Ebi's Gaming Blog: Minecraft - New Survival World Castle

I bet you were hoping my next update would be a continuation of my own Hurule project. Well, work on that has slowed down a bit, but I am still plugging away at it. I've finished most of Death Mountain now except for the Eastern caverns. Figuring how to make all those work has been a pain! (There are a few quick photos at the end of this post)

What I want to share today is a new world I started that I've become rather fond of. As usual, I started on pure Survival without cheats, but with the Bonus Chest. Right off the bat, I found an extreme hills biome with a great mountain that had a huge opening through it. Naturally, I had to climb to its peak and claim it as my own. From a simple dirt base in the side of the mountain, my castle began to take shape. This is where it stands currently.

From my dirt room, I started to dig into the mountain and work my way down creating room above room that was about 15x15x3 each. Eventually, I started hearing spiders and thought for sure I was getting close to a cave or something. I was wrong and wound up running smack into a spider dungeon. This dungeon was half hanging out into the opening through my mountain. It was two more layers below the dungeon that I finally hit caves that go all the way down to about Y=15 or so.

What that left me with was a lot of cobblestone, but not much coal. That came from the caves I finally discovered. The next stage was to terraform the top of the mountain so that it was not only a little more shapely, but so that it would also hold a castle better. After all, if you don't build a castle in Minecraft at least once, you're not playing Minecraft... ;)

I started with the garden section and built the wall around the outside. I love how they turned out.


The Garden Area. The spot where the door goes into the castle (surrounded by Roses) is what used to be my original dirt shelter. That door led down into my first rooms in the hills.

From here, I started to move onto the first level of the castle which was above the garden. Everything is made from stone brick, and I don't want to think about how much coal I've spent smelting it all. I did eventually find diamond, made an enchanting table and got an awesome pick on my first enchant. Unbreaking III, Efficiency IV, and Fortune III. Yay! The coal finally started rolling in. A later pick gave me silk touch which helped too.

An early view of the castle. Garden section is on the right.

With lots of stone brick, I completed the first level of the castle which set the footprint for everything else: big. The first floor itself isn't much to look at. I have a small "dining" area, but the rest is just open space. I'm not sure what to do with it yet.

In the center, I started to create my staircase up. I took it up 4 levels, each 3 high, and stopped. I wanted to create a Nether Room at the top of my castle to house the Portal. In fact, that's the part of the tower I did first before anything else. I had the Nether Room complete and a big empty space below it that would eventually become 3 more levels. For quite a while, it looked very strange and was very enemy prone as there were no torches on the roof.

The Nether Room at the top.

At this point, I was running out of ideas. I had a big castle started, but wasn't sure what I was going to do with it all. Then it hit me. Let's make this castle as if it were a "Spawn Castle" for a server and turn all the other floors into housing for players. It may never see a server at all, and I may be the only player of it, but I thought it would be fun regardless and it would give me some experience creating something like this. So, that's exactly what I did. I created room after room on all the floors between the first and the Nether floor.

An open area on one of the floors. You can see the rooms down the hallway.

I don't remember how many rooms I wound up with off the top of my head. I think there are about 25 or so. Each room has a "welcome" chest that contains some wood, coal, a bed, 4 diamonds, 10 iron, some torches and food. Enough to give a player a huge head-start.

Each window above the tall ones on the first floor represent a living space for a player. This is the "Main Entrance" of the castle. It is also where I moved the Spawn Point for my world to with mcedit.

A back view of the castle early on. On the left is the garden and you can see the opening through the hill on the bottom.

By this point, the castle was taking shape very nicely. I created an above-ground garden area on top of the back section with a few trees. On the very top of the castle, I created a small fountain and a viewing tower.

The Roof-Top Garden.

The fountain with a poor attempt at a domed roof.

Inside the viewing tower looking up.

The view from the top looking down at the fountain and below.

A far-away view of the whole castle at sunset. I love how it looks at night.

Same view as above, only zoomed in for a close-up view.

I love how the castle turned out. I still have some work do to finishing up the grounds and expanding the world out, but I'd love to be able to take this offline world online. I have plans to put in a massive train depot nearby that will eventually be connected to locales across the world. The first line is already in place heading out to a large ocean biome. Later plans are to create another line to a large desert I found, but haven't had a chance to explore.

Below are a few more screenshots from my world.

A zoomed-in view of under the hill. You can see the massive window into my main bedroom that was built pre-castle.

The back view of the old entrance into my underground rooms. The door at the top of the steps leads into the store room just above my bedroom.

The bottom floor of the "community store-room". This one houses food, tools, and less-common materials.

The top floor of the store-room with the common building blocks and my auto-smelters thanks to the amazing Hoppers. (I love those things!)

Underground. The stairs going up lead to just under the spider dungeon, the stairs going down lead to caves that lead to bedrock, and the path heading away and to the left leads to a dual dungeon that I turned into an Experience Grinder.