Hey fellow Minecraftians!

Io m sure most of you Arcadia Games players have heard of Ousire. Not only was he our servero s first Architect, but he created a life-sized recreation of Laputa in Survival! Even a glance at the massive, looming, magnificent structure awes players. Besides, thereo s nothing quite like the very first time you see the majestic bowl load above you, casting its shadow down on the water as you cruise by on your pitifully small little boat, or the very first time you type /warp laputa and see a beautiful combination of nature and graceful statues unfold around you and your little pink glider as the massive castle loads.

After a couple minutes of wandering around and observing the marvels, it becomes obvious how much dedication and hard work was put into making Laputa just so. The circles are perfectly round, and the wild nature growth complements the graceful sandstone statues magnificently. The place practically reeks dedication and well-thought-out builds. Ito s a masterpiece, gorgeously crafted through the stubborn desire to make the castle the best it can be.

All of Ousireo s buildings have a obvious gracefulness, achieved through practice and the stubborn desire not to give up. Doubtless, Ouisre has quite a bit of useful information to impart to us after learning to build such magnificent structures... right?

So you can imagine my excitement when he let me interview him on his builds, and, more specifically, Laputa. Quickly(ish), I pumped out the best list of random questions I could for Ousire, hoping to answer a few of my own burning questions and (lets be honest here) get some advice to improve my builds.

1.) Where do you get inspiration for your builds?

Laputa was obviously inspired and modeled after the Hayao Miyazaki movie of the same name. Other than that though, ito s random spots mostly. Sometimes I just have an idea and decide "I want to make THIS" and work from there. If I find an interesting picture or design while surfing the web, I'll usually save it in case I can reference it later.

2.) How do you figure out the dimensions and scaling for your builds?

When modeling something that already exists, like Laputa, the key is lots and LOTS of reference images. While Laputa was in construction, I had around twenty to thirty images saved from around the web, and I rewatched the film and took screenshot of important or interesting looking areas of the castle.

From there, I started with the smallest stuff and worked up so everything would keep the right scale. If you know how two different objects need to be in relation to each other, ito s much easier to make the smaller object first and use that to design the bigger one. In Laputa, the first thing I actually made was the little pink glider that Pazu and Sheeta use. I found some reference images of the glider, and I knew I had to make it large enough for two people to fit in it, so it would have to be at least two blocks long.

From there, I could work out the scale of everything else in the castle with a little bit of measuring and eyeballing it to fit in minecraft terms. "The glider is 3 blocks wide, and in the movie it landed on a platform about three times as wide as itself, so obviously the platform needs to be 9 blocks wide to be the same scale."

If i'm making something up from my own imagination, its much more dependant on the landscape around me, and what I'm trying to make. I'm also a fan of trying to fit buildings to the landscape, as it looks more realistic. On a multiplayer server I obviously can't just bulldoze my way through someone else's house to make room, and there's a limit to how much terraforming I can do (or am willing to do) for a project to make it fit. So in those situations, I'll try to size my buildings based on how much land is available. Laputa was a sort of exception due to being built in the middle of an otherwise empty ocean.

3.) Do you graph, build beforehand, or otherwise plan out your builds before the actual thing?

Lots and LOTS! Most builds usually start with a list of what features I want it to have, and from there I design the build to be sure all of them fit. Graphing is usually used to get a general idea of the layout or to check the scale of something, but I do a lot of designing with creative mode. I'll build small scale models, examples of the various decorations, all sorts of stuff, until I'm sure I have the idea right and then I'll make it full size in survival.

4.) What is the actual dimensions for Laputa?

Depends on which part you're counting. The lower layer tier is the widest part I would still consider part of the "castle", and it's 175 blocks in diameter, but the outer ring is 229 blocks diameter. The little bubble protrusions from the sides push it a little bit wider.

5.) How long did it take you to build?

It was about four months from start to finish, but the actual construction time was much less. I took a few breaks in the middle either from boredom or running out of materials or stuff like that. Sometimes I had to stop because of real life stuff, things like studying for tests or work related activities.

6.) How much time do you spend getting your materials compared to building with them?

Collecting the materials takes many, many times longer than actually building the stuff. Ito s also many times more boring. Getting enough stone to make Laputa was so slow I would use a cobblestone generator and just tape my mouse down while I was off doing something else in o real lifeo . Lucky, Wood wasno t as bad thanks to finding some skeleton dungeons and collecting a loooot of bonemeal.

7.) Why did you choose to build on Arcadia instead of Single Player?

Two reasons. First, it would help keep me honest about the whole thing. If it was single player, it would be easy to hack in materials, use X-ray or world edit, or some sort of other cheaty method and just SAY I got my builds done legit. The second reason is simply because I prefer to play on multiplayer servers over singleplayer worlds. I tend to get bored of singleplayer games because I feel there is so much less to do and no other people to interact with. No cooperation, no contests, no chatting, and stuff like that is a big reason why I enjoy playing minecraft

8.) In all of Laputa, what was the hardest thing to build?

