I made a jack-o’-lantern in Minecraft

A last minute decision to do a Halloween themed post has had me as on edge as my 9 year old self watching Jaws for the first time.

A considerable amount of work goes into starting a new build and it’s accompanying post. I often have some amount of building or a draft started when I hit publish on a post.

While it’s not the first time I paused other ideas and jumped on a new idea, this time I am leaving for Mexico for ten days.

File this in the so bad it’s cute category.

Feeling some pressure

Lately I’ve been feeling the pressure. The right amount of stress can be good, and motivate you to accomplish things. I am definitely still in the good stress zone. But I do find myself thinking about my self imposed schedule and feeling nervous at times.

Winter kicked the door in, so to speak, a few weeks ago. This is early even for this far north and there were a few to do items that needed immediate attention. As previously mentioned parenting, more specifically late bedtimes isn’t leaving a lot of free time in the evenings. More recently what I presume was COVID really had some impacts. I had to significantly reduce screen time for a while as I had some light sensitivity, and black text on a white background was dysregulating.

While these impacts didn’t make this post itself more stressful to create per say, its been adding some pressure to the process overall.

Art Tip: Use reference images as your minds eye may not have an accurate picture of reality. I initially over exaggerated the segments of the pumpkin.

So why would I take on the additional pressure of an unplanned post? Will part of the decision was that it then gives me two posts in the queue that have some work already done. I can now spend some time wordsmithing a half ready post while lounging on vacation. And when I get back I have the game-play and screenshots needed to go with the associated rambling.

Smoke on the river, fire in it’s eyes

Artistic anxiety aside, I was struggling to recreate the vision I had going in my head. I went to the nether to get shroomlight and while rummaging through my chests stumbled into some magma blocks. These were breakthrough blocks for me. With better defined eyes, especially at night, I was starting to reconcile the image on the screen with the one in my head.

Future plans

While the jack-o’-lantern qualifies as a 1 Chunk build the pumpkin patch and oversize pumpkin plant I’m going to build is going to violate that.

I had some plans to add some builds to this area that I’m going to scrap. Without spoiling they were going to be human inspired structures. I think I’m going to keep the highly custom organic theme going on the starter island instead.

Happy Halloween

So I’m very happy with how this turned out. I’m traveling this year and won’t get to celebrate in more traditional ways or experience the trick-or-treaters and all their great costumes. Whether or not you care about Halloween, I hope you can acknowledge and vicariously enjoy the joy some get from it.

Build Stats

What you see here is only partially complete. I still need to change the texturing on the sides of the pumpkin you can’t see to call this complete. If you were building this based on the what you can see and didn’t have to edit your work these stats would be accurate.

If you are curious about anything you see in the photos comment below and I can address the block choices I made in the build.

Real Life Days: 6

Minecraft Days: 25

Hours: 4.5

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