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.

Plan for the day: August 2nd

Hi everyone, and welcome to my plans for the day!



Primary goals for today

• Find and locate an area on the map that could be used to design a sea- and mountain based base. The base would be equipped with a storage facility, a small harbor, as well as living quarters. The base would be built in such a fashion that it starts as a boat house out at sea and integrates into the mountain.
• Begin the first stages of constructing the base, which amongst much else includes connecting the base to the world network in the nether for easy and convenient access to it.
• Document the first few stages of the project, and post it as a short tutorial on the blog.
• Plan and lay the foundation for the base, as well as planning what should be included in it's design

Secondary goals

• Complete the first stage of the base, which involves building a starter's house.
• Carve out the first stages of the mountain-part of the base.
• Make the base independent with it's own food supply.

This will the first time I am building a base of this type, so it will be very interesting to see how this one turns out.

- Shaun.

Progress of the day : Juli 30th

Hi there everyone!


Here's the progress I made on my build over the course of yesterday. I was unable to post the progress of the day yesterday due to being away for a theatrical play, so I'm posting this today instead.


My goals for the day were as follows:

Primary goal : Supply my new warehouse with the first chests, and equip them with signs so that one can easily identify which resources the individual chests contains.

Secondary goals : Expand my warehouse with more floors, and make it gain height by building more rows of blocks on the top.

The primary goal was fullfilled. My new warehouse now have a significant bit more chests than it had before I started for the day. It have also gained more signs, more frames, and I have also worked on the registration over the items. The secondary goal was unfortunately not fullfilled due to a lack of both time and resources. I instead focused the time I had on expanding my old tree farm a bit so that I can harvest more trees that I need to make the chests required for the warehouse. 

The current look of my warehouse. There have been more chests added, but those are off-camera as they are in the row right next to this one.

The goal for today will be posted in a separate post. So keep an eye open for that post :).

- Mattias.

Chests. Chests everywhere

Hi everyone!


Though I'd share this small update with you all. As you may already know, the plan for the day is to equip my new warehouse with chests in which I can store my resources and items in. I've been trying to figure out the best possible way to create a system in which one can easily find the resources one are looking for, and after a bit back and forth I found out that the easiest solution is often the best solution. I've taken inspiration from my dad who have allways been good at sorting stuff out. So what I ended up doing, was that I have started to mark each individual "rack" of chests with a number, starting from R1. What this will allow me to do, is to create a complete registration over the chests and resources, and should I ever need any particular resource or item, I can simply go into the registration overview, find the resource I need, and simply find the rack of chests listed underneath the respective resource. I am still early in the phase of equipping my warehouse with chests, so I may have to reorganize stuff later on, but this is how I have decided to do it for the time being.

My current progress in my warehouse, with the registration visible in the front of each invidual rack of chests.

- Mattias.

Introducing: Plan for the Day

Hi everyone, and welcome to my first Plan For the Day. You guys will see a lot of these posts in the future, as I will make daily plans for what I wanna accomplish in my survival world day by day. The Plan For the Day posts will allways be posted before I start working on the builds themselves, and when I end my progress, I will post a new post in which I will make a summary of the progress I've made for the day. So let's not waste more time and get right to it.

My warehouse, the build I will mainly focus on today.

Plan for the Day, July 30th 2016

Primary goal : Supply my new warehouse with the first chests, and equip them with signs so that one can easily identify which resources the individual chests contains.

Secondary goals : Expand my warehouse with more floors, and make it gain height by building more rows of blocks on the top.

- Mattias.

Welcome home! (introducing my primary base)

Hi everyone!


So for the first post in my quest to tell the story of my survival world, I decided to focus on the most essential and key parts of my survival world, that being the very heart and core of it all: My primary base, storage facility, mine, secondary observation deck, and the first tree farm I ever built, the latter of which remains a vital part of my everyday activities in my survival world.

View of my primary base from my bridge. On the right hand side we can see my tree farm which currently supplies my world with birch wood, and in the middle of the shot we can see my secondary observation deck which in the early days of my world served as a waypoint I could see when exploring the fresh lands around my base. It has later lost much it's former use, but still serves as a observation deck. Just underneath the observation deck, covered in protective cobblestone and "hidden" away (or used to be hidden away in it's earlier days), there, you can find my primary base. 

Let's start off with my primary base. When I first started to play Minecraft, I was a noob, and had no experience whatsoever with builds in Minecraft. So what I ended up doing during my first day in Minecraft, was I found a naturally generated cave, cealed of the lower bottom of it, and carved my home into it's entrance. This, was my first establishment and the place I spent my first night and second day in before I was able to gather enough resources to build what now resides on top, that being a small and simple square house. It was originally built in wood and had only 2floors, each floor being 2blocks high, but after reading on the wiki that wood could burn down if hit by lightning, I decided to cover my base in cobblestone just in case so as to avoid it burning to the ground.

The entrance to my primary base as it appears today. During special occassions the walls here will be covered in banners in all kinds of colors, depending on the occassion.

In the early days of my survival world, I lacked the experience and will to fight the hostile mobs that lurked around my base, and I did not want to walk far away from my base and running the risk of starving to death, as I had no idea how to gather food. Yes, I was that noobish back in the old days of my world. The only food I knew about was bread, and the wheat took forever to mature, so I had to conserve as much energy as I possibly could and walk as little as possible. On day 3, I therefor ended up making a run for it and collected enough sand to smelt the glass I needed to build a small and simple greenhouse, taking the shape of a glass cube with oak wood as it's framing. This, was what would turn into my first tree farm when I finally sorted my food situation out properly. Due to my paranoia of being stalked by creepers and other mobs, I ended up connecting my tree farm to my base through the use of an above-ground tunnell, which made it possible for me to harvest wood and access my tree farm without having to go out into the outdoors. Though this tunnell has later turned into more of a hinder rather than something useful, it has been able to survive to this day and it's still used, though rarely now that I have built a proper walkway system. As I stockpiled on resources, I began running out of resources, and had to expand my base with a small warehouse. With how paranoid I was about being stalked by creepers, I ended building my warehouse directely connected to my base, and have it hover in midair so as to save down on ground floor. Without knowing it back than, I had set the stage for what would later turn into my signature build in Zurvival, that being my supermassive base, built 98% in midair.

A view from inside my mine which is located underneath my primary base. 

As time passed