o hi

bonejangle here, I'm going to describe the Ziggurat project a bit.

We're doing a recreation of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, which is an old-ish Sumerian construction. Here's a link to the Wikipedia article, which also has pictures. I should also give credit to a user of the Minecraft Forums, Felix_Casus, who has already built one. I've drawn a bit of inspiration from it (mostly just getting an idea of lengths and widths of the tiers and whatnot, in the end I think his/hers will be bigger than the one I'm building) and I'd be remiss not to credit him/her. Here's a link to the thread.

We're planning on building it more or less 1:1, which 64m long, 46m wide, and 30m tall (this isn't including the long stairs in the front of the building, at least in our version). I had first thought of building it in sandstone, which is probably the closest match in terms of color and texture, but that's waaaay too much effort for how much I care about it (plus I don't want to take all the sand on the server). So, we're going to go ahead and do it in cobble. It's not the prettiest block unless you havea different texture pack, but it'll do.

We've started construction already, and have built the basics of the front facade and the walls of the base. It's wiped us out of cobblestone already, so the rest will wait while we shore up the numbers. The idea is to get the basic structure finished, then go through and add the details later. I haven't decided what to put in it, and if it were just me, it'd probably just remain empty through laziness.

On another note, I'm going to put up some other pictures of the electrified creeper we encountered. I was pretty surprised to see one so soon after the patch, but given the sheer amount of mobs we had been dealing with and the frequency of thunderstorms we'd gotten, I suppose it was only a matter of time. I lured it around and sacrificed myself to see how large of a crater it would make, since I'd heard they were more powerful. I was not disappointed. I'm kicking myself for not taking before/after pictures of the area, but oh well. Here's the little fella now: