MC BLOG POST
MART & ANGEL'S MANSION
Building Essentials Tutorial

Hello everyone,

This is a blog related to a project I've been working on (and where I actually still work on from time to time) called Mart & Angel's Mansion.

My aim for this blog is to give some more in-depth information about certain decisions I made during the time I built my house and hopefully it will help you with your building skills as well.

Introduction:

Currently I'm much into survival and decided to build a house/home which is eventually going to be 'the' ultimate survival home I've created so far!
I've spent countless hours on building and figuring out what would be the best style, design and function for a home and eventually came to some very good solutions. I've lived underground, in mountains, islands and so on but the house itself always had something missing at the end and I never could find a proper solution until now...

Before I did built my survival homes entirely of stone and glass. This gives a strong and powerful result but the disadvantages were that it felt really cold and looked very bombastic...
Next to stone I built serval wooden homes as well. The admosphere is much warmer but it wasn't epic at all. Just a practical wooden structure without any towers, halls or any other powerful elements.

Since I love Gothic architecture I decided to create another home in this style on a new server I joined recently called Chronic Survival. It is a survival-only server and that was just one of the things I was looking for in the first place.
(For more info about Chronic Survival, visit my review about the server by clicking here)

The home and project are both called Mart & Angel's mansion since a good friend of mine called Angelvonheaven is living in this house as well. He did a great deal at resource gathering and helped building some parts of the structure.

General info about the mansion
After setting up a simple base camp meant for resource gathering I started looking for the perfect spot to start building. After a while I found some sort of island, separated from mainland with small rivers and a large swamp biome on one side. The place lays in an Darkwood Forest biome.

The Main Hall:


This hall is actually something I always wanted to have implemented to my home. The problem was I never really consciously considered of adding it. This is without doubt the most important room of the house.
The room consists of a large, open area surrounded by walls with the balconies from the first floor. A large stairway in the center connects ground level with the rest of the house.

Note that some inspiration of the main hall and its Gothic design came from the main hall at a Dutch Castle located near Utrecht - The Netherlands.

A Kitchen:


Weeeh! Who doesn't love to have his/her kitchen in Minecraft? Well it definitely wasn't disappointing at all when I completed this warm and modern part of the house. I never built a kitchen on this scale before. Most rooms or places I called a "kitchen" in the past were contained nothing more than a furnace, cauldron and probably a table as well. The kitchen in this mansion was for that reason a HUGE improvement and I made it very functional as well ^^

Storage systems:


Storage, storage and more storage! After all, you can't have enough of those double chests full of resources. From dirt to stone, wool to clay and diamond to wood.
This time I decided not to use one, big hall to store everything I obtained in, but instead serval chambers were built with each chamber its own purpose. I created for example a huge stone chamber with walls of chests underground to store specifically stone only in the designated room.

Chests are now placed in the actual rooms itself as well to provide faster access to each item or block. Before I had to walk through too many halls and serval other rooms in order to get the stuff I really needed.

A bedroom with enough space - for two:


One of the other important things on my list were to create a functional, open en warm bedroom which still had to look very epic and connected with the rest of the house designs as well. This puzzle is solved in this mansion once again.
In fact, I've spent the entire Eastern wing of the mansion on the bedroom itself, as well as other facilities built around the main room which are only accessible through the main doors to enter room before the actual bedroom itself! If you can still follow me from this point on, than it should be clear (maybe not yet though) that this part of the mansion is the most complex part in general. It contains around eight rooms or more. From a room for pets to a portal room, serval storage rooms and even a attic. All of them only accessible through the main bedroom doors.

Survival and Functional Essentials:

A (Lava) Safety-Zone:

Ever played on servers with teleportation commands were you felt into the lava and were too slow to teleport yourself to a save location? Well you're not the only one... I experienced this before as well!
Therefore, I developed my own "safety-zone". This is a zone which consists of a 3x3 area with one block of water placed in the middle.
No more than that is actually needed in order to have a functional life-saver.
Just create a home on this location and whenever you fall in the lava or are about to get burned to dead, you teleport back to this zone to bring yourself into quick safety. (Note: keep the homepoint as short as possible. I.e. /h s (/home safe) will be more than enough)

Automatic Trashbin:

[coming soon, stay tuned]

More is coming soon over time. I will add images, more info about the progress, existing topics will be extended and what techniques I used to accomplish some more complex parts of the house.