Uh, perhaps I back this up. Open sourced Death Star kickstarted, when US government does not build one for you.
Perhaps here in Finland, we can have one for ourselves!
Author Archives: Tomi
Was not that simple
Her are some of the earliest pictures taken from the work site. Started to build the castle from the south western corner on a promising location with intersection of two mountains. Materials are there very near the site.
Scenery is nice.
Outer sections are taking shape.
I built the corner couple of days to give me some shelter from the wandering skeletons and zombies. And then sarted to do the western outer ring wall. Which is long – the midsection is over 130 blocks away from the door to the right. Similar wall would cut through the two mountains.
And then things started to go wrong. I had started from a high ground position, and ended up with a wall too high from the intended water level. Note how high the wooden walkway is from the river. Stupid me! The structure was 5 blocks too high. I needed to redo everything.
After I had lowered the midsection of the western wall, and started to redo the corner. Visual stimulations on my visual nerves got me: the Castle is so big that it will cross several habitat environments, as the northern part of castle is going to be in the Desert! That yellowish stuff in the horizon.
Also I mined through the mountain, and to my horror found out, that there where should be a plot for Castle’s main entrance, was only water – a sea. Why I hadn’t checked that there is no damn sea behind the mountain!
The blueprints of Obawangchicheng
The module contains the layout of the entire castle/city in the cardboard backside of the cover of the module. It has a scale of 10 feet per square, translating into four minecraft blocks. The usual scale used in this kind of projects seems to be only 3 blocks per 10 feet (as the avatar is two blocks high making it proper scale). However, minecraft’s thinnest wall element is one block in width, so in house elements of 10 times 10 feet rooms would have only one block size of interior size! Therefore I opted to use the four blocks scale making interior plans easier to follow. This results however in some block intensive structures.
The outer wall
The parts which I have started to build are south-western corner of the outer wall corner, and from there the western wall to north to the midsection of the wall. Just to see the scale in effect. How big it is, oh and its big!
The inner section
Elevation of the whole structure
Note that the northern-south axel is not from up to down, but left to right in the images.
Minecraft meets Obawangchicheng
Couple months ago I bought Minecraft for my son, after his tedious wishing and whining. Actually, I was going to buy it for myself, but never had got into it. Like my son, I have played with it, toyed with it, and died many times within it. Damn you Creepers!
Yes, I have built like everybody else several castles to keep my avatar from harmsway and well fed. However, lately the game had started to taste a little bit stale. There were nothing new or fun things to do: adventuring in the mines, seeking gold and other treasures – been there, done that. And as I am not interested in The End, the excessive hoarding has no meaning for me.
However, last week it hit me – how about a castle of truly Grand Design? In Survival mode? Without any cheats? Sure, why not?
The mode was easy to decide as the Survival is the only mode I like. Infinite amount of blocks in Creative mode is childsplay. And because, the Monsters are really after You! No cheats of course, because cheating is always Bad!
The castle part was also easy: not a castle from history (somebody has already done those), nor from my own imagination (my imagination sucks), but from an old module (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Oriental Adventures – Ochimo The Spirit Warrior) with floorplans (10 feet = 4 blocks) provided: Obawangchicheng – City of The Dead Spirit King.
I have been building it now for a couple of days, and it really is Insane task. Lets see how this Epic quest unravels itself.
FFG’s Star Wars Roleplaying game
Bought it yesterday, and quickly skimmed it through today. Nice big pictures, with 
production values in place (price 30€ here in Finland). It feels like Star Wars, which is good. Clear instructions what to read and when – good again. Easily craspable concepts, superb!
However, the game uses special game dices of various sizes without numbers. Instead those have special Star Wars “language?” symbols on colored dice. Nothing wrong there, because mechanics should be easy and no calculation skills required by the player, and should promote the story driven methodology, than minmaxer’s wet dream of accounting.
But how on Earth to get players to invest 12€ to dice, which can be used only with this game? Most people I know it is not actually issue of money, but a principle. And how the, heck gamemaster (or the one who runs the game) can differentiate easily the dice in his/her own adventure notes? Beginner’s Game itself uses colored images in the middle of text to tell what dice to throw. This remains to be seen.
This game needs really to be playtested.