Introduction

When the history of Minecraft is reckoned, what will be considered the decisive split between the "early Beta" period and "late Beta" will almost certainly be the 1.8 patch. No patch before this point was so enormously comprehensive or sweeping in terms of the changes it wrought in both gameplay and construction.

This is especially the case with castle building. The addition of the stone brick and the accompanying gaggle of stairs and halfblocks blows the possibilities wide open, while rendering old modes of doing things virtually obsolete. Hence, why I've split my castle portfolio between pre-1.8 and post-1.8; the former to be considered an archive copyand the latter to be the working paper from henceforth.

The Good

In my eyes, as far as castle building is concerned, the most important thing 1.8 has given us is the stone brick. Affordable, recyclable, and good-looking, it gives us another valuable option to build the outer surfaces of walls with. Formerly, there was something of a split, between people who preferred the look of all smooth stone, and the ease of all cobble. I preferred to use both; using cobble for the majority of things, and using smooth-stone to bring out the horizontal lines on a design.

Stone brick isn't, in my eyes, a complete substitute for either of the former stones. I still prefer to use smooth-stone to bring out horizontal lines and to line the pathways and crenellations on the walls. That said, I don't think one can really use cobblestone for the visible surfaces of their design. Using it for floors, cellars and roadways strikes me as appropriate, but not so much for walls anymore, at least of edifices like castles, though still probably acceptable for other medieval structures that might be considered lest prestigious.

In a sense, think of stone brick like a uniform; military things will be more prone to use it; while civilians less so.

The Bad

Stone brick has one significant drawback, though. It requires smooth stone to make, so, in a sense, the all-smooth-stone contingent has won. Luckily, the return on smooth-stone to stone brick is 1:1, but to build a decent-sized castle still takes thousands of stone, which breaks down to hundreds of coal.

Thankfully, I get the feeling that resource distribution in 1.8 zones has been changed a bit; coal shows up more often in "vein" configurations, and abandoned mines often bore through huge troves of coal.

A method I use to shield my coal supplies from being too stretched by smelting stone is to intensively farm trees and only use mined coal to make torches and smelt logs into charcoal.

The Ugly

Building castles is still, overall, far more difficult than before. Pre-1.8, I would always recommend building on a hilltop, due to its superior visibility and defensibility. Now, however, hunger can quickly take a toll on you climbing up and down mountains without the assistance of stairs. I am going to amend this advice: now, when picking a spot to build, simply be mindful of the terrain. Still build with the terrain as much as you can, but pick features that will add to the castle's defensibility. The castle pictured above uses a ravine that runs along one of its walls to bolster it, it also sits on slightly higher ground than the surrounding swampland.

But there is one more nuisance to consider. Endermen are fully able to move any block they please, including player-placed blocks. After a few consecutive in-game days and nights mining underground, I returned to the surface to find the outside of my wall and turf pock-marked from endermen who had lifted blocks and then vanished, leaving nothing. Moats, even cosmetic one block deep ones, are probably the only effective defense against this, as endermen are apparently fatally allergic to water.