[CHALLENGE] (v4.3-ish 6/7/18) Refugee to Regent Kingdom Building Challenge

[HoodedCrow]

I had to take some break from gaming and when tried to continue the challenge, I got quickly too annoyed at having to spend an hour to clear trees before being able to build anything, so I finally rerolled the map enough times to find a lovely flat-ish clear area big enough for a village. I waited to get some builds going before posting progress and I haven't written more diary entries besides few first ones.

Pictures:
https://imgur.com/a/AoKsa

Story:

Spoiler: Diary of a space noob

GalaxyDate 195189_75 aka Day 0

After I told the protectorate commander to "stuff it" and rented the cheapest shuttle to get out of Aten IV I thought the day could only get better. Of course I did not count on the cheap navigation system to completely go to shits and decide to plummet into random wormhole to god knows where. I was woken up by impact warning as we were heading into this planet's atmosphere. I was knocked out again by the crash, and woke up in darkness with the ship being surrounded by weird growling green humanoids. As they did not look like much of a welcoming committee, I decided to camp in the remnants of the shuttle and have a better look in the morning. Pretty much all of the electronics were fried, but air seemed to be breathable and temperatures tolerable.

Day 1
When I woke then sun was already up high and yesterday's welcome party was nowhere to be seen. I looked through what was left of my shuttle and found an orange box labeled 'survival kit' and grabbed that with me. To make a perfect day into even better as I stepped out of the shuttle, it's doors closed behind me and I found no way to open again, at least not with my current tools. I really wished I had paid more attention on the basic cadet survival lessons, but I remembered that priority should be water, shelter and food in that order. My tricorder still functioned on very basic capacity, so at least I was able to scan if any food or water was fit for consumption. I headed out towards the treeline, where the trees had largest leaves and biggest trunks. I reckoned those kinds of trees require lots of water to grow, and maybe in the forest I could find some berries or roots depending what growing season it was at the moment.

Day 2
I slept last night inside a hollow log, I was bit worried about all kinds of bugs, but not nearly as much as about the weird natives that only seem to come out at night. They might be nice and friendly as far as I know, but I'd rather wait to be fully armed before checking. There was a huge ass tree growing by the forest edge, and surprisingly I was able to cut a larger opening inside it using my Mark-I survival axe (standard protectorate issue). I had opened my survival kit hoping to find something useful, but as one might expect in a cheap end of life shuttle, it had just lowest quality tools they could find, just enough to dig some clay and dirt and cut soft wood. At least it had a small military stove I could use to cook food and slowly barbecue wood chips into more coal like state for better storage and hotter flame in case I need to cook something bigger. Biggest animal I've seen so far is some kind of pig like creature which using my immense imagination I'm going to name "pig" and I also saw some "sheep" who just kept munching on the grass while I relieved them out of their extra wool. At least I'm going to sleep more comfortably tonight.

 

[Monarch_of_Gold]

Nice! Once again, you can press F1 to turn off the HUD (heads-up display - toolbar, crosshair, minimap...) for cleaner screenshots.

Also: You've probably listed it elsewhere, but what are the mods you're using? Ignore my sleep-deprived brain.

[EDIT] I will be looking through your mod list later to see what has ported to 1.12 so I can add it to the list. Seems like you have a nicely balanced pack so far! In other news, all mods on the suggested mods list have now been linked, so now all you have to do is click a name to be taken to the mod's page. More mods will be added as I remember what I enjoy playing with and go through other player's lists. I'll look over the ones I'm unfamiliar with, and if I like the concept, I'll suggest it.

Another mod you guys might find useful is Modlister. It's a mod that makes it easier to share your mod list and reports any changes to it automatically. Knowing my habits, I figured it'd be easier than constantly reporting any changes I've made to my pack.

 

[5argan]

That is super cool and thank you for posting! A tip, though: F1 turns off the HUD to make cleaner screenshots. Also: have you been watching Grian's videos? I see a lot of his tips here.

