Secondly, and the biggest, I'm being sidetracked by a massive project in Minecraft. A sudden idea that sprouted from two others.
In a small flat area surrounded by some of the tallest mountains in my map, build a fortress wall (the front wall for now, the rest can be done later) which can potentially contain a royalty hall inside a mountain. I started planning the whole thing yesterday morning - drawing, measuring, re-drawing, stripping a few layers of a mountain... The whole thing took almost a day.
![](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v235/cron_z/Blog/minecraftcastplan.jpg)
Today, I started laying down the outline of the front wall. Shortly after I stacked the first layer, then the second... soon I had the basic wall down and just needed to work on the towers. I completed the two small towers and now I'm almost done one of the two towers. What I failed to calculate is now costing me a lot of time (but it's so much fun in Minecraft!)
![](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v235/cron_z/Blog/minecraftcast1.jpg)
The roof of the towers are made of bricks, which requires clay. It was easy to make the small towers. But the big towers require a ton of bricks, therefore four times that amount of clay. I spent about two hours walking around the map, using Cartographer and selective mapping, getting all the clay I could.
I now have an extra 256 bricks. I hope this will be enough, else I'm probably going to have to resort to a fourth portal in a lost end of the Nether to get to a loose end of the map hoping for more clay. This is creating another problem. Smelting all the clay into bricks requires a lot of coal. I'm slowly running out of this precious (in Minecraft) mineral.
![](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v235/cron_z/smileys/4.gif)