January post – creative tips, survival tricks and more
Sethome trick on servers
On survival or factions servers, there’s a trick that might allow you to get into somebody’s base. Use at your own risk! Basically, all these servers should allow you to use the /sethome command to find your base in the /wild. However, this can be used in another way:
- Get a friend or alt account to /sethome at your base (so that you don’t lose your bases location).
- Clear out your inventory, you’ll get killed.
- Attempt to /tp to random people! When someone accepts the teleport, instantly do /sethome. There is a chance you’ll be near or inside someone’s base (even if in a trap), and you can now come back there with the /home command.
- If you do find yourself in or near someone’s base, go back and explore! If the player had OP items on them, wait for them to go offline – otherwise, you can come back instantly with your proper gear and kill them. Maybe you’ll find something good, maybe not.
Two sided opening chest
This seemed way more genius the first time I done it. But, turns out it simply involves placing a chest in a wall with a stair block above! This allows you to open a chest from both inside and outside. Quite useful if you have a farm outside your house and wish to easily store items collected from the farm, and access them inside the house as needed. You can do different designs of course, but the stair block covers the gap very well.
Making “organic” houses
What do I mean by organic? In general, making a build fit into its surroundings and work with the terrain. There are a few steps I take to achieve this, and this works for creative or survival, but best for small scale builds of course. This is a little technical and hard to explain, but here you go:
- STOP FLATTENING EVERYTHING! Please, just stop flatting a 1000 by 1000 block area to build your base on! This can be avoided quite easily. Work with the terrain to blend the build in – you’ll also end up with an unaltered, natural backdrop to your build.
- Find a relatively flat, raised area. Flatten out hollow bits of the terrain by building a small cobble stone platform for the house (foundations), or dig out the raised bit and have a house sunken into the ground.
- Use any blocks you have available on hand, with surprising effects! Find some unneeded gravel in your inventory? Use it to fill in some terrain. Have some left over slabs? Decorate the house, maybe add shelves or counters inside. Few blocks of wool lying around? Incorporate them somewhere into the build, like at each corner of the house while building.
- In short, be creative and a little random! Realistic builds use a lot of blending and unusual blocks to achieve interesting textures and patterns. You can also use local materials, because it just makes sense to do so.
PS3 organic castle build
The castle above may be nothing fancy, but it uses “rules” like the above! The shape of the castle was dictated by the shape of the mountain side. Where there was a hollow bit in the mountain, I mined out a little bit and built the main keep. The tower stands on a natural base of a square-ish cliff. Natural terrain features, like the jagged rock at the front, were left. The wall at the back ends at the edge, continuing the shape of the hillside. The wooden walkways surround the castle, but are not forced – they end where the terrain forces them to end. And the block combinations and wavy flags add realism.
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