Thank you so much!

Sent from my KFDOWI using Tapatalk

Thank you! I totally forgot about f1.
Yes I've watched Grian's videos, but also a lot of other builders.
I think I got two things explicitly from him: The usage of dark oak for roofs and extending pillars 1 block out from the walls.
I keep running into a problem with that last one though: if I try to make small-ish houses like in these challenges, even a 3x3 interior has a 7x7 footprint. This means with a roof, even if it's just a normal 45° angle, they tend to become quite bulky. The only workaround I've found so far is to make them round and use the half-slab roof you can see in one of the first few images.
It's always giving me headaches when trying to build something cozy, but I also can't go back to walls with the pillars in them. They just look so flat.
If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know

[EDIT] I will be looking through your mod list later to see what has ported to 1.12 so I can add it to the list. Seems like you have a nicely balanced pack so far! In other news, all mods on the suggested mods list have now been linked, so now all you have to do is click a name to be taken to the mod's page. More mods will be added as I remember what I enjoy playing with and go through other player's lists. I'll look over the ones I'm unfamiliar with, and if I like the concept, I'll suggest it.

Another mod you guys might find useful is Modlister. It's a mod that makes it easier to share your mod list and reports any changes to it automatically. Knowing my habits, I figured it'd be easier than constantly reporting any changes I've made to my pack.

Something I'd like to recommend is Magneticraft. It's similar to immersive engineering in that it aims for a certain aesthetic style using multiblocks, which makes it lend itself very nicely for these kinds of challenges. I'm not sure it's 100% finished yet though.
Other than that, I really like agricraft and (if you use forestry) binnie's mods (which lets you brew alcohols and adds more trees/bees as well as some other stuff related to forestry).
NotEnoughIDs is also helpful if you like to run a lot of mods.

 

[Monarch_of_Gold]

Agricraft and Binnie's have been favorites of mine (and are now on the forum page). I completely forgot about magneticraft.

And right now my problem isn't IDs but requesting a lot of power from my computer. RealWorld, when it's added to the list, will have the footnote of being suggested for "vanilla+" type packs only unless you have a beast for a computer. It adds a lot of wonderful things for decoration (and I've dubbed it my Kryptonite since I always fall for mods like these) and adds what was once PlantMegaPack and DecorationMegaPack. It's huge (well over 1000 blocks/items), but will be so nice for town decorations. I may add it to the challenge for a decorating side-quest suggested by an early user.

Also: My "current" (read: ever-changing) modlist. RKazumi is a name of a really old character of mine that I never bothered changing. I'm too used to using it in-game to change now.

And you asked for building tips. Personally, I don't mind having flat pillars. My builds always look fairly nice yet simple, and flat pillars add to that. Here's a link to my Imgur gallery, with lots and lots of pictures of buildings I've made that haven't started suffering from flat pillars yet.

 

[5argan]

And you asked for building tips. Personally, I don't mind having flat pillars. My builds always look fairly nice yet simple, and flat pillars add to that. Here's a link to my Imgur gallery, with lots and lots of pictures of buildings I've made that haven't started suffering from flat pillars yet.

You're... not exactly wrong. I am pretty sure they would look better with extended pillars though.
Looking at your farm house, you're definitely better at interior stuff than I am (mostly sectioning larger rooms to look nice). I can't really work with interiors as well as I'd like.
I'll be taking a look at the rest of your buildings, but in the meantime, here is the next entry to my log book.

I'll be building a small wooden bridge next, do you have any ideas how I could design that?

Edit: Also I just saw the race-guessing post. Do you have more screenshots of your current work? I feel like I'd be able to draw some inspiration from those to keep me more motivated.

 

[Monarch_of_Gold]

Oh. Right. I do, but it's for another race and is not fully fleshed out, yet.
That one was for Orcs. The next one I started working on was for Egyptians. All of this in creative, btw.

