So, a few of you might have heard me harping on about New Stalingrad when discussing various Minecraft things. The idea arose from two servers ago - those of you who were there might remember when some random arse came on and put holes in RJB's cathedral. Although it's a bastard thing to happen to someone, I actually rather liked the look of a half-destroyed building. And since it's not right for me to go and blow up someone else's stuff, the only option remaining is to build my own stuff and *then* bomb it flat. Back then, we had New Venice. Now, we have New Stalingrad. To reach it, head South from Spawn City, past the floating obsidian polyhedra and Taerkasten host station. [/URL] Right now, it's nowhere near complete. I've built 4 housing block shells (yay Buildcraft) and arranged them in a quartet between the two main roads to Spawn City. This is an alley situated between two housing blocks. And this is the main square with marble paving and a Lenin-style imitation statue product (ignore the floating Buildcraft engine assembly). However, since Buildcraft's templates don't distinguish between different types of block (boo Buildcraft) in version 2, I can't replicate complete housing blocks - I can only make the stone shells or the wood components, etc. So progress is going to be rather slow until we get an SMP version of Buildcraft 3. New Stalingrad will eventually have multiple areas of housing (all lovely and identical in true Soviet style), large factory districts and a church overlooking the main square (because we need a bell tower with snipers in it). Right now, one of the housing blocks has got hand-placed internal wooden walls, glass in the window slots, is completely lit up and has some of the "furniture" installed - if you want to look around it, use that one. Otherwise you'll just end up getting a surprise creeper. And then we wreck it. I don't want it completely levelled - just artfully destroyed. A few "airstrikes" consisting of jetpacks and dynamite here, a few frantic street battles with mining lasers there, some carefully placed and ignited netherrack for fires and a bit of mining laser explosive mode bombardment to add icing to the cake. Maybe even one single airburst nuke (placing that is my job). But that comes later, once it's finished.
Time for a little progress report. Using a seven-pass template construction technique, we can now assemble a mostly assembled and lit housing block in about half an hour with no user intervention beyond changing the builder's templates ever so often and keeping it well fed with materials and energy, though stair blocks, furnaces, water, some stone slabs, doors and beds need to be place manually afterwards. New Stalingrad now has another quartet of housing blocks, bringing the current state of construction to (side view): Roof View: Square View:
