This whole thing is pretty fucking incredible, all in all. Where did you get all the stone for that, anyway? Just the pits at the bottom of the castle?
Man, I wish. Digging the pit is the last thing I decided to do, so now I have hundreds of extra stone blocks stored in the chest near the entrance, and that's not counting the silly amount of dirt and gravel I had to outright throw away because I didn't want to bother making storage for it. The castle and lighthouse were built from stone excavated from the tunnels underneath the hut. You know that gigantic hall you reach when you go down the ladder in there? That used to be solid stone with a few pockets of gravel.
At first I was just mining for ore, and that's why I made all the random descending tunnels. Then I decided to do something with all the rock I had, and eventually demand overcame supply and I had to start collecting stone from closer to the surface for efficiency's sake. Besides, I have lots of iron, gold and redstone stored in the hut already (plus some diamond), and it'll be a long time before I need any more.
The next step is decoration, I think. I kind of want to put a layer of dirt on the towers, plant some trees up there and call it a day, but that's plan B; mostly I want to figure out some architecture instead and see if I can make the tops look cool. I tried crenellation but I couldn't get it to look right.
Zed? You're insane. It's the brilliant kind of madness, but madness nevertheless.
How long did this take?
And that bridge! Did you lay down all the ice and everything before you excavated out everything under it, or did you build some kind of scaffolding?
I never attempted to count the time, and I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't want to.
God bless the podcast, is what I gotta say.
As for the bridge, it's a little of both. I originally put a thin, crappy little bridge on top of the ice just so I could get to the back of the fort without going all the way around, but as I got deeper I eventually decided it should be fancier. Thing is, you don't really need a scaffolding to build horizontally across empty space. It's possible to inch forward on a cliff so that the center of your player entity is over the edge, then look back to the side of the block you're partially standing on, and attach a new block there. That makes it really easy to fall off though. If you've seen my retardo sunblock ziggurat on Smiler's server, that entire construction is made possible by that technique.
That is something you should send to the creator, legitimately.
Hmm, maybe once it's less obviously a work in progress... I'm not even done putting windows on the inner walls!
My only regret is that I didn't build it on an MP server. Unfortunately, when I started, the game wasn't exactly in a state where this was feasible.