So then the hardest part was figuring out how to beautify the forge and church. I did this:

All buildings take up the same amount of space they took up when they were built (except for the ones with two floors), but now it's better optimized so there's room for them to live.

And I haven't made many bridges. Grian, however, has a video on bridges. I would honestly recommend watching his whole Build School series.


[EDIT] Figured you'd like to see the town before I transformed it (but after terraforming):

Before I touched it:

Another shot. I had only changed the walkways and transformed a handful of houses:

 

[5argan]

And I haven't made many bridges. Grian, however, has a video on bridges. I would honestly recommend watching his whole Build School series.

I've seen most of his build school as well as this video. However, his bridge designs are too grand for the use case I have in mind, even the smaller ones. I'll come up with something though.

I'm still a bit stuck on the flat pillar thing. I've been experimenting a bit (part of which you will see in the next log update), but especially walls that are not intended to have a window or door are very difficult to make look decent.
I might try breaking them up by randomizing materials, but that's not something I want to do for the small village houses if I'm honest.
I'll experiment more but it's not quite working the way I'd like so far.

 

[Monarch_of_Gold]

The only advice I can give is to make sure it has some support and looks like it can hold itself.

Try putting bushes or vines over walls without windows if it bothers you that much. Again, I haven't had many problems with this.

Here are some more images of super tiny houses I've made without standalone pillars:

A small building that I made stackable so I can make apartments if I want:

An operational toaster house I made as a cheeky gift for my fiance (who is currently collecting vintage toasters) and the back of an acacia house I tried to make. I hate acacia 'cause I can't make it look good.

A shot of the bride while this was in-progress:

The water features I added to make the area look more hospitable:

Maybe these will be helpful to you.

 

[Monarch_of_Gold]

Alright, so I'm up right now because of a migraine (even though it's the middle of the day), so since my head is weird and actually prefers bright light and some form of distraction during migraines, I decided I'd try to figure out some designs for bridges and attempt to ease your concerns on pillar-less small buildings. There's a lot of pics on this one, so everything is inside the spoiler!

Spoiler

So I started by just trying to find a nice area for a bridge. Since this is a dessert, most of the land is flat-ish and at water level, so I couldn't find many of the trenches you usually see where you might want a bridge that weren't so far from town that it didn't make sense. It will be expanded, but having a bridge "to town" on the other side of the desert seemed silly. So, I found the best place I could to try to model a standard bridge I might do:

So after selecting a site, I decided to look around and see what I was building into (it's always nice to know).


Once i've got it set up, I pick up a tip from Grian and plan where I want the bridge and how I want it to look. In this instance, I want it to be straight-on, since I've already done an angled bridge in the Orcish settlement I'll have to re-build. The angle is pretty steep and I don't want it to look like it's a straight bridge by any means, so I decide to make it "sag".

And then I start placing blocks and settle on a checkerboard pattern, since I feel in this instance like just using one wood would make it look too flat. I also decide to use slabs for block transitions but do not re-design the bridge around it. One strip of slabs suits me perfectly fine, but may not be to your tastes.

I begin replacing the outline with preferred blocks:

And decide that I like the half-block edge beside the transitions, and carry it across the whole bridge:

In an effort to have smoother transitions, I put half-slab transitions on the bottom, too:

And then I visually decide on the best location for the supports:

I add a few more torches, and then It's done:

While I had it set to night, I decided to grab some more recent pics of the village:

And decided to go about fiddling with a flat bridge and how you might make it not look flat:

I plan this one out for curves to make up for the lack of vertical interest.

I replace the blocks and decide I may want to try to use my old nemesis, acacia:

And decide on something I don't entirely hate:

Add torches, and there you go!

Seeing the village in the distance made me remember your issue with blank walls on small houses, so I decided to go grab some better pics of mine:

I also decided I may as well get a better pic of one of the larger houses:

Do ya see 'im?

