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.
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!)
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.
