Steps 3 to 11

So once again Sorry I didn't take shots of the rest of the steps. 

As you can see SkyWater is Nearing Completion.

You can see a few additions in this shot. These popped into my mind along the way and I'll cover them all in this post. 

I figured walking up all those stairs would start to suck right away so I decided to add some more transportation ideas into the mix.  In this shot you can see the Skyport and a couple of Airships on the left, sticking out on the right is a heliport. Up top you can see the top 2 floors of the town which stick up above the water line.

Here is a list of the steps and milestones I didn't take pictures of. At least you can follow the order it was built in... I'm trying to break the habit ;)

• Step 1:  Building the Domes
• Step 2:  Filling the Water Tower
• Step 3:  Streets and Plots
• Step 4:  The Farm
• Step 5:  Balconies
• Step 6:  Building the Town
• Step 7:  More Stairs
• Step 8:  Building the Terrace
• Step 9:  Heliports
• Step 10:  Designing an Airship
• Step 11:  The Skyport

Steps 4 Through 6 were were done at the same time.  I swapped around the 3 as one or the other got tedious.

The denizens of the server have started to take notice, so I threw up an info board at the main warp point. 

So Here is a Directory of sorts of the town. 

• Level 7:  Bar & Grill, Terrace, Concert stages
• Level 6:  Market, North and South Heliports
• Level 5:  Residential
• Level 4:  Town Center, West Skyport
• Level 3:  Residential
• Level 2:  Farm and Ranch
• Level 1:  I'm not quite sure what to do
• Level 0:  With these levels yet
• Levels -3 to -7: Shaft balconies
• Level -8: Ground Entrance, Seaport, Cargo Terminal
• Level -12: Lower Entrance

Keep scrolling for some highlights.

Level 7: Bar & Grill, Terrace

Here is a shot of the Terrace on the roof. I may have gone a little over board on the seating, but hey! I love a good Terrace in the summer and always hate it when there's no space...

The 4 centre Blocks are the Bars with 2 floors and their own roofs. The Main Terraces are built on the Roofs of the store plots on the level below. Bottom Left is one of two Concert Stages. I'm not too keen on this first design so these are likely to change at some point. 

Levels 3 and 5:  Residential
These levels are pretty nondescript. Once I got the homes built I left these alone as there weren't any additional Features to work on.

With the Floors filled in you can get a decent if watery view of the town from through the Water.

Level 4: Town Center, West Skyport

Level 4 is the Centre of the Domes. I had initially though of civic buildings for this level, Town offices, municipal vault and such. But it is essentially the same floor plan as the other levels only wider. 

The big feature on this floor is the Skyport.

So Since the very beginning of MC, people have been building Airships and Blimps of various sizes, just about everywhere. So when I started thinking About extra Transportation for SkyWater, the First thing on my mind was Airships. In fact, I'm moving Airships into a project of their own. 

But I'll go over some details here as well. 

So far I've designed 2 models, a Passenger Liner and a Cargo Ship. The Cargo ship was inspired by the new "Spy Blimp" designs the US Military has been toying with the last few years. It Started out as 2 Passenger ships side by side that I "welded" together.

The West Skyport is built Hanging off the side of Level 4. It has 5 Docks, the 3 centre Docks are for the Passenger Liners, and there is a Crew Dock for the Cargo Ships on either end. I don't intend to have Cargo at this port, but I wanted a place to dock both models side by side.

Level 2: Farm and Ranch

I wanted this to be a self sustaining town, so I made Level 2 into Farmland. One half of the floor is Irrigated Rows for Crops, the other Half is Pasture and pens for LiveStock

Levels 1 & 0: Undecided

I haven't Quite decided what to do with These floors yet. With the Taper the space is kinda awkward. Early on in the build I was toying with the idea of running pipes down the shaft and giving the town a working sewer. Had I gone that way, this would have been utility space. But when I dropped that Idea, I lost my only decent plan for this floor. I've considered Storage but that drew a blank as far as designs go. 

Levels -1 through -12:  Balconies, Ground entrance and Lower entrance

When I numbered the floors I wanted to differentiate between Town levels and Tower Levels. I didn't want 12 floors of nothing and then have the town start at 13. So I  picked the Taper as a mid point and called that 0.