Apparently, in the process of transforming and adding to the town, I added enough houses for an Iron Golem to spawn

So that's that. I've also started playing through my challenge with a fairly small but nice pack (small because of RealWorld). I'll post some of those pics another day.

Hope this helps!


[EDIT] I was looking around for any information on just randomly spawning villagers so we can all have nicely populated towns. That apparently isn't possible, but there is information out there on getting villagers to your town (aside from just maybe expanding an existing village), so I figured I'd link to the wiki article on it here, hoping that it would help you all out.

 

[Monarch_of_Gold]

Alright. One more post and I'll quit. If the FTB forums didn't have an image cap per post, I'd just have this all on one huge post, but they do, so I can't. Twenty per post. Can you believe that? 20! I need at least 50 to fully describe what I've built! /s //but not really i'm terrible about taking hundreds of screenshots....

I started thinking more about it and realized that I didn't really cover what to do if you wanted a small arch to cover a small distance, so I flew around in my transformations world...

Spoiler

...and settled on a ravine near a plains village.

I'll make this one pretty later. I'll have to expand it away from the river and jungle and may put up a wall or something.


So I planned it out:

And built it, adding some details underneath (I wanted to take so many more screenshots of this it isn't funny) :

So I hope that helps you. I'll be adding this and other building tips to the main post. Obviously, this all depends on you and your preferred building style.

 

[The Mobius Archives]

I've restarted! Okay I swear I posted some of the last few videos but maybe I've been getting conversations inside my own head... Maybe my brain is haunted like all the buildings around.

The Mobius The Third playlist

This time around I decided to do a Lost cities/Lost Souls playthough using a nearly straight out of the box FTB Revelation modpack but and adding CustomNPCs, BiomesOPlenty and "a few" mods and removing Extra Utilities because of some weird compat issues with CustomNPCs.

The full mod changes:

Spoiler

Base Pack - FTB Revelation

Added

• BiomesOPlenty
• BloodMagic
• Calculator
• Chickens
• Custom NPCs
• Cyclic
• Elemental Dimensions
• gearswap
• hatchery
• immersive craft
• lost souls
• mekanism
• mekanism generators
• mekanism Tools
• MmmMmmMmmMmm
• Morechickens
• Mystical Agriculture
• Mystical Agraditions
• NoMoreRecipeConflict
• OpenBlocks
• OpenGlider
• Psi
• RandomThings
• RecurrentComplex
• RefinedStorage
• Refined Storage Addons
• Rougelike Dungeons
• Silent's Gems
• Silent's Gems Extra Parts
• Twilight Forest
• Waddles

Removed:

• ExtraUtils2 - Removed due to compatibility problems with CustomNPCs + another mod

Episode 1 - Shelter

Spoiler

The first day was spent running from haunted buildings and hostile mobs. I finally found a nice spit of land with some water and some area without buildings before settling down:

Episode 2 - Agriculturist

Spoiler

With settling another refugee appeared and we spent some time setting up a home for him:

Episode 3 - The Town Center

Spoiler

There's two of us now and I need a better place to store everything. We're sharing nearly everything so the Town Center makes sense. Now if only I can keep it organized...

 

[5argan]

@Monarch_of_Gold Thanks for all the input! I really like the stackable building, even though it's definitely not the style I'm going for.
I'll probably make my bridge similar to the one you put over the ravine, but I'll try to add more depth.
Also, I hate acacia planks too

The ork buildings are something I find look pretty nice and make me want to try more round-ish builds.
I don't see how to work that into my style yet though, so that will need some work.

One thing I want to suggest for your egyptian build is add more contrast. At the moment it's all pretty bright.
Maybe some spruce wood somewhere or dark blue / red wool or something. Maybe even something like an oasis or otherwise a small-ish grassy area could be nice, possibly even just some cactus spread around, although that would be annoying I guess.
If you haven't, check out jamziboy's desert building series. It's rather old, but I liked it a lot back then.
Today I see a few improvements that could be made, but I still think he's doing these pretty well.
It doesn't quite match the style you're going for, but might give you some inspiration.

