“I’m not sure at what point a lair turns into a prison”
Figuring out an underwater home in Mine craft
What started as a short trip into Minecraft to check out the Update Aquatic has turned into an underwater episode of Grand Designs where I (a great sea witch) am building a lair in a crevasse I found, and an imaginary Kevin McCloud is making concerned noises.
I’m at the point where I have a nook I’m happy with, and which provides a mission statement for the rest of the area, but I haven’t expanded yet. The aesthetic centers on bluish glowing cubes, dead coral, and sea pickles.
Under the sea
Sea pickles look like small green candles, and you can arrange them in little groups of one to four on top of a block. I’m using them as a mood lighting solution, picking out parts of the nook which would otherwise be in shadow, but which a bluish beacon would ruin by being too harsh.
The other thing my lair has, and which I’m enjoying enormously, is entry and exit bubble columns. If you place magma blocks in water they generate a whirlpool above, which is essentially a bubble column that draws stuff down. If you place soul sand, it does the reverse, and creates a column which pushes you towards the surface.
I’ve put a platform of magma and one of soul sand at the entrance to my lair to act as chutes. I might tinker with those to see if there’s a way to refine them, or whether I can somehow use redstone to turn one on and off. Y’see, when building a true lair, you don’t want people escaping, so I’m envisioning a system by which the downward column is always on
(and thus potentially trapping things), and the upwards chute is one you have to activate. I’m not sure at what point a lair turns into a prison. Perhaps it depends on who you ask and who has the key to the exit.
Anyway, the entry column deposits you at the bottom of the sea. From there you go down pris-marine steps which loosely follow the shape of the terrain, so it’s a bit of a winding staircase. On the walls, I’ve used the way the water behaves to create some waterfalls, and I’ve filled in some of the gaps in the walls with either dead coral blocks or mossy cobbles. The dead coral blocks add an organic texture, which is nicely creepy, while the mossy cobbles have that sense of being slightly wild or overgrown.
Now is the part where Kevin will try to ask, “Where do the bats fit in to all this?” And the answer is, “I don’t know, Kevin. They were here when I got here, and I think it’s because technically the game generated a cave, so I don’t know how to not kill them if I start poking around, so I guess we have to live with the bats, OKAY?”
Or maybe he will comment on the lack of a bed, and frankly, Kevin, I haven’t decided whether a sea witch needs a bed. The beds seem too jolly, and they don’t involve dead coral, ALRIGHT? And don’t even talk to me about the lack of a ceiling and how escapable this whole thing currently is. Ugh. I’m never speaking to Grand Designs ever again.