Walkway progress

Well, that was so much for keeping updates going. There have not really been too much to report on though on my part in my survival world. In the recent days, I have mainly been focusing my attention on getting my newest addition to my walkway network, completed. And I am happy to say, that after a lot of pondering on the design, I have now completed it. And if I may say so myself, I think it turned out quite nicely. The only thing that annoys me a bit is the fact that my walkway had to be incorporated into my old roller coaster build (which is not included in the screenshot, because I used my roller coaster as a base for my photoshoot). But it is a very minor problem. A more annoying problem, was just clearing out the bits of the forest that would get in the way of my project. But I got it done, so I am quite happy with how it turned out. This walkway connects my new EXP farm to my base. I am planning on also making an extension to my minecart network, so that I can travel uninterrupted between my EXP farm and my base, without the need to walk. You may ask why I built my walkway to begin with if this have been my plan all along, but even if I do not use the walkway, it still serves a display purpose. And the fact that I will probably use it`s design later. But at the moment my minecart network is still very far away from being connected to my EXP farm, though I do have a station at my roller coaster build, which is located a few seconds walking away from my EXP farm. I will post more screenshots from these builds as I move along, but for now, I will focus on my newest walkway. I ended up with a classic design. Classic, as in that I developed the design from my older designs, that I used on my original walkways, when I established the network.

I have not really been able to get down as much progress in my world as I would like to get, but I have finished my walkway at the very least. I am very busy on the side, so I am not able to focus as much time into Minecraft as I would prefer to do, but that`s just how life is.

Pictures and screenshots still speaks much more than a thousand words, so I will include some screenshots here. Some are old, and some are new. Butt they show what I am working on.

A screenshot from early August 2015, which shows the early stages of my walkway network. In this screenshot, we can see my old transportation network in the middle, with the walkway with a lighter tone of stone crossing it. At this stage, I was experimenting with the redstone, as I had no clue how to use redstone back in the days shown here. The main challenge I faced at this stage, was how to supply my redstone lamps with power to light them.

A couple of days later, after the progress shown in the screenshot above. At this point, my modern and current design for my walkways, began to take shape. I made the primary part of the walkway three blocks wide, made up of stone slabs, framed by a row of stone on each side. And than, just for added details, I decided to put one row of spruce wood, and then one row of stone bricks, on each side of my walkway. And the solution to the problem with my redstone lamps turned out to be as simple as just adding a row of stone slabs on level with my redstone lamps. These two rows serves exactly the same purpose as our powerlines in the real world; they support the power cables, which supplies my redstone lamps with the redstone power they need to light up. This design also means that I can power my redstone lights on and off at will. Though very stable in the early stages, later updates, especially 1.9, led to many of my circuits to fail. Thus, my once fail-proof design have become a bit rusty, but thankfully, this part of my network have not suffered too much. It is a different story in another part of my world, where half my design have just simply vanished. That design was intended to incorporate this exact design seen here, only with a birch roof above, so that I could use the walkways during thunder storms without risking getting hit by the lightning. I am planning on fixing this design though in the nearest future, so we will see more updates coming from this. 

My most recent walkway, which is what I have been building on for the past days when I have had the time to spare to do so besides my studies. In this decide, I decided to go for much more simple and cost-effective design. As you can see, I chose to cut out the flower pots that could be seen in the screenshot further above here. And I also chose to cut out the electricity system, which I had put so much attention into in the earlier designs. For the design here, I chose to simply stick with the standard glowstone, on the side of which I put open trap doors. And than it is only a matter of putting down a three block wide walkway, neatly framed by stone blocks, birch wood, spruce wood, and finally stone bricks. One major improvement I made in this design, is that the design seen here, is much cleaner, and a lot more organised. Plus the fact that I chose different materials, so that it would stand out much better. I originally intended for dark oak in the place of spruce wood, but eventually ended up with spruce wood, because dark oak gave too much contrast with the birch wood. As far as the expansion to my minecart system goes, I am not entirely sure what I wanna do about it, but it will be a bit of time until I can get to it, as I have a lot of stuff to do first.

If you look closely on the upper right hand side of the screenshot, you can just barely notice my old birch wood roof design I made for my walkway. Originally I planned for it to cover the entirety of my walkway network, but after updating 1.9, and seeing how blocks vanished, the design was scrapped to the advantage of expanding my minecart railtrack to a two tracked network.

So that`s where I am currently standing.




I will keep posting updates as I go along. Or so I hope :P.



- Mattias.