In case you want more stuff to do (which is unlikely but hey, why not ask), I'm currently struggling a bit with the community buildings of your stage 2.
For the jailhouse it's just that I don't know what a suitable place would be yet, but the school is throwing a stick in my wheels right now.
I usually try to refer to medieval-ish pictures or floor plans as source, but schools weren't really a much used thing back in the dark ages afaik.
I've tried looking for baroque buildings, since that is apparently what they used near the end of the middle ages / beginning of the modern era, but those are way too grand for what I have in mind.
My current solution would be to just make a random, slightly bigger house and basically stick a sign on it saying school, but I don't really like that.
I'm sure I'll come up with something eventually, but not right now.

Edit: Also regarding the image issue: That's what imgur albums are for!

 

[ZephyrWindSpirit]

@Monarch_of_Gold I never considered planning out my designs with bright wool like that. I like the bridges!
My brain questions briefly if fenceposts would be enough support for a log&cobble bridge, would stone walls be more support?
And then I tell my brain, "Its Minecraft, get over it."

I realized there is a limit on how much worldgen I should do. But serveying the masses (about six of us here) Ancient warfare, millenare, minecolonies? To accompany custom npcs.

 

[5argan]

@Monarch_of_Gold I never considered planning out my designs with bright wool like that. I like the bridges!
My brain questions briefly if fenceposts would be enough support for a log&cobble bridge, would stone walls be more support?
And then I tell my brain, "Its Minecraft, get over it."

I realized there is a limit on how much worldgen I should do. But serveying the masses (about six of us here) Ancient warfare, millenare, minecolonies? To accompany custom npcs.

Tinker's Construct goes well with these challenges and adds world gen.
I really like agricraft for stuff like this (together with pam's harvestcraft), and immersive engineering is pretty neat for immersion challenges like this one. Both add stuff to villages.

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure what you're asking.
Are you asking about what mods to use, or what world gen would fit well? Or am I completely missing the question?

 

[ZephyrWindSpirit]

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure what you're asking.
Are you asking about what mods to use, or what world gen would fit well? Or am I completely missing the question?

Natural worldgen, like new biomes, plants, streams, etca.

What mod do you think personally would compliment custom npcs of the list of 'village addition' mods I had? There's likely more but theres only so much Squidward I can handle.

 

[Monarch_of_Gold]

Yeah, there are albums, but I like mass-uploads and Imgur likes ordering by time uploaded rather than filename, so it just doesnt work.

Sent from my KFDOWI using Tapatalk

 

[5argan]

Yeah, there are albums, but I like mass-uploads and Imgur likes ordering by time uploaded rather than filename, so it just doesnt work.

Sent from my KFDOWI using Tapatalk

Yeah I do the same. You can re-arrange them though, although I'll admit the interface for that is a tad annoying.
Anyway, here's my next update. I'd love any suggestions all of you guys have, even if I might not implement them.
Also, what's a good compact, self sustained power source I can hide away in the basement of my blacksmith to power the electric furnace he will get once I'm at that point?
Obviously doesn't need to have much power, but I'd rather not manually feed it resources.

Natural worldgen, like new biomes, plants, streams, etca.

What mod do you think personally would compliment custom npcs of the list of 'village addition' mods I had? There's likely more but theres only so much Squidward I can handle.

I don't have too much suggestions on the first one, sorry. There's natura, biomes o'plenty or realistic world gen. Maybe the biome bundle. There's a mod called streams, that adds streams, but I'm not sure which version it's for. Forestry and Binnie's mods add a lot of new trees, but those aren't world gen.

