The Craft of Mining

Hooray! Time for another Minecraft post. So, there was actually a big ol' Halloween update pretty recently, but I haven't played around much with the new stuff. In any case, my brother and I have been doing a multiplayer server with just the two of us and slowly expanding our settlements in anticipation of when monsters are added to multiplayer. I figured I'd do a screenshot-tour of my two main projects thus far, a cliff-home and a prison island. Onwards!

(Click any of the images for a larger version! The thumbnails don't really do some of the shots justice. In my opinion.)

Here's my cliff-house from the outside (along with its boathouse). The cliff/mountain itself is actually a large, hollow dome-type affair. I built scaffolding up to the roof of the dome and laid a floor out, then added walls, etc.

The view from one of the two balconies in the cliff-house.

Sunset (or rise? I don't recall) from the second balcony - which is actually a fair bit larger than the picture suggests. You can also see my reed and cactus farms down at the bottom.

My pool, built right underneath the main floor of the house. I've taken the liberty of naming it "Sweet-ass Pool Hell Yeah". There's a decent view from the large windows, which I neglected to take a picture of.

That concludes the tour of the cliff-house. I decided not to take screenshots of the other rooms (and hidden vault) because they're not that exciting. Haven't finished furnishing the place. Now, on to the prison island! We had decided to do a bit of exploring and I found a nice X-shaped island (it's kind of shaped like a chromosome, in my opinion...). I'll toss up a Cartograph map of just the island sometime.

Here's the island on approach to the main bay/dock. I do intend to raise the height of the walls by a good deal, but it takes a hell of a lot of cobblestone just to raise the entire length of wall by one block, and I believe in mining all my materials. The large building just right of (and behind) my reticule isn't the prison building itself. Explanation forthcoming.

The island looks incredibly prison-y by night, in my opinion. Also, the lighthouse (that tall tower on the left) looks much better in the dark.

Here's the interior of the main prison building. It's got something like 5 cells on the first floor and 8 on the second, plus 12 solitary confinement cells underground.

The guard's clubhouse. I accidentally burned it down at about the halfway point of construction while I was trying to murder an errant chicken.

And, of course, the clubhouse has an underground pool. Nowhere near as nice as Sweet-ass Pool Hell Yeah, though, because that one has glass walls.

Here's the guard barracks and one of the guard towers, which is connected to the roof by a walkway. I need to put up fences around the perimeter of the roof.

And here's the large building that I pointed out in the first screenshot: The warden's house! It's pretty nice, with a large entrance area, patio around back on both the first and second floor (visible from that first screenshot, I believe), large dining room (bereft of furnishings at the moment, of course), bedroom, and office.

Finally, a sunset image of some of the island.

So yeah, that's that for Minecraft, at the moment. If I make significant progress, I'll do another update on the island. We also built a cliffside hotel building, but it's not nearly as interesting as the prison island. Which I need to name.