the life’s been a bit cruel to me, boys, but Minecraft is there for me, swear to god
see, I’ve had spinning episodes recently… and this last one is going for over three weeks. the intensity varies. it’s exacerbated by head movement, bright light, certain motions, etc etc etc. so i’ve been stuck on the couch with nothing to do and feeling… unproductive.
enter minecraft. the realization i can play minecraft and still have my symptoms slow the fuck down the same as if i were to sit still on the couch for hours… because i don’t move while playing minecraft… is BOOM, mind-blowing. i feel more productive suddenly. making things that other people can interact with is my jam. plus, i have a realms sub so the chickens can play on a trusted server any time they want… that went unused for a while, so really, it’s up to me now, ain’t it?
i want to gush somewhere nice.
so here we go.
Casa de Isekai’d Into Minecraft
this is the spawn and beginner house for everyone i built.
i love that people have started placing down little offerings to the waystone.
the upper floor of the house is super simple, just a small demo of some things for players to see on logging in. the story i had in mind is that there is some guy here that isekai’d into minecraft and just decided to develop a normal life regardless. probably even PLAYS minecraft on that PC there. unpictured is the chest filled with wooden swords and walking sticks i provide for new spawns. (everyone spawns survival)
but the guy at the same time researches all these ways to get back.
being notably absent, i wonder if the guy made it back?
the copper smith’s house
nearby, i found a hole in the ground rich in… nothing. fuck that i says, fuck that. it’s rich in copper now. i even added copper to the mines for players to dig up if they wanted.
It’s a humble little operation here, entirely copper-based where I could manage. even the braziers are copper. the roof is copper. you can imagine what the lightning storms are like here. below is the entry into the copper mines.
i love the variety of colors the copper patina gives you.
the copper forge is blessed with ingots aplenty!
and inside, even the smith’s lifestyle choices revolve around copper.
and to help the smith sleep at night, a copper golem stands sentry in the middle of the room.
little ravine camp
a tiny ass camp long abandoned by adventurers… or so one things, until they peer into the ravine and find the bodies of these unfortunates.
redstone tower
i want to learn to build some imposing towers, so my first thought on this one was something oblivion/LotR… but square since Minecraft.
I don’t know if it really communicates the sort of feeling I want it to. At least not during the day.
i tried to make it somewhat imposing, but it’s more of a towering monolith. my next attempt will be more… circular. maybe something that feels more alien to minecraft will be better.
an interior shot looking upwards into the unlit abyss. the idea was that it would be a tower that produces its own baddies, though i put a spawner up top equipped with vindicators just to seal the deal. if it’s playtested i’ll definitely find out what to fix and what sorts of things people want and don’t want, but for now… stair monolith.
sunflower shrine
something karen and i built together! we found a sunflower that spawned on top of moving water and wanted to preserve it.
it has a bit of a found shrine feeling to it that I like. cared for but just out of the way.
sunflower village
admittedly i outfitted this with the idea that players would take it over in time, but i don’t think i provided enough to make it worth coming back to for people except for the creative/survival toggle for the regular players to use at their leisure. i didn’t alter it too much aside from adding a wall and fixing some things up…
it’s a two tier village. i may return and alter it significantly depending on how players end up using the village.
for a bit of flavor i upgraded the central market to be a bit more fun. my favorite piece is the sunflower stained glass.
my idea is that the village loves sunflowers. that’s it. it’s the village flower.
guide library
one of the problems with playing a modded game on bedrock is everything comes with a guide, and people can’t be going around carrying the damn things everywhere. i built a library that holds all the guides so that players can come back and borrow them when needed. you can see it on a hilltop a short walk away from the sunflower village.
it is a serious climb, though.
i wanted something that looked grand on the outside but was humble on the inside, so we get these pillars here and the white quartz to give it an air of museum-y marbling.
the entry shows a small interior…
…where one can study and borrow books…
…or lounge and read at their leisure. all interactable books are guides here.
my favorite feature is the window.
it perfectly frames the setting sun. it’s really beautiful in game, actually. i wanted this part to be almost shrine-like, like the light of knowledge and all that. realistically it’s a bit overblown to have such an idea during a small build but it made me feel nice. you can’t actually see very much outside the window because of the angle and the height of the hill. but you can see a bit.
like floro!
floro
i wanted to make a tiny water village that subsisted on making boats and serving up fish to people. there’s an inn for visitors, and a visitor center, but it’s so small that it’s more of a pit stop.
i wanted a vibe that this was a sort of eclectic place.
the shopping is three stalls: fish, veg, and fishing supplies. i imagine people trade out of their boats and move on.
boats can also be built and acquired here!
ted’s cat is taking advantage of the services.
weirdly, my favorite part is the two boats that are docked in floro. the one in front is a single bed vessel that is made to suggest more going on, something nice and simple. of the people.
the other one comes from far away lands, much more violent than these.
an open deck with cargo slightly visible beneath the grating, and the swords front and center. it sort of suggests that it comes from somewhere like a ghost village, where creatures try to climb aboard and one is always fighting to make their trades down the river.
the backrooms
in a fit of insanity, i wanted to build something enormous. huge. as big as a chunk. and i wanted people to get lost in it.
i built backrooms. the backrooms.
and i happened to get process pics along the way.
filling in the base took two or three sessions. you legitimately could not see the other end of the base. in my head i went, “how big is a chunk? probably this big” and then just went as far as i could until i couldn’t see the marker i had on the corners
after building the walls, i set down the waystone in something LIKE the middle. i oculdn’t see where the ends were so i just made my best guess. it was a bit off. it was room #1.
the method was to start from the middle and corners and extend them out to meet. each room was initially supposed to have both an entrance and an exit, but as it dawned on me that the project would be so huge, i ended up making more dead ends to keep a maze-like feeling and introduce some more niche novelty rooms.
you can see here that i first outlined sections and then filled them. i tried to do a lot of random shapes and varying wall placements and heights as well, mixing it with large halls filled with regular columns that would occur multiple times in the maze to confuse people. the novelty rooms would act as landmarks and help to guide people around or help them see when they’ve been somewhere before as well.
one of the things i noticed when i referenced backroom game maps— several, mind you— was that there weren’t many that had variation, twists and turns, or made it anywhere easy to get lost in. there were very few rooms in those maps, which made it easy to make certain rooms landmarks and navigate in an almost linear fashion to the end. i wanted to avoid that if possible.
here’s a completed overhead of the complex. i would cap rooms like a bee finished making honey in a cell and then go to connect it again and again and again. this layer just demonstrates that sheer hugeness of the project, but also serves another purpose.
it’s useless on a map.
as you can see, the map shows that this project being over two chunks large. after over thirty hours assembling the backrooms, i decided to instead connect different areas via large, cramped tunnels that both disoriented the player and provided a means to keep from spending another thirty hours assembling this complex.
during karen’s first tour of the incomplete complex, about halfway done, it took over an hour to fly through and show her most of it. i realized that i needed a reason for a player to linger in the backrooms for any unreasonable amount of time, so i added a scavenger hunt.
i spent a huge amount of time making this place unique and entertaining, so i wanted people to look and find things that i worked on. part of what makes the backrooms games confusing in layout to most people who aren’t me, who is good at video games and therefore a king, is the being chased part. after much debate, i decided not to include monsters.
monsters would affect the entirety of the realm and would potentially drive away players who were more sensitive to The Horrors from playing entirely. i didn’t want people who were horror averse to have to deal with horrors for the sake of the backrooms, since for some people minecraft is supposed to be a more peaceful experience with the occasional and predictable baddie instead.
so the backrooms not having any monsters to chase and confuse a player, it’s up to the maze and a sense of novelty dotted around the map that were unique enough to get people interested.
i didn’t expect it to work as well as it did!
so while my first player found the end cell in 17 minutes…
he spent nearly two hours wandering the maze trying to find everything in the scavenger hunt.
making friends along the way, of course.
it did take a huge toll on me to try to make as many rooms as possible, though. the backrooms, just by the nature of it, is simultaneously monotonous and novel.
it relies on the nonsensical to carry it, and there’s a point where it goes beyond “liminal” and into “surreal”, making up its own rules that i ended up struggling to follow as time went on.
(this is, by the way, the most annoying room in the entire maze)
the backrooms started as a space for the liminal, but evolved into a surrealistic depiction of a certain kind of human interior that wears down on the soul. it’s not quite office, but it’s not quite home. it’s like the bones of waiting rooms are breathing around you.
it’s like you’re trapped in a bunch of model homes that all have the same old, musty scent. you know the smell.
so i couldn’t resist adding some spaces that were a bit more fresh-air compared to the rest, even with the bleak lighting and frankly… grating. color palette.
this concludes the backrooms tour.
my house
after the backrooms, i was ready to do a small build just for me.
a little house not too far from spawn, just somewhere nice for me to retreat to and ease my eyes with uncomplicated shapes and some self-indulgent whimsy.
a place for me must obviously circle around two things: books and cats. (cue the beatboxing)
here is tony napping in his bed.
alongside my lovely open galley kitchen.
the upstairs is focused on a relaxing, lived in vibe with creativity and color pops.
just something nice and simple.
i also have a trophy room underneath where i built tiny monuments to the big builds i did:
one has the map of the backrooms plastered to the wall in a tiny backrooms cell, while the other is a miniature version of the redstone crystal that floats in the redstone tower (which i just realized i never took pics of, oh well).
that’s all folks thanks for looking at my long minecraft post ♥
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