The foundations for a new project

The title pretty much says what this post is all about. I have decided to try out a new project. This time, I am planning to build a city next to my primary base. Now, a city is something I have always wanted to build in Minecraft. There have just been one tiny little problem: until recently, I have had no clue how to build house properly. Most of my time have been focused primarily on resource generation, and/or more imaginative builds. The closest thing I comes to actually building a house, was back when I built my longhouse, which ended up being reverted into my new sheep farm. But still, I did not even bother to make a proper design for it, and thus it is very basic, and not as good as I wanted it to be to begin with. But I chose a very poor building site, as I built it right in between already existing buildings, meaning that I did not have the room to experiment that I would wanna have. I was very lucky though with the height of the long house, as it just barely ended up fitting underneath my extensive base. Which is good, because it would have been very annoying having to abandoned this build. But thankfully, I was able to at least bring my long house up to the point where it could begin to serve a purpose as my sheep farm.

But enough talking about the past. Let`s focus on the present. After a bit of back and forth, I decided to build my new project on the southern side of my primary base, behind my tree farm. In the past, I have tried to establish a city here, but I abandoned the build, due to my attention being turned towards more critical builds. I have gotten a basic idea of how I want things to turn out here. But do not expect me to waste time on building surrealistic houses. My building style is very simple, and I will not waste time on building houses that looks absolutely out of our world. I intend on building houses that looks realistic, yet they still have that hint of Minecraft in them. This means that I will not spend all too much time into building those extravagant houses you see around the internet that have been built in Minecraft. I will primarily take inspiration from my own country, where houses are built in a primarily simple manner. You will rarely see houses with extravagant decorations, and glowing lamps all over the place. Some people will sometimes decorate their house with cheap lighting, but this is mainly restricted to the christmas season.

With the clearing of my style out of the way, here`s my current progress. As with many other of my builds, the first building to be put down, will be an observation deck. This building will not only serve as a point of reference for future progression screenshots, but it will also serve as the point of start when one are to access the city, as the primary walkway passes by it. I have already built two houses, to try and get comfortable around this new type of builds in my world, and they turned out quite nicely. Though these houses are very basic and are only on the testing stages, they will give an idea of the kind of style one can come to expect in my city. That, and the fact that I will provide all houses with smaller walkways. Because over in my country, having a road you can drive on where you live, is starting to become a luxury a lot of people have to live without. A lot of people do not even have a parking space, and can only dream about having a garage. This means that most, if not all, houses, will be built without a garage.

Laying the foundations for the first house I built, to try out my skills on building houses. You can also see the technique I have adopted for building houses to get the best results, which is to simply build the house in 3*3 cells.

Looking at the first house from a distance. To the left, you can see one of my older attempts at getting a city started. You can see the size difference, and the lack of the technique I have adopted at the moment.

A closer look at the first house as seen from above. This one turned into sorts of a pyramid shape, but that`s fine, because to me, it is more important to have fun while building something, rather than to focus entirely on the final result, and its size.

Looking at the house from ground level. As you can see here, messed up the design a bit there, but its not too much. And this is what we learn from after all :).

A second house under construction. This one is significantly bigger than the first one, and also features a more realistic look. You cannot see it from here, but it have a walkway that leads into the main parts of the house. It turned out way too small for my liking, but it`s a start.

Looking at my two houses from where I have laid down the foundations for a new observation deck. You can see the size difference here, and if you look  closely, I got the design right this time on my second attempt.

The foundations for my new observation deck. The blocks you can see in the foreground are markers I have put down, for where the walkway will be set up. 

Looking at the foundations for the new observation deck at a slight distance.

Looking at my current progress, with the new observation deck foundation, from my primary observation deck. You can also see here the clearing I have made in the forest in preparation for future progress.

There are plenty of work still to be done though, so I will just have to get down to it. Updates will come as progress is made.


- Mattias.