Note: This post is made almost a year after the server started. Most of the images are taken well after the fact.
Starting out on Smugglers’ Landing, Star and I knew we wanted to collaborate. We found a nice bay a few hundred blocks from Spawn and while I got to work on my base, Dangle joined us and settled down alongside it.
Star started out with a simple day-1 iron farm over at a nearby village, as I got to work on a bungalow. Dangle would spend so much time down in the mines he didn’t really “move in” and Star would come to late build his “boat house” next to us.
The Fort
As soon as I had a roof over my head, I did want to get an iron farm closer to where I lived. So, I got to work on carving out a hole for a *very* simple castle design for an iron farm. With no enchantments or beacons, I carved out the insides of the castle which would be come the kill zone for the iron golems. I used the cobblestone from the hole to make the walls and towers.
The Shack
Once we had the iron farm up and running, I started working on various projects and realized I could do with a bed closer to the actual village. So I found a very nice design of a small shack online and set it up next to where I was going to work on the village.
The Smiths
By the time I got around to documenting this village, the original blacksmith was already torn down and I had replaced it with a more convenient one. But the initial blacksmith (which was on a raised dirt hill) was the second house to be built in the area.
Because we were nested between Jungle, Dark Oak, and Birch forests, we didn’t really have access to any Spruce. But Lav kindly saw that we were provisioned with some saplings.
While the old blacksmith had less of an interior and instead just had a roof, I did set it up with an armorer and a weapon smith so we could get renewable equipment by trading with the villagers. As our source for emeralds, I set up a tool smith house next to it with 4 more tool smiths. I tried to
This meant I got kitted out with diamond gear before I even mined my first diamond.
When building the tool smith, I did try to find various ways of keeping the villagers locked in place without it looking like a jail cell. This happy accident led to the smithy getting its name: Mumford & Sons.
Because all of our smiths were precariously placed right next to a river biome, they would come to die a number of times. Star had set up a villager breeder up the hill, which came in handy. Before we had lit up the river and secured everything, we would come to end up with 3 out of 4 tool smiths being cured and giving discounts. Not that we needed the iron anymore, but it did make trading a bit easier.
The constant Drown incursions served as inspiration when we finally settled on calling the village Port Crimson. This also then named the bay itself (Crimson Cove) and the fort (Crimson Fort).
The Artisans of Port Crimson
With the necessities like gear and food put aside, I started focusing on building out small factories and farms that would serve to give us easier access to resources that we would need for larger builds.
I knew we would need a lot of mud, so I started by building a mud farm next to the shack, and proceeded to try to build a small building around it – using mostly materials that the village itself would have access to.
The Mudboys Masonry would come to house ilmango’s mudfarm, but also three stone masons that would grant us access to terracotta and quartz.
By this point, Star had built his Boat House Base and set up a new type of superior smelter outside it, where 8 furnaces were stocked from a single boat with a chest. I thought that was a really good basic design for a smelter, so I set up a small furnace house next to the Mudboys.
This smeltery would come to serve us for a really long time and it enabled us to clean up the yard outside Star’s base a bit.
I started building these buildings, not in creative, but just in survival, texturing as I kept going. I wanted asymmetric and jumbled roofs that would give a feel of the village being constructed in haste and by purpose, not for the very real aesthetics reasons. By the time the smeltery was finished, we had killed the dragon, set up a gun powder farm, and I was needing rockets – badly. So I just kept going with the building, adding a rocket factory; The Fire Werks LLC, next to the smeltery.
The factory had a shulker unloader for gunpowder and a sugar cane farm under the ground. It would feed both components into an auto-crafting set up that would keep making rockets for as long as it had the materials. This meant it could be kept stocked up on sugar cane and for every shulker box of gun powder, it would produce three boxes of rockets. The building – and farm below it – was complete with an ender pearl stasis chamber in the same chunk, so the sugar cane would come to grow as soon as either me or Star were online.
The outside of the Fire Werks was recently kitted out with a refilling station where a shelf is kept filled with rockets so you can fill an action bar slot by just right-clicking on the shelf.
More to come, but maybe this post is long enough. Let’s get into Star’s builds with a part 2.