An Update on the Masterwork

I've been working more lately on the cathedral I started ages ago in Minecraft, and I'm finally making some definable progress after months of nothing. Kind of like writer's block, only with, well, pixelated blocks. I tried to take this screenshot from the same location as the original shot in one of my earlier posts when I first came up with the idea for the cathedral, but I've since torn that platform down so it was more of a guesstimate.

You can see I've started to define the roof, and although it's hard to tell, a lot of progress has been made on the walls in the nave and aisles, and I put in a huge rose window at the front entrance. It's actually kind of hard to tell the scale of this thing from this screenshot, but I wish you could see it in person and walk around in it. It's so much more inspiring now that it's so much closer to being finished, I feel more and more motivated to press onward the more I add to it. Hands down it's the most ambitious project in Minecraft I've ever taken on before. The wall defining the border of the kingdom was huge, I'll admit, but it was, well, just a wall. It's not that challenging. This though, this is taking thought and planning and trial and error and a little bit of math even. Not my strongest suit.

The project at sunrise.

The above picture is purely to attempt to give you a sense of scale, but then I suppose if you know anything at all about Minecraft you'll be able to see how huge it is. Granted, it's not the greatest or most impressive thing out there, especially if you do a youtube search with choice phrases such as 'epic minecraft cathedral' but I'm still pretty proud of it. Maybe once I finish it, it won't be such an eyesore and Squid won't have a reason to complain about the half-finished building on the edge of her backyard.

I also lost the link to whatever real-life cathedral I was modeling this after, so it's completely out of my head at this point. +5 to creativity, please? One thing that really pleases me about building this is how I've come up with some new ideas and even stolen some building techniques from watching the videos of others on youtube. Did you know you could place stairs upside down? I do know, and I'm thoroughly exploiting the technique in my flying buttresses. I still wish we could put stained glass in our windows, but as I was talking with a friend the other day, the tech to implement that would be huge, and probably not something Notch would want to add, since Minecraft can be a demanding program to run anyways, at least on my machine.

Hrmmm, after going back and looking at older posts, I was apparently modeling this thing after the Metz. Mine looks nothing like it. Oh well. I'll keep trudging merrily along. /whistleahappytune