While checking out The view, I realized Just how damned high the Dome is. From the Level 4 Balconies you can barely see the ground, never mind any scenery. With this in mind I took a look at the Tower, I realized that that was a decent height for a nice view.  So I put a Wrap-around Balcony on each floor. This also helped fill in all those Featureless Floors in the Shaft. The Entrances flip back and forth between floors because the Staircase takes 2 floors to wrap around completely, I just put the door in front of the stairs on each floor. This part was pretty tedious, and a little dizzying, The only generated part of this was the outer ring of the balconies. The rest was done by hand, So it was a lot of going around in circles

In the End the pit will be filled with water, but since the bottom Balcony is so Close to the ground I'll be making it the Ground entrance and will put in a bridge or two. I want to put a Seaport here as well, but I don't know how close I am to any seas. Since there is no room at the Skyport for Cargo, I'm also thinking of putting a lower Cargo Ship Dock down here for loading Cargo.

The lowest Level will have a few Tunnels as a Lower Exit, but so far I haven't decided what else to do Down there.

I'll grab some more detailed shots soon.

So far I estimate I've spent, 32 hours for the Structure, 40 hours for the interior and another 20 on the Skyport and Airships. 92 hours over 2 weeks? Naw i'm not addicted at all...

Step 2: Filling the Water tower

That Milestone I mentioned was the completion of the dome and adding the water. Once I was satisfied with the main framework, I patched a bunch of holes. (Part of the pain in the ass of having to generate the taper line by line.) 

I started at the bottom using fixwater to fill sections of the base and shaft. It doesn't work very well under overhangs so it took a while to get it filled.

Once filled with water, it casts a wicked shadow. In this shot you can also see a couple of holes that I missed on my first round.

Here I got my first glimpse of what the lake will look like.

Those nice big dimensions have given me Plenty of space for the town.

The stairs turned out pretty good once the water was in.

The bottom entrance is pretty dark now, so I'll have some lighting work to do once I get back to it.

The last two posts cover the first 32 or so hours of work.

Step 1: Building the Domes

I have yet to get over my bad habit of not stopping to take screenshots. So I apologize for not having more Making Of shots. I did remember to stop for pictures on day two as I hit a miletone.

As I mentioned before I tried a few different shapes while brainstorming about this project. 

It was a little daunting at first, especially since this was the first MC build in a year, never mind the scope!

Since I was going for the water tower look I was pretty firm on a bulb tapering down to a vertical shaft as the general shape. This first shot is one of my early tests. At this point I was still judging the dimensions I wanted. This was also when I started contemplating water.

To Add water I decided on an inner dome to house the town and an outer dome around that to hold water around the town. Now in order to get a decent sized space for the town, I of course had to Jack up the dimensions a bunch. Which is good 'cause I Love Big Builds!

After a few more tries I settled on size I liked for the outer dome. After that I shrunk the dimensions a bit for the inner dome. The Final dimensions are: 200 Blocks across and 80 high for the outer dome and 160 across  and 60 high for the inner dome, The full structure is 200 Blocks high. Once I had some basic framework added to the dome I cut the tops off both so I could have the town stick out the top. This also gives the town a nice surrounding lake at the top between the two domes.

Thanks to World Edit, the domes were nice and easy to make. Tapering down the bottom however, was a pain in the ass. I first figured out the shaft dimensions (40 across for the outer and 20 across for the inner) and then tapered down the bottom of the domes to meet their respective shafts. 

Once I had the tapering done, I started on some stairs. After all, people gotta get up to that town after all eh. Since I like having headroom when I walk around inside, I decided to space my floors at 10 block intervals. 

that gave me 9 blocks between floors to work with. I also followed this spacing on the framing. 

After a few attempts, I found a design that fit and gave room to fly up the middle. Once I had it done I finished off with 20 floors total. I split it up by setting 0 in the middle and counting up into the dome from there, Then down into the shaft from there. This gave me Floors 0 to 7 for the Dome and -12 to -1 for the shaft. 

Project Intro

Freshly back from my year long hiatus, I've been enjoying the new additions, and been hard at work on a couple of new builds,

When I saw the new height limit I started revisiting the various ideas I had had in Beta but couldn't really pull off with only 128 height to work with.

I remembered something I saw on ImDeity last year. I don't remember who built it, and I never saw it finished, but it did inspire me at the time. He told me he was building A town in a glass dome high above the ground. I thought that was Pretty Cool!

When I thought back to this idea, I knew it was perfect for the new height limit, so I started thinking about Shapes and Sizes. After trying out a few ideas, I thought back to the build that inspired me, At the time I thought it kinda looked like a water tower, but was only the town, no water. So I thought about Combining the two. I decided on building a Town inside a Giant Water Tower.

SkyWater is the result.