Abandoned builds: The Forgotten side of Minecraft

SO. Abandoned builds. I got them, you got them. Pretty much everyone who have ever played Minecraft for more than five minutes have them. Abandoned builds are basically these plans we make that just never see the light of day. Whether it be that you abandon them long before you even start laying out the ground plan in your survival/creative world, or you lay out the floor plan, or even start building the build, but than just choose to abandon it. Abandoned builds is probably one of the most forgotten parts about Minecraft. Not many players pay their abandoned builds any attention, and it is kind of sad because quite often, at least for those who spend a lot of time in Minecraft in the same world, abandoned builds is what started the world to begin with. It may be their original base which they have since abandoned in favor of something much more suited for an experienced player, or it could be a farm or a generator that they built but have since opted to abandon for whatever reason. Some players even have entire worlds they have abandoned. I would be lying if I were to say that I got no worlds that I have abandoned, because I got a whole bunch of worlds I used to practice my skills in Minecraft before I moved from Creative to Survival mode. Some of these worlds no longer even exists, because I got no known backups of them anymore. Whilst others, such as my Demo World which was the first world I ever started in Minecraft, are primarily only ever used when I wanna have a look back at my oldest of the old building styles.

In this post, I wanna highlight this forgotten side of Minecraft, and blow the dust from some of the oldest and most forgotten builds I have built myself at some point over the course of my Minecraft career. Some of these builds used to be the emerald in my world. The builds I would show to friends and fellow players whenever I wanted to showcase my skills in Minecraft. Most of these builds are today forgotten all about, and no longer receive any attention in terms of extensions or repairs.

1. The Pillars of Fire

Perhaps the oldest abandoned build on my list, is the Pillars of Fire. The Pillars of Fire was an experimental build I built back in late 2014, when my world was relatively young and unexplored. It's primary purpose was for me to practice and discover exactly how lava behaved when exposed to different type of fountains and whether I could use lava as an improvised source of light. The build was a catastrophic failure however, as back when I built this build I was very inexperienced with Minecraft, and had no clue as to what armor or fire protection was. The first accident was me burning down a wooden house I had built on site to accommodate my tools and resources. Then the first pillar I built burned off a significant portion of the surrounding forest, which was not really too much of a problem but it was still annoying. But the biggest problem about building this build, was the fact that I would frequently catch myself on fire, and quite a lot of resources was burned away as a result of me burning myself to death. After a couple of deaths, I abandoned the build in rage, and swore I would never, ever, EVER, resume construction on the site. A promise I have kept for 2years now, as I have not made any progress on this build since early 2015. This build however is one of the luckier ones, as my transportation line runs straight through it, so it is not as forgotten as some of the other builds on my list.

2. The Original Giant Tree Farm

Now, those who have seen any of my posts in the Minecraft Community on Google+ should know that the very pride in my survival world at the moment is my giant tree farm which have been under construction for more than 2years now. But this tree farm would not even have gotten started, had it not been for me abandoning another tree farm. Because originally, my tree farm was planned to be put a whole lot closer to my base than where it is under construction today. 5minutes in fact of constant travelling separated the two locations when I relocated my farm. The original tree farm though was planned to be 500blocks long, and 300blocks wide. Which is not far from the size my new tree farm have, but this original tree farm was located in a far worse location. Which was the main reason why it eventually got abandoned when I discovered a new location where I could relaunch the project. So today, all that remains is the blocks of dirt and soil I used to measure up the 500blocks that were to become the length of the tree farm. This build was not really abandoned; more like relocated, but the remains of the original plans still stands as an eerie remainder of numerous hours of planning and measuring that in the end proved to be wasted.

The beginning of the vast stretch of dirt and soil that were to become one of the walls of the tree farm. This, along with a few signs, is all that remains on site as a reminder of the abandoned build.

A sign indicating the measured length of the farm up to this point is all that remains to remind players that there is an abandoned build on the site of the original tree farm. 

3. The Milky Way

This is perhaps one of the more stupid builds I have undertaken. The idea sounded simple enough, but it turned out to be way too overwhelming. This was during the planning phases of my intercontinental transportation system, which have since been constructed to displace this abandoned build. The plan was as simple as it could get. I would build two lanes of minecart tracks, one going in one direction, with the other track going in the opposite direction, so that the network could support two carts going in the opposite directions. The only problem? I was planning to make the build out of solid quartz. Now for those who are not aware of this, mining for quartz in the nether turned out to be a nightmare. I could spend a full 8hours mining for quartz, and in the end I was only able to build what I will show you on the screenshot below here. Easy to say, I was not impressed by the amount of quartz one can gather over the course of a day. And as much as I could spend my train rides back and forth between my grandma's place over the summer, this was not the kind of build I had any interest in investing time in. So that spelled the end of the Milky Way. 2weeks of hard work and dozens of blocks of quarts went into this thing. Over time I tried to resume the build, by replacing the quartz with the much more easily obtainable Birch Wood Planks, but in the end that too ended up being a waste of my time. Eventually, I decided to build a completely different transportation network, a network which turned into a ground breaking success. And thus, the need for this build was wiped clean from my world, and today the Milky Way sits empty in the middle of the savannah, as an eerie reminder of what can happen when one decides to build something that one does not have the required resources for. The abandoning of this build did however have one positive outcome, in that it lead to the planning and construction of my primary storage facility, which today stores several thousand blocks of various resources.

But despite this, I still have the Milky Way empty, and it still remains one of my costliest and time consuming builds to have been abandoned.

The Milky Way, empty and abandoned.

Parts of the Milky Way where I eventually replaced the Quartz with much cheaper and easier accessible resources. This did still not save my build from being abandoned a few days after this was completed.

4. The Original Zurvival Intercontinental Transportation Network

The main thing that separates this build from the builds above, is the fact that this one was actually completed prior to being abandoned. Also, parts of the build is still being used on a daily basis today. This build here was one of the earliest builds I ever undertook. It connected the various parts of my survival world together, and supported the founding of what my world is today. In it's early days, it was meant for only one track. So only one minecart, going in one direction. But as my skills increased and my craving for better builds grew, the old network did not stand up to my expectations. A brand new network was planned and successfully constructed. As a consequence, the old network was disconnected and abandoned. It still stands though, an everlasting reminder of the good old days. The days when I was a noob and had no clue as to what I was doing. 

A significant portion of this build was however lost during the Great Purge of Old Chunks when I converted my world into an AMPLIFIED world, but thats a story for another time.

One of the many stations on the old transportation network

Abandoned parts of the old transportation network

The new and much more modern transportation network that eventually replaced the old transportation network. This one features two tracks, and can thus be used should my world ever see the need for two players to travel in opposite going directions.

And that's it for now. I got more builds coming up, and there are a whole load of stuff still to be done in my survival world, so do stay tuned for more updates :).

- Mattias.