When I eventually reached the point where I was building it, I discovered that it was floating up in the air with absolutely nothing underneath it. And the room you fight Ganondorf in at the top of his tower would actually have been floating out above nothing. To resolve this, I wrapped Ganondorf's room above the room where he sends Zelda to the Dark World and under the Throne Room I created a new room, the "treasury". I also made some hidden passages with a lot of the extra space in between the walls. It worked and gave the castle more life than the game-only design would have. Plus it was fun to be extra creative. ;)

It didn't take me too long to get the first floor roughed in and start the catwalks in the side rooms. By the time I had this completed and a roof on it, I was starting to get excited about the whole project. I don't have them taken yet, but I'll get more screenshots of the first floor for next time's post. I'll also talk about the challenge of creating the throne room and beginning to dig out the dungeon levels.