For the second question, there's not much else than what we mentioned I can think of. For general mods I can recommend, DecoCraft should work well for details, although I'm not using it as much as I should.
Grimoire of Gaia adds a bunch of mobs to liven up your world too, although none of those are villagers and I'm not sure it's updated beyond 1.7.10.
I don't think you're on 1.7.10 but if you are check out mariculture, especially if you plan to build a coastal city.

 

[Monarch_of_Gold]

Streams is updated to 1.12.2. It's a neat little mod and from time to time I don't mind having it in.

I've also come to like mods like Bibliocraft, MrCrayfish's Furniture Mod, GardenStuff, and RealWorld. Keep in mind that RealWorld is basically a kitchen-sink mod adding decorations, plants, and food. Unfortunately, most of the decorations are only decorations and aren't interactive like Biblio and Crayfish. I'm using this mod in a fairly small kitchen-sink-ish pack, because having too many mods in with this one will overload your RAM and you'll be a very sad Minecrafter.

Also: There's about 10-15 more mods I want to add to the mod list. I'll add them sooner or later, but right now I want to play more than I want to fiddle with editing BB code (blech). There are also about 5 or 6 more ideas for side-quests currently that will be written over the course of the next month or so. I also want to try to get that new feature for the races completed no later than April 1st, because I have something fun planned for that day!

Also, @5argan, what about a hopper feeding a small electric generator (or whatever you have) coal? Anything else I can think of requires diamond or a lot of other resources (solar, wind) A small generator with pipes or hoppers feeding it coal and another wire taking the power back to the machine shouldn't be too hard. Or, you can just have the generator beside the furnace with a couple wires behind. Shouldn't look too bad and is cheaper than digging a hole just to conceal it. Later on you can fiddle with automatic charcoal making and feeding that into the gen instead of hand-feeding it, but I can't imagine that being doable with only iron and redstone (redstone was never explicitly ruled out, so assume it's always available).

@Monarch_of_Gold I never considered planning out my designs with bright wool like that. I like the bridges!
My brain questions briefly if fence posts would be enough support for a log and cobble bridge, would stone walls be more support?
And then I tell my brain, "Its Minecraft, get over it."

I use bright wool in creative mode because I'm half-blind and it's easier to see (not really blind but if I hadn't've had laser eye surgery when 2 days old I would be). And thanks!

I didn't want to make the supports incredibly visible because that bridge is so small it'd be swallowed by them, so I put a bit of cobblestone down below each of the four corners and filled the rest with fences. Small builds like this do not take much to be swallowed.

@Monarch_of_Gold Thanks for all the input! I really like the stackable building, even though it's definitely not the style I'm going for.
I'll probably make my bridge similar to the one you put over the ravine, but I'll try to add more depth.
Also, I hate acacia planks too

My builds are always toward the smaller size with the smallest footprint imaginable because I'm always trying to build these things in survival, where resources are a pain to get.
ugh acacia is the worst //rant

The ork buildings are something I find look pretty nice and make me want to try more round-ish builds.
I don't see how to work that into my style yet though, so that will need some work.

I decided on round for the orcs since they like war huts, right? So why not make everything into a hut?
Round buildings with outside framework would be a challenge on something tiny like that.

One thing I want to suggest for your egyptian build is add more contrast. At the moment it's all pretty bright.
Maybe some spruce wood somewhere or dark blue / red wool or something. Maybe even something like an oasis or otherwise a small-ish grassy area could be nice, possibly even just some cactus spread around, although that would be annoying I guess.
If you haven't, check out jamziboy's desert building series. It's rather old, but I liked it a lot back then.
Today I see a few improvements that could be made, but I still think he's doing these pretty well.
It doesn't quite match the style you're going for, but might give you some inspiration.

You know what? Flat spruce or dark oak roofs on top of the existing roofs maybe extended a block around would look fantastic. I'm gonna go do that now.

