2015-07-08

Bigger Building

So just to be different, I've been building something a little bigger.  I wanted to use diorite, and ended up using redstone because frankly I had a ton of it and no practical use for it.

This is the result:

First Project Building
It is a bit more intricate inside, with a two-story lobby in the front.

Lobby
There's not really anything else in it.  There are some pictures showing the construction deeper in the Minecraft album I have on Google Photos.

Next time I'll probably try to use granite, diorite and stone throughout rather than cobblestone.  I'm already preparing the next site for the next building.

One thing that is (slightly) interesting is that digging for physical resources shows you how scattered they can be.  I dug a fairly deep 9x9 shaft to get cobblestone for this building, and the shaft didn't yield especially much in the way of extra resources (iron, granite, diorite, or even coal).  Meanwhile another shaft dug about 300 blocks over yielded a lot more -- even after accounting for the fact that it was a 11x11 with +4 feathering so it covered a lot more blocks.

Coal really becomes a scarce resource when you are using it to turn cobblestone into stone.  I managed to reduce my torch usage by just using the torch to light the active trail I was on, and then blocking up "finished" tunnel areas with cobblestone.  It does mean I won't have any indication that I've explored a tunnel run if I encounter it with another shaft later until I hit the cobblestone wall.  But one coal unit only gets you 8 units of stone, which means that building with it requires a lot of coal.

Or a willingness to use diorite/granite for stone.  However I like the starker colors that those materials provide so I am reluctant to turn them into stone.

I've also changed to using stone pick axes to conserve iron.  Using iron pick axes was sustainable, in that I would usually find more iron than the cost of the pick axe, but the net collection of iron didn't really get further ahead.

Of course dying with a load of materials either in the bottom of some shaft that I'd wandered to start digging and/or the bottom of a lava pool probably has more to do with my lack of materials.

Well that turned out a lot longer than I intended when I started writing it.