ChunkShift.com

It’s been 500 minecraft days and a little less than 5 real life months since I’ve started this minecraft world.

It’s been interesting playing with new boundaries and finding a narrative associated with the things I’ve done.

Minecraft and gaming in general is known for it’s YouTube and twitch content. Super cuts and time-lapses of mega projects bring clicks and drive a certain type of content. That in turn influences the game play decisions we take.

Knowing this, I do question my decision to use words and screenshots to describe relatively tiny builds. Without any content to inspire a style of writing or demonstrate a path to “success” it’s easy to feel lost. Especially when I’m tired and time is limited.

But I’ve enjoyed this immensely. It’s created some of the meaning I was looking for when I started this journey. It’ll take sometime to find my approach to this, and even then that approach is bound to evolve.

Mapping progress

I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to record or document my progress within the game. I want to regularly map the Island to document it’s change. I am using books to journal my progress, and am collecting other mementos along the way.

Maps take up a lot of space. The maps of the Island are 3×5 at the moment and may expand if I add anything to the waters around the Island (which I’ve already done).

If you’re a regular reader you might know that I’ve decided to start a town to address this need. I talked about it here in “Raiding an ancient city in Minecraft“. If you don’t want to click away here’s the quote:

Having a building with interior large enough to store all those things would blow my 1 chunk build guideline out of the water. I’ve decided instead to build a town. How does building a town help me stay inside that guideline? I’m going to build it 1 chunk at a time.

Every 500 days I’m going to add a house or multiple houses to the town and use the respective build to store items and maps significant to that 500 days of progress. This will allow me to complete a build in a reasonable amount of time instead of having a project drag on.

I’m going to try something new with this post, I’m not going to speak directly to the building I’m doing and instead let you check out the photos and captions. I may try this more where there isn’t something that’s easy or unique to convey.

Building in a Chunk

Being this early in the game this hasn’t been a challenge and hasn’t taught me a lot yet. But I can feel that changing. especially with an upcoming build. I think it’s going to be fun for me to figure out how to manage this small space and provide the details and function of the modern minecraft build meta.

Building at larger scales makes shaping, detailing and texturing builds easier. Finding small tricks to make these things work at a micro scale and learning how to maximize the limited space of a chunk is motivating me.

The obvious solution to maximize size is to build a 16×16 square structure or at least to build in squares and rectangles. Straight lines that don’t leave wasted space.

Adding small angles to walls, however, adds depth and breaks the straight lines that can dominate minecraft builds. I look forward to discovering the ways to make these angles work within the chunk boundary and finding ways to recapture that space in the height of the build or landscaping.

Planing ahead

I have already started work on a castle. A build that I was planning to wait a little longer to start; however, knowing how tall this build will be necessary to further progress. I need to define its height so I can visually separate it from other areas of the island visually. This is to keep areas immersive and coherent despite being close together.

The castle will be the centre piece of the town. I think I’ll still add another chunk of buildings for day 1000. I haven’t decided on the purpose of the castle and it may just be cosmetic. For me, and probably a lot of people, a castle is often my main base or my personal home in a minecraft world. I don’t often have others join me in my worlds, but the castle is my home (bed, backup gear, treasure) and other builds have purpose or are cosmetic.

I’ve started laying out where some other builds might go, but landscaping is going to be the big project. A few posts back I built a forest around the snowy mountain to avoid a huge terraforming project. But I might end up doing some significant terrafoming anyways.

I’m trying to figure out If I’m going to do my 3rd annual minecraft Christmas card (for family and friends) in this world or jump back into Simple to do it (Building in the area used last year). It’s already the end of August which doesn’t give me much time if I’m starting from vanilla terrain generation.

We’re about halfway through this season and I don’t have plans to alter my approach in a significant way. I’m going to do my best to keep to the twice a month schedule. Though in the future I’m open to changing that, I’m thinking about what creates the best content.

This has definitely been the slowest play-through of this game I’ve ever done, both in progress and in actual playtime. Writing the blog is done with time I would normally spend playing the game. Though our 2 year old’s affinity for late bedtimes is the more significant factor.

Late bedtimes don’t leave a lot of time other than to tidy up and take a shower. This isn’t “bad”, its a new perspective on life and this game and reinforces my decision to downsize my builds 5 months ago.

Thanks for reading this one and if you have any ideas for items or experiences I should capture in future milestone builds let me know! If you’ve found this blog, share it with someone you know, I’d appreciate that.

Build stats

Real Life Days: 83

Minecraft Days: 241

Hours: 12.5

This build was a 1 chunk build, if you’d like to see more 1 chunk builds click here.