Cute Archetecturial Techniques

[ShneekeyTheLost]

When building your bases, some people like to go basic cubes, while others tend to get... creative. Sometimes you come up with a cute trick which is both aesthetically pleasing and mechanically superior.

This thread is for those. Show off your cute tricks for base construction, how and why they work, what mods are needed for them... this is your time to shine.

Allow me to start off with a cute technique I call the 'water tunnel'. On first face, it doesn't seem to be much different from any old glass tunnel running underwater.



But when you get down there, you'll notice a slight changeup. Instead of just a boring old glass tunnel, it's using signs to hold the water at bay, with glass panes as walls. These are actually very important for the mechanical aspect. You see, because of the way Glass Panes allow collision but deny water in that block, you can press up against the glass pane and jump... and you'll jump into the water and out your tunnel. It also permits you to jump into the water and dive down to safety in your tunnel!



It looks REALLY cool when you have Optifine and a texture pack which works well with connected textures. Here's how it looks in Soartex Fanver for the Direpack


So why bother with this design? Well, here at ShneekeyCraft LLC, we have determined that mobs (except for endermen and blazes) swim. In fact, they will always swim when in water, because they don't want to drown. Because of this, any base entrance which is entirely submurged is completely safe from normal mob entrance. It's even safer than a wooden door, because it can't be knocked in!

This is a purely vanilla mechanic, so unless a mod changes how water and glass panes and signs interact, it'll work with any and all instances of Minecraft!

So, that's one of my architectural techniques. Share yours!

 

[Saice]

That is cleaver. I am a huge fan of useing signs and glass on my underwater builds but never thought about doing that sort of sneaky tunnel set up. I usely just make a 2x2 hole in my wall, ceiling, or floor and slap some signs or ladders to make it like an air lock.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Well, my very first oh-crap-it's-getting-dark-dig-a-hole area was under that volcano. It's quite a nice spot, it breaks into a short cave, and into an extremely expansive mineshaft system which itself connects to several different cave systems and at least two very deep chasms, however expansion space was limited due to being sandwiched between the volcano (don't want to get through that ash cone in the middle) and the very expansive mineshaft which was crawling with Very Unpleasant Things. So I built a house on the opposite shore where a Badlands turned into a Savanah, which had a LOT of space to play around with.

Then I wanted to connect the two, so I built that.

It also somewhat functions as an enderman farm, because when endermen pop down there, the water of the third block up damages them. It also doubles as an ink sac farm, because squid now 'drown' when NOT in water. So they swim through, fall down into the tunnel, and die, leaving me with ink sacs to pick up along my tunnel.

I plan on installing a railcart system down there eventually.

It will be the location for my Let's Play FTB Direpack series which will be a tutorial system, putting my blogs into practice and showing people the techniques and systems described in my guides. Of course, to do much with any of the mods, first you have to do some resource gathering, which is all very boring and tedious, so I 'set the stage' so that I can jump right into the modding element.

 

[Saice]

as a side I do like using RP Covers instead of signs as the just look so much nicer and hold water back + have low collosion boxes also.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

as a side I do like using RP Covers instead of signs as the just look so much nicer and hold water back + have low collosion boxes also.

You know, I hadn't considered that... using glass covers would work wonderfully and would look much neater!

 

[Bellaabzug21]

I use glass covers instead of panes for windows.

 

[Saice]

You know, I hadn't considered that... using glass covers would work wonderfully and would look much neater!

I think the only down side is they dont play well with texture joining from what I've seen but that is normaly not a huge issue when I use them.

 

[Zmaster27]

this will come in quite handy

 

[ATYPICAL]

Signs to hold up water? What is this, vanilla? Use Redpower microblocks! Take almost any block + a handsaw, cut it vertically as many times as you can, and then twice horizontally. This produces a block which is 1/64 the size of a full block (very small) but can hold up liquids! Have fun