On my SMP server, the admins are basically members of the Mage's guild; they're 'wizards' in the roleplaying setting, and they farm out their abilities to players as needed. You want a river there? You solicit a mage, and he charges you iConomy to do his thing.

Rather than making us totally accessible 24/7, too, I wanted to keep players 'in' the game world a bit by making them trek to the Mage's guild if they needed something like that. I was playing around with a couple of ideas, but the one that stuck with me the most was some sort of flying lair far above the world.

I made a couple flying islands, and immediately realized that whatever In wanted to build would need the full 128 height... so what I decided to do is to make the mage's guild fly over the void and put it outside the map borders that the players are restricted to. I was thinking I'd probably add some big goddamn chains to the underside of whatever I made, and trail them down from the guild structure to the void below... and then make matching ones on the main world, that anchor into the terrain and climb up all the way into the skybox. While not a primary way for players to reach the Mage's guild, they could conceivably start climbing the chains up - and once they hit the 127 mark, I'd set up an invisible portal to teleport them to the corresponding 'chain' above the void below the guild building. With a little sleight of hand like that, you can fake having the guild flying at a height in excess of 128 over the world.

Anyway, I started working on this thing, and I played with a couple ideas, but one of the images I came across really stuck with me - Laputa, from an anime of the same name.

I've started making a scaled version of this thing that'll fit in 128 height. I've never seen the movie, so I don't know exactly what the inside looks like, or how faithful I'm being to it, but I sort've don't care. I'm gonna do my own thing with it, I think; just using the idea as a base. After making the base structure, I started making these giant root systems from the tree up top - they extend throughout the interior of the structure, and all of the roots link back up to the main tree. The building's interior will basically be designed entirely around these tree roots.

It's a little slow-going because I'm mostly doing this by myself, but I'll try and keep this updated.