In case you want more stuff to do (which is unlikely but hey, why not ask), I'm currently struggling a bit with the community buildings of your stage 2.
For the jailhouse it's just that I don't know what a suitable place would be yet, but the school is throwing a stick in my wheels right now.
I usually try to refer to medieval-ish pictures or floor plans as source, but schools weren't really a much used thing back in the dark ages afaik.
I've tried looking for baroque buildings, since that is apparently what they used near the end of the middle ages / beginning of the modern era, but those are way too grand for what I have in mind.
My current solution would be to just make a random, slightly bigger house and basically stick a sign on it saying school, but I don't really like that.
I'm sure I'll come up with something eventually, but not right now.

It really depends on what era you want your builds to represent. I feel like a jailhouse will be easy enough to figure out on your own. As for a school, I would think maybe a tiny one-room school like the ones they had a hundred years or so ago here in the states, or maybe a small school building with just a few classrooms, maybe a principal's office, a lunch room or patio for lunch, and a playground/sports field. You could maybe even make a small bell or clock tower on top to help signify that it's a school. You can also find plenty of old-fashioned clipart and cartoon drawings of schools you could use as inspiration. PLEASE don't try to make these realistic! That would take years.

 

[5argan]

Also, @5argan, what about a hopper feeding a small electric generator (or whatever you have) coal? Anything else I can think of requires diamond or a lot of other resources (solar, wind) A small generator with pipes or hoppers feeding it coal and another wire taking the power back to the machine shouldn't be too hard. Or, you can just have the generator beside the furnace with a couple wires behind. Shouldn't look too bad and is cheaper than digging a hole just to conceal it. Later on you can fiddle with automatic charcoal making and feeding that into the gen instead of hand-feeding it, but I can't imagine that being doable with only iron and redstone (redstone was never explicitly ruled out, so assume it's always available).

Round buildings with outside framework would be a challenge on something tiny like that.

You know what? Flat spruce or dark oak roofs on top of the existing roofs maybe extended a block around would look fantastic. I'm gonna go do that now.



It really depends on what era you want your builds to represent. I feel like a jailhouse will be easy enough to figure out on your own. As for a school, I would think maybe a tiny one-room school like the ones they had a hundred years or so ago here in the states, or maybe a small school building with just a few classrooms, maybe a principal's office, a lunch room or patio for lunch, and a playground/sports field. You could maybe even make a small bell or clock tower on top to help signify that it's a school. You can also find plenty of old-fashioned clipart and cartoon drawings of schools you could use as inspiration. PLEASE don't try to make these realistic! That would take years.

I liked the suggestion with the bell tower for my school house, and the idea with the one-room thing also helped.
I have no idea how to make a decent looking bell, so the tower is empty, but you won't see that from the outside anyway.
In other words, my next log entry is done.

Round buildings don't really need outside framework I think, because the roundness adds depth by itself and also makes it so there are no long flat walls.
That's why my smallest buildings have a footprint of multiple circles.

I might have to go with something like the hopper + electrical generator I suppose, although thermal generators might work too. I'm unsure how expensive those are, though.
I want it concealed because ideally, it shouldn't look very technical, and the electrical parts should mostly be functional. I don't plan to have an actual base for myself. Instead I want my smeltery in a blacksmith's, my sawmill block in the sawmill building, a furnace to smelt sand into glass in a glass blower's hut etc. This might not work or be too annoying to use, but I'll try anyway.
Speaking of which, I don't need an electrical furnace for my blacksmith. I can just use a tinker's smeltery.

Anyway, keep the suggestions coming! There's a lot of stuff I'd like to do, but any ideas I haven't thought of will be helpful!
Also I'm grateful for everything that gives me an excuse to explore

 

[ZephyrWindSpirit]

@5argan Except for the fact that I am working to figure out how to integrate Peace of Mind's peaceful mob drop gains into my run so I am not constantly fighting something off because I'm not the best at combat, Grimoire of Gaia sounds interesting.

I guess today's log entry cam be collecting two full herds of llamas. I have a caravan of 10 cream/white.