Minecraft Castles

Recently, August and I decided to buy this game called Minecraft. If you have never heard of it:

 Minecraft is a sandbox video game originally created by Swedish programmer Markus "Notch" Persson and later developed and published by Mojang. The creative and building aspects of Minecraft enable players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D procedurally generated world.

This is the description put out by Wikipedia, and it is both accurate and confusing, at least to me. Basically, the player is set into a world of "cubes." The graphics are incredibly simple as everything is formed from cubes of different textures, even the animals.

Survival world--click to enlarge

 You can play the game two ways: Survival and Creative. In survival, you are placed
in a randomly generated world with no tools or help of any kind.The goal is to survive by gathering resources and building a house. When you think you are strong enough, you can go fight one of the two bosses, the Wither or the Ender dragon.

Ender dragon--click to enlarge 

But be careful, because if you die, you might lose everything you took to fight the boss. In creative, you simply have access to all the types of blocks used to make each world and you may build anything you can think of in this mode. Here are some examples:

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I have played a lot of survival, but August prefers the creative mode. We recently decided to make a kingdom with castles in creative mode. Or, more accurately, two opposing kingdoms with castles. August is the nice side with colors of blue and yellow. I am the evil side with red and black. I thought I would share the progress we have made so far within our kingdoms. We are on opposite sides of a superflat map, which has no pesky trees or hills in the way. We each have one pre-generated village and a castle design to improve on from the internet. This first picture is August's castle entrance. He designed the towers on either end.

August's castle entrance--click to enlarge

August's castle entrance has a moving gate that pushes gravel up to block invaders. It is quite confusing to use redstone, the "power cables" of the game, so this is actually quite a feat.

Entrance with the gate up--click to enlarge

The entrance hall to August's castle, not quite finished yet.

August's entrance hall--click to enlarge

 August's pre-generated village.

His pre-generated--click to enlarge

Now, onto my evil castle. 

This is my castle entrance. I don't have any fancy moving gates like August, but I do have the red beacons in each tower that I can turn on and off at the flip of a lever.

My castle entrance--click to enlarge

As my castle is evil, I am attempting to make a long, dark hallway inside the walls of my castle. It actually worked pretty well, but did not show in the picture.

Long dark hallway--click to enlarge

Each of us will have an emblem when we are done. August has gone with a trident, as is shown on the flags by his gate. Mine is hopefully going to be a crown similar to the one below, but the diagonal/horizontal of the world is messing with my design at the moment.

My emblem--click to enlarge

This is my pre-generated village, but I have now started to add onto mine. I made a small, but very colorful, marketplace, a couple houses, and I also added in a blacksmiths.

My pre-generated village--click to enlarge

This is the blacksmith I built, with a villager inside who is actually a blacksmith. He is, in this picture, standing on the anvils, for whatever reason.

My blacksmith--click to enlarge

Last, but not least, I am currently working on an arena. When it is finished, it might be larger than the castle I am going to build inside those castle walls.

My arena--click to enlarge

So, there is a look at the gaming life of August and I. August thinks that so far we have put in about 12 hours work on this project, and there is still a lot more to come. Hope you enjoyed!