All is grist that comes to the mill

Seems a disproportionate amount of my time as of late has been spent mining. Although seemingly unexcitable, it's influencing how the town is developing.

As of this time I've hit a bit of a diamond dry spell. My personal preference is to float at least thirty or forty diamonds in my on hand stock. I find this is a comfortable cushion when preoccupied with a large project or I'm otherwise distracted from mining. However when recently rebuilding my diamond reserves I've been finding that I'm essentially breaking even on my mining trips. Only mining enough diamonds to replace my expenditure in picks. The upside to this spate of mining is that I have an abundance of materials on hand and won't have to make frequent trips to retrieve more.

It also appears I'm flanked on at least three sides by lava fields. Meaning that to clear it out I'm going to be building with a fair bit of obsidian in the near future. It should make for some interesting builds.

With that going on. I've taken a short break to put together another towny style house.

The idea behind this one was to have an open concept workshop on the first level and a livable space on the second.

Where to place the standard crafting bench, chest, and furnace presented a minor challenge at first. Eventually I had settled on closing off the back wall and placing the chest and furnace there. Then to fill out the space a little I stuck the crafting bench in the middle of the floorspace. A ladder provides access to the second floor.

The second floor provides a simple bed and a Minecraft style poker table. Of course I had to include some signature skylights to complete the build.

Necessity is the mother of invention

Everyone loves to show off the big elaborate projects. Personally I've always been more impressed with small builds that are unique and have some character to them.

Two basic concepts went into this one. First was to have the roofline start at the ground level. Second was that the roof would only have one slope.

The interior contains all the trappings you would normally find in a server house. Crafting table, chest, furnace, and a little decoration in the form of a simple desk and chair.

Patience is a virtue

I'd like to think of obsidian as a high status block. It's brutal mining time of fifteen seconds in alpha make it an absolute waste of time to try and mine in large amounts. Gathering enough of it in survival to build a large structure was seen as an impressive feat in old multiplayer servers. Enough so that players could be paid fairly well in diamonds for stacks of it. But I would like to go about it a little differently.

If the issue with obsidian is the mining time, then I'll just cut out the mining time. How? By bucketing the lava and transporting it to the building site to then cast. The limitations of this method are the 36 inventory slots and travel time. However I feel that those limitations are much less mind numbingly boring than mining the stuff.

One way to cut down a little bit on travel time to the construction site is to construct a warehouse that will act as a distribution center.

Like most warehouse buildings, this one is fairly simple in it's design. My only thoughts going into it were to construct the facade out of obsidian and allow passers by to easily see inside.

The first floor is mostly for decoration. There's an open hearth furnace to the left that felt fitting. The workshop in the center is based on my standard workshop setup. The smoothstone slabs make it look a little more industrial. The furnaces to the right are purely decoration.

The second floor is purely for storage. I can't imagine ever storing that much lava. Let alone crafting enough buckets to fill them.

Everything comes to those who wait

As of the current version of Minecraft (alpha v1.0.4) the game contains minecarts and rail track. Unfortunately both are completely worthless as there is no way to give the carts acceleration and overcome the basic limitations of gravity.

There is a silver lining to this blunder of game design. There was a glitch in the game that occurred when a cart came into contact with another cart that was placed parallel to the main line. The carts would lock together and accelerate quickly and provide the speed necessary to do useful things, such as going uphill.

Here are the results of my test line demonstrating a basic booster cart setup.

As you can see the glitch isn't present in my current version. I'll have to attempt it again at a later update.

Good fences make good neighbours

Thought I'd do a little exploring and ended up discovering a dungeon with a zombie spawner in it.

It's quite close to town. I should set up a mob grinder in the near future to gather feathers in order to produce a steady supply of arrows.

An Englishman's home is his castle

Next door to our little cobble shack is this slightly more attractive number.

The second floor was completely unplanned. However I felt the addition fit in during building. The sand line between the first and second floor help add some character as well.

The living room contains the standard filler furniture.

The back workshop. The two furnaces show the annoying way in which Minecraft automatically adjusts placed blocks.

This is the upstairs sitting room. I've tried to spruce it up a little with some plants. The ceiling is low enough that the tree sapling will never grow.