Published Aug 16th, 2012, 8/16/12 6:44 pm
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What is the White Tower of Tar Valon?
The White Tower is the heart and home of the Aes Sedai, an ancient order of mystical female magicians within Robert Jordan's epic fantasy saga, the Wheel of Time. It lies at the center of Tar Valon, a city/state built onto a large island in the middle of the River Erinin. The Tower is said to be a large cylindrical structure of approximately 200 meters in height. Also included within it's grounds is a large palace-like structure connected to the Tower's rear which houses all of the young women who are in training to become Aes Sedai, another large building - second only to the Tower, proper, in height within the city - which houses the twelve repositories of the Tower Library, and various other outbuildings such as stables.
What is the scope of this Project?
I plan to build the entire Tower and it's grounds at full-scale with a whopping 661x801 block footprint, and at 200 blocks tall. Everything will be fully detailed, both interior and exterior. This means there will be enough rooms to house 400 Novices, 200 Accepted, and 3000 fully trained Aes Sedai - just like in the books. No, that is not a typo, either. There will be 3000 Aes Sedai suites, all fully decorated and detailed.
How close will you stay to the descriptions given in the books?
I will remain as reasonably true to the information given to us by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson as I reasonably can. To that end, the tower will have multiple spires and a flat roof with a waist-high railing, and each of the 3000 Aes Sedai quarters will be arranged into seven pie-shaped wedges, one for each Ajah. Granted, because there have been no actual images provided to the readers, and the plans for a movie based on the first book in the series seem to have stalled, I must take some liberties with the over-all design and construction. Any help or references that can be provided to me so that I can more closely resemble the White Tower as it has been described in text are greatly appreciated.
How long do you expect to take while building this project?
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea. The last megabuild I attempted, Figaro Castle from Final Fantasy VI, was only 200x150x64 blocks and took several months from beginning to end, but it was built on a survival-centric server called Mongoose Country. This one is far larger, more heavily detailed, but built on a private creative server.
The White Tower is the heart and home of the Aes Sedai, an ancient order of mystical female magicians within Robert Jordan's epic fantasy saga, the Wheel of Time. It lies at the center of Tar Valon, a city/state built onto a large island in the middle of the River Erinin. The Tower is said to be a large cylindrical structure of approximately 200 meters in height. Also included within it's grounds is a large palace-like structure connected to the Tower's rear which houses all of the young women who are in training to become Aes Sedai, another large building - second only to the Tower, proper, in height within the city - which houses the twelve repositories of the Tower Library, and various other outbuildings such as stables.
What is the scope of this Project?
I plan to build the entire Tower and it's grounds at full-scale with a whopping 661x801 block footprint, and at 200 blocks tall. Everything will be fully detailed, both interior and exterior. This means there will be enough rooms to house 400 Novices, 200 Accepted, and 3000 fully trained Aes Sedai - just like in the books. No, that is not a typo, either. There will be 3000 Aes Sedai suites, all fully decorated and detailed.
How close will you stay to the descriptions given in the books?
I will remain as reasonably true to the information given to us by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson as I reasonably can. To that end, the tower will have multiple spires and a flat roof with a waist-high railing, and each of the 3000 Aes Sedai quarters will be arranged into seven pie-shaped wedges, one for each Ajah. Granted, because there have been no actual images provided to the readers, and the plans for a movie based on the first book in the series seem to have stalled, I must take some liberties with the over-all design and construction. Any help or references that can be provided to me so that I can more closely resemble the White Tower as it has been described in text are greatly appreciated.
How long do you expect to take while building this project?
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea. The last megabuild I attempted, Figaro Castle from Final Fantasy VI, was only 200x150x64 blocks and took several months from beginning to end, but it was built on a survival-centric server called Mongoose Country. This one is far larger, more heavily detailed, but built on a private creative server.
Additional Notes
Timelapse videos of this project are available at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL991401E1FF65CD63&feature=mh_lolz| Credit | Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson for writing the books that have inspired this project |
| Progress | 5% complete |
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Thanks, Mark.
How high have you decided to build it? The 160m specified in the books means that with minecrafts limitations you'd require a minimum of 4 blocks per floor, leaving you with 40 floors. My main difficulty comes from other description in the books for the hallways being even larger than a cart, which you would imagine to be 3 or 4 metres/blocks wide, and the corridors are described as taller than they are wide, meaning that this is technically impossible. To make it accurate and 'grand' enough youd need to increase the height of the individual floors to 9/10 (including floor, 6/7 block high halls ceiling and empty space for redstone/details etc) This increases the height dramatically out of the context of the books. Even with the lowest margin (I managed 24 floors before default height limit with heights of I think 7 blocks a floor + the required three basement levels) your then left with another contradiction, there is one sentence, and it is only one, from Gawyns perspective which boils down to describing the middle of the tower at round about the 23rd floor, but is incredibly vague. Meaning the tower could contain at least 40/50 floors.
My third problem: you wouldn't (or at least i don't) expect the flat top of the tower to be as large as the base - unless the tower tapers to a point. This is not mentioned in any of the books as far as I know, in fact I seem to recall the tower being described as 'sheer' - meaning that it goes straight up, and using the offical maps (not the greatest source but everything else is to scale) is over 200 metres wide. Meaning the tower is wider than it is tall, which leaves it looking too stubby, but tapering the tower means a lot more logistic calculations for the corridors and rooms and means that the higher you go, the smaller the rooms would become.
How are you dealing with the wings? This is one deviation I made from the maps, as the map has them coming out parallel to the tower. But with various directions I won't bother repeating here there is at least an East entrance, and would be stupid without a West one too. Which means guests arriving from those directions would have to travel through both the Novice and Accepted quarters before reaching the main bulk of the tower. A minor problem at this point is that the Nov/Acc quarters are different heights and that each is considerably taller than the tower base which cannot be taller than 2/3 storeys. Another minor problem is that each Wing is described as having a dome on top, but this is incredibly impractical as each Nov/Acc quarter has a garden situated at the bottom - meaning it cant be on top of these buildings.
I wont even begin to go into the amount of texture pack alterations I've had to do for details inside the tower alone - what bugs me is missing details from some of the Ajah quarters. The Greens and Blues floor tiles would be impossible to recreate - the same being said of the Greens doors - without more blocks and I'm already using the only mod I could find to add more default blocks in. Are you using any and would you care to share? Theres some blocks I just do not want to reskin as it means loss of details outside the Tower proper.
My god, text wall or what. And I'm not even done! Suffice to say I've had to make severe compromises with my dream of building an as-accurate-as-possible build and just had to go for an as-accurate-as-possible-but-still-epic-looking build. Which annoys me greatly. Best of luck with your build! I'll check back here to look for responses, I've also subscribed to your thing here (I registered just to comment on your build).