A Monumental Undertaking

I've been doing more work on NameWorld recently; mostly it's just been pushing the tank carts up the mountain during the daytime, filling them with oil and bringing them back to the liquid storage warehouse to empty again. And during the night I was in my branch mine carving out every last block of marble I could find for the church's basement (which I keep flipflopping between calling an "undercroft" and a "crypt" and "catacombs"). Other than that, not a whole lot of work is being done there.

Updated Cartograph_G Isometric

Here's an updated isometric rendering of my map. You can see the progress I've made toward the church so far as well as the general village itself. Keep in mind that the version of Cartograph_G that I use was made before the vanilla update that gave us things like dark wood trees for the tundra or stone bricks. And, naturally, anything that the mods I'm using ads has similarly been omitted, like the rubber trees in the tree farm.

Diagonally up-right from the village you can follow the path of torches up to where the oil pump currently is, on top of the mountain overlooking that lake. To the bottom-left is a small group or torches marking off a surface dungeon I had found, and toward the bottom-right is a small pool of surface lava that I plan to siphon out in the future. I'm not sure what I'll use it for, but it'll still be nice to have.

You can basically follow the direction I took when looking for rubber trees in a straight line diagonally down-right from the village. Also, in the swamp area, there's a sort of water sinkhole that I seem to remember drops right into an underground ravine. I didn't explore it much when I first found it as my inventory was full of rubber tree logs, saplings and resin. The way that river twists and turns makes me want to build some kind of boat dock to the up-right from the village. And, dotted around the edges of the explored map are the huge, 3x3 trees from the RedPower2 mod that I've taken to calling "redwood trees," mostly due to their size and the color. I've heard you can use them to make rubber in an extractor or a furnace, but you only get one rubber per log rather than a few.

Wickydoo's SMP Server - Marn's Lamp Design

Finally there's a screenshot of a very nice-looking lamp that my friend Marn built on the SMP server I occasionally play on. It's simple and works well, using the block-sections and a single glowstone block. Thinking of these made me remember my plans to later "upgrade" the lighting in the village streets to something other than torches strewn about. And that brought up a bit of a problem.

When I first entered the village and decided to start moving things around I went with the simple approach. All the roads would be three blocks wide, and there should be at the very least one block between the edge of the road and the walls of a building to make it look more "neat." What I didn't think of at the time was that this didn't leave much room to later place things like lamps along the sides of the roads.

And so, while looking at the village in the isometric image from the start of this update, I came to a realization. If I'm going to build lamp-posts in my village, I'm going to have to move the buildings. Again. Potentially every single one of them. I've been putting some thought into that already. The church shouldn't need to be moved.. and my house would only have to be moved one block to the side if I move the nearby street away a block.

I had been worried that I had run out of projects to write about in my blog, and then I find out I'd accidentally given myself an entirely new one. It won't be nearly as enjoyable as the first time, but this time I think I'll try to use some graph paper to record the designs of each building as I go. That way I won't have to work slice by slice but instead will be able to entirely demolish one building and then use its resources to place it again. Hopefully that will make things go faster.