Probably all of the decorations on the outside. The statues and trees and things like that. The dome and tiers of the castle are all very easy to make, since they're all just circles and spheres and easy-to-copy patterns. The plants and decorations and things like that are all the things that people would be looking at the most, so they had to look the best, and they're a lot more free form in design so I had to spend a lot more time on each individual object.

9.) Do you make, plan, and gather the materials for your builds all at once, or do you get help?

Its mostly random depending on my mood. I try to collect a lot of material at once so I can get a good portion of building done at a time, but if I get too bored of mining or farming wood or whatever I'll change it up. My pattern in constructing Laputa was usually to fill my furnaces with cobble, and then build the castle while it smelted. Once I ran out of smoothstone, the furnaces would usually be close to finished so I could take a small break and then repeat the pattern.

10.) How do you get the dedication to spend that long on something???

Probably because its a multiplayer server. All the work is a lot less tedious when you have other people to joke around with or get help from. Laputa was a lot of repetitive filling of space, so being able to goof off with others really helped it seem less boring. If it was on a single player world, I would have gone insane from the tedium.

11.) What do you think is the coolest thing on Laputa?

Hard choice. My personal favorite item on Laputa is probably the little pink glider, both because its a very iconic thing from the movie, and just because it looks adorable in minecraft. The COOLEST thing in laputa is probably the giant tree in the center. Its one of my favorite pieces in both the movie and the build. It manages to imply a lot of story and history to the castle in just one scene

12.) If you had to improve Laputa in one way, what would you do?

Probably tear down some of the statues and decorations on the outside, and replace them with a lot more trees and vines and stuff, add some cracks to the walls so you could peek inside hidden rooms of the castle, stuff like that. Really try to increase the vibe that the place is abandoned and falling apart. Maybe try to add in some sort of easter egg or two, though I'm not sure what

13.) Any ideas for future builds you can share with us?

Lots of stuff! Currently I'm working on making a new home for myself, a steampunk castle situated on a volcano. On an old server I made a egyptian/mayan themed ziggurat that I've wanted to redo for a while now. Someday I want to make an enchanted forest with lots of giant trees, hidden villages, giant mushrooms, lots of magical plants and stuff. Travis, another member of Arcadia built a large palace in The End and challenged me to make one too, so I've been planning on that someday. To play up the weird other-dimensional-ness of The End, I'm going to make it very M. C. Escher themed, with stairs going the wrong way, sideways rooms, and other fun insanity.

Other minor projects I've thought about are a "hell on earth" by replacing all the 'natural' blocks in an area with nether related stuff. Sand into soul sand, dirt into netherrack, water into lava, bricks into netherbricks, stuff like that. Another is making something me and a friend cooked up that I've dubbed the "world of silence", where you replace everything colored with something similar in greyscale. Everything would be shades of white, black, or grey wool, stone or cobblestone, coal and iron, all the water would be glass, etc. I have no idea what I would MAKE in either of these locations, but they're both ideas that I feel could look pretty awesome if they're pulled off well.

13.) Do you tend to use a certain Texture Pack, or just the default?

My main texture pack is Faithful 32x32 pack, which is just the default textures in double resolution. It comes with the option to customize it slightly, so my pack has clear glass and some slightly different looking flowers, but otherwise its essentially identical (but much cleaner looking). I have a few other packs downloaded, but I dono t use them often unless I'm curious what a build looks like with a different art style.

14.) Anything else you think is worth mentioning?

Just that people should join Arcadia because its a fantastic server! :D

Awww, thanks Ousire!

Well, that pretty much wraps it up! Ousire gets my thanks for answering my questions with huge, well-thought-out paragraphs! It made my day when I opened the unassuming little .txt folder and got such outstanding results (seriously, I flipped out. Ask Ousire, ito s true)!

As it turns out, Ousire wrote a Minecraft Forums thread devoted to the development of Laputa! Check it out to see step by step progress as he slowly built the magnificent castle over several months: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1153738-building-laputa-in-minecraft-100-legit/

Or, you can hop on Arcadia Games and see it for yourself!

Simply type in our IP: mc.arcadiagames.net

And type o /warp laputao to instantly arrive in Laputa, starting off in a familiar (for those of us whoo ve seen the movie) pink little glider!

[size=15px]If you feel like applying to build and hang out with Ousire and other Arcadia Games community members, check out the o Want [B]? Go Here!o thread on [/size][url=forums.arcadiamc.com][u][size=15px][color=rgb(17,85,204)]our forums[/color][/size][/u][/url][size=15px]: [/size][url=forums.arcadiamc.com][u][size=15px][color=rgb(17,85,204)]http://forums.arcadiamc.com[/color][/size][/u][/url]

[size=15px]Finally, if you liked the interview and want to see more, feel free to like, favorite, diamond, or subscribe! (It gives me a fuzzy feeling inside <3)[/size]