Seegras Logbook

I somehow lost interest in this (more on that later), so it’s basically a construction site, but I thought I write up how I constructed it.

I was looking around for some more baroque things I could build, maybe a small fortified city or something like that. Initially I came upon the Peter & Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, but I could not find any useful plan or schematic.

And then I found this: Castle Of Good Hope, Overview. It has a scale, measures around 240×240 meters, and the layout looks gorgeous. The picture has around 2 pixel per meter, so that can be scaled easily. This star-shaped fortress was built between 1666 and 1682 by the Dutch East India Company (VOC).

I loaded the layout into gimp, fiddled around with the colours so that the black pixels were blacker and thicker, and the colours deeper. Then I made a custom palette with five coulors: black, white, orange, blue, green, and converted the image from RGB to indexed with that palette, replaced white with alpha, and rotated it 60 degrees counterclockwise (because I wanted the walls of the building in the middle to be straight). Finally I scaled it to 50%. Which gave me this:

This image I then converted to an mcedit-schematic. There’s some free online-tools which can do this, some standalone programs and even some mcedit filters. Which gave me this: Floorplan Schematic which of course is not very precise. This I placed on the ground with mcedit, and then I started building up, while interpolating and correcting.

This is how it looks right now, from a bit up the ground

And from above:

Including the woollen plan beneath it, and with various sandstone blocks to mark where buildings should go.

Now, if you take a close look (or look at a View of Castle Good Hope or a Closeup of the Gate of Castle Good Hope) you realize what this consists of: Basically (granite) cobblestone topped off by red brick! Ugh!. That was the moment I slowly started to decide that I would not finish this.

Add to this that I could not find an elevation-plan of it (only of the earlier square-shaped fortress) and various details remained opaque (although google map view of Castle Good Hope helped a bit; you can see where stairs are), I decided to leave it after I’ve brought into some kind of shape.

So if anyone wants to continue this (perhaps someone frome cape town?) I publish it here. License is public domain, you can do whatever you wish with it. It’s in 1:1 scale, as accurate as possible. The walls are maybe 70% done, although I don’t know if I’ve got the height right, and the topping-off is a bit higher, since I wanted to have half-slabs on top to stop spawning. Also, there’s only grass where It didn’t interfere with the rest of the walls. The Oranje and Leerdam bastions have their gun emplacements, Buuren only two of the five it should have; the rest none yet. And I’m not quite happy with how they look. The entrance lacks everything. The buildings are somewhat staked out, some with approximate height.

The world save is just what you can see in the pictures, the schematic however is the walls only, so you can put it into your world and fill in the rest with whatever you want.

Here they are

• CastleGoodHope.zip, Minecraft world save (flat)
• CastleGoodHope.schematic, mcedit schematic, walls only

Welcome, this is my “1890 Fruit Company”, an automatic farm for Minecraft, which isn’t even about fruit. It looks rather 1890ies, though, and I couldn’t resist the name.

It produces patatoes, carrots, wheat and seeds. You need to sow and plant yourself, fertilizing and harvest are pretty much automated, and the products are automatically sorted.

The schematic

• 1890FruitCo.schematic

The license of these files and my screenshots is the OPL 1.0 (which is about the same as CC-by-sa).

I noticed some time ago that multiple spawners could be active at the same time, as long as the player was within 16 blocks of each of them. However, if too many mobs of the same kind the spawner spawns were within 9x16x16 around the spawner, it would stop spawning after 6 mobs or so.

So in principle, it must be possible to have a lot, maybe 8, spawners, completely with their delivery- and killing-system within a sphere of 16 blocks around the player, all churning out mobs and items. So that’s where I started:

In green you can see the 16 block sphere around where the player would be standing, in yellow are the 9x16x16 areas where no mobs of the same type should be (and consequently, the area any spawned mobs need to leave as soon as possible). The cyan circle is the ground layout, and of no consequence. The spawners along with their spawn-boxes are in brown and in stone. Those structures made of end-stone are elevators and droppers, to the left is one for skeletons, to the right one for cave spiders.

This made for a rather cramped internal layout, with 7 spawners and all the mobs which needed to be lead out, upwards, thrown down, and led to the middle again. Plus the redstone, mostly for lighting. it was a mess, the spider-grinder didn’t really work, for blazes and endermen I hadn’t implemented any automatic system, and I didn’t know where to put them because of lack of space.

Then I watched Etho Plays Minecraft – Episode 234: Egg Delivery where he demonstrated with Minecraft 1.4 items will go up a solid block, if there’s no other space around where they could go. So I redesigned the whole interior. I decided that only blazes would be left to kill for XP, and the other mobs would just get killed as soon as possible, and their items sent up to the central room.

This I did. And I moved the spiders to one side, making space for another spawner, slimes, making it the whole 8 spawners I initially envisioned. Of course, if I hadn’t cared for isolating zombies, creepers and skeletons from each other, it would have been possible to put in more spawners. Probably all of them. So this isn’t as efficient as it could be.

I initially had some problems with the redstone-circuits, but I finally realised that something simpler would do the job just as well. Now it’s only tow clocks, one for the item elevator and one for the grinder, a T-flipflop, also for the grinder, and a pulser, for sweeping out items.

The two mobs posing the biggest problems were blazes and slime. blazes, because they need a light level of 11 or higher in order not to spawn (which I solved with lots of redstone lamps and a smaller spawn-area) and the slimes, which would spawn in any light. I now put half their spawn area under water if spawning is turned off, but small slimes still spawn. For the cave spiders, I just turned the above item elevator into a killing machine, killing spiders and sending up items at the same time.

Right now, I’m still not entirely happy with the blaze-situation, I would like to have them delivered to the central room, so I can kill blazes while I wait for items, but I’ve not yet found a good solution.

Finally, I couldn’t resist to give the thing a facade, and I decided upon a late 19th century industrial look. Half of it is buried in the ground, so this makes the main control room in the middle of the structure easily acessible from ground level:

I call it “The Manufacture”, although it’s of course none. But this fits with the 19th century theme, where factories sometimes still were called manufactures, although the production wasn’t really “handmade” any more. And it works day and night ;):

Level and schematic:

• TheManufacture.schematic
• The Manufacture, Level

Update:

Minecraft 1.5 is out, and it makes item-handling so much easier. So this is the totally revamped mob factory, now called “Mob Products”, featuring lettering on the roof (idea and font by Etho), and using hopper conveyors, dropper elevators and an item sorter.

Also, I went over it with 1.6.2 and the HostileSpawnOverlay mod, and fixed some lighting.

Update 2:

I fixed the typo on the roof ;).

No new level but simply the schematic:

• MobProducts.schematic

The license of these files and my screenshots is the OPL 1.0 or CC-by-sa 3.0.

If you go to Planet Minecraft or mcschematics and look for schematics of levels of towns, you’ll notice something: Just about none of them are. They’re villages with walls and maybe a castle. Rarely, there are some that somehow make sense, like Skycrown (Nothing historically correct in this one, but plausible).

There are, however, cities that look like cites. This Imperial City is simply unbelievable.

But I didn’t want a city, but simply a fortified town for the NPCs. And I wanted a town which looked like it, and not like a village: Neither totally flat, nor with too straight roads, nor one with dispersed single-story buildings — the latter being the defining characteristic of a village. Towns need to be cramped, buildings built in rows and blocks right next to each other, with a small footprint but multiple stories high to maximize real estate.

I decided to go for a rather medieval look in general, with upper stories protruding in front of the building, sometimes with arcades in front of the houses. Also, with firewalls between the houses which are slightly higher than the roofs. Most houses feature a stall/shop behind double doors, and another entrance for entering the workshop and the living quarters.

However, the medieval looks is not drawn trough. Think of a medieval town that was modified in the later centuries, and arrived in the 18th century. Most buildings are still of older types, and only the most modern buildings really have a baroque look. In that case, it’s the city walls, which are already in the model of a star-shaped fortress of the late 17th century, including the gate-tower, the town hall with it’s tower, and the church. The church is actually the uppermost part of a cathedral by someone else, inspired by the Frauenkirche in Dresden. I won’t include it in the schematic (so I can put the town under a free license), but you’ll notice the big round place at the top of the town — just copy paste in either the cuppola of above cathedral, or something else there. And the lighthouse is actually too modern, these turned up in this form later in the 19th century.

The schematic is a cut-out from my usual map, since the town didn’t lend itself nicely to being placed on flat ground. It’s supposed to be on a hill towards the sea. If you want to set it into its original setting, the world seed is “3327780” (structures, cheats, no bonus chest, type default). You’ll find the place at +850/+600, southeast of the spawn point. There’s a village there (which in fact, was the base of my town and supplied its population).

Here’s the level and schematic:

• BaroqueTown.schematic
• Baroque Town, Level

The license of these files and my screenshots is the OPL 1.0 (which is about the same as CC-by-sa).

Vauban was the foremost military engineer of the late 17th and beginning 18th century, and he built dozens of fortresses for Louis XIV. Typical for his art is the star-shaped fortress, which allows fire from one bastion to cover all space in front of a wall or another bastion.

This is my take on such a fortress. It’s loosely based on the fort of Bayonne (high-resolution pictures can be found at Wikimedia Commons: Citadelle de Bayonne), since that one is rather square than pentagonal and so lent itself to easier implementation in Minecraft. Well, easier, not exactly easy.

It measures 260 by 244 blocks. Now it also becomes clear why I needed compact designs of Minecraft Cannons. These go onto the ramparts in numbers. There should be 47 short guns (my “carronade”) and 40 long guns (my cannon mk1 and mk2) on there…

Within the citadel of Bayonne are some not-very inspiring barracks-type buildings, which I initially planned to build as well, but then I found an Isometric view of the Citadel of Bayonne which made clear that I was off anyway, and my fortress wasn’t really Bayonne. So thought what the heck, we’ll go for baroque, all the way, with garrets and an onion-domed tower. I got me some more inspiration in the form of baroque mansions and town halls, and put a mélange of them on there.

And that’s how the whole thing looks, at dusk:

Well, that’s about it, here’s the level and schematic:

• VaubansFortress.schematic
• Vaubans Fortress, Level

The license of these files and my screenshots is the OPL 1.0 (which is about the same as CC-by-sa); the original plan of Bayonne is of course public domain.

The fortress lives best about 6 blocks up from the level ground on some slight hill, that’s why the level has it raised by this (it’s just the hill missing under it). Some small details are unfinished, namely the portal on the other side, and some kind of outer gateway fortification (you’ll notice, the modern one seen in the isometric drawing is quite different than the one on the original plan). It is about half equipped with furniture, as well as half filled with stuff, Most noteably, it’s got several huge powder magazines, The screenshots were taken on my survival map, the dowloadable level is flat.

Update: I updated the level and schematic, the fortress other entrance is now useable, has portals (automatic ones), a towerlet over one of the portals, and some gardening (hedges, fountains and lanternposts) done.

In short, for those that didn’t know: It’s possible to build cannons in Minecraft, using TNT as charge, as well as payload. The trick is to detonate the charge TNT earlier, and place the payload in a position where it will be driven away by the explosion. And of course, unless you want your cannon to explode, you’ll need to place the charge into something inert, water will work nicely. Just search for “minecraft cannon” on youtube to see examples.

So these are some cannon designs I did for minecraft. I don’t claim the original idea for them, I just implemented, tried and tested. The reason I did this, was that I needed rather small cannons which wouldn’t look too alien on emplacing them onto the ramparts of a minecraft fortress.

Of course, they all come with schematics for mcedit (another one, not the mcedit from Midnight Commander).

Basic Cannons

These all are very basic. Payload is activated by some delay achieved with repeaters. However, since they’re rather simple, and space was scarce, there isn’t actually enough delay, so these don’t work against targets below the plane of the gun. The payload will just explode in mid-air in that case.

Simple cannon, 5x3x3 blocks

Cannon5x3x3.schematic

Simple cannon, 6x3x3 blocks

Cannon6x3x3.schematic

Simple cannon, 7x3x3 blocks

Cannon7x3x3.schematic

Diagonal cannon, 8x7x3 blocks

Yep, that one shoots diagonally.
DiagonalCannon8x7x3.schematic

Basic Aimable Cannon

The idea heere is to work with two stacks of charges, and to aim by not filling one stack completely. I also tried to make some non-diagonal ones, but I haven’t found a reliable design yet.

Aimable Diagonal Cannon, 8x7x3

AimableDiagonalCannon8x7x3.schematic

Better Cannons

These here are the ones I actually use. They contain enough repeaters to shoot just about anywhere, the main constraint in range seems to be minecraft itself, or rather the new client-server model of Minecraft 1.3.

All of them use obsidian for barrels, and sand stone for the carriage (or whatever you want to call that). Actually, if it explodes on you, only the half-slab in front, plus some redstone will have to be replaced. And if you bury them 2 blocks, the flood shouldn’t damage the repeaters.

Cannon Mk1, 8x5x6 blocks

My first design for a cannon for use in fortresses. It’s supposed to be buried 2 blocks deep. It’s quite slick, but due to it using only 9 repeaters, maximum range is slightly limited to what is possible.
CannonMk1-8x5x6.schematic

Cannon Mk2, 8x5x6 blocks

This one has the circuits slightly altered, making it able to delay a tiny bit longer with its 10 repeaters. An in-between version had a totally altered layout with 12 repeaters, which turned out to beb totally useless, since 10 is the useable maximum (otherwise you get squibs).
CannonMk2-8x5x6.schematic

Carronade, 6x5x6 blocks

This one is actually a totally redesigned Mk1. It’s much shorter, but since it still uses 2 layers of TNT, it still packs a pretty punch. It’s not as slick as the Cannon, since a few sacrifices had to be made to fit all 9 repeaters.
Carronade6x5x6.schematic

Arrow Gun

Here as well, a tight footprint and a “look” of a gun (when buried two blocks deep) was aspired. Uses a pulser, you turn it on, it shoots arrows, until it runs out or you turn it off.
ArrowGun3x3x3.schematic

Irgendwie hat sich dieses spätmittelalterliche Ding in Backstein einfach aufgedrängt. Es wollte in Minecraft realisiert werden. Warum ich 18-24 Stunden dafür verwendet habe weis ich immer noch nicht. Es wollte es eben.

Dokumentation von 1881

Aber dafür bekommt nun die Welt nicht bloss ein Minecraft-Schema, sondern auch gleich die Dokumentation und Pläne von Vufflens, aus den “Mittheilungen der Antiquarischen Gesellschaft in Zürich” von 1881, komplett digitalisiert, und die Texte durchs OCR gejagt. Die sind Gemeinfrei (“Public Domain”).

• Vufflens – Seitenriss A-B
• Vufflens – Seitenriss E-F
• Vufflens Grundriss
• Vufflens Illustrationen
• Vufflens Rippenprofile
• Beschreibung Des Schlosses Vufflens [pdf, 3mb] Dr. Albert Burckhardt, 1881

Minecraft Level

Ich habe versucht mich möglichst genau an die Pläne, sowie diverse Bilder aus dem Internet, inklusive Google StreetView zu halten. Naturgemäss ist bei 1×1-Meter-Blöcken nicht alles genau einzuhalten. Die Raumaufteilung stimmt, die Proportionen ungefähr (tatsächlich ist der Donjon zu hoch; eine Notwendigkeit damit der Vorbau genügend Stockwerke bekommen konnte) gewisse moderne Dinge wie die Terrasse vor dem Palas habe ich weggelassen. Die Lizenz hier ist die OPL 1.0 (was in etwa dasselbe wie CC-by-sa ist).

• Vufflens – Minecraft Level
• Vufflens – Minecraft MCedit Schematic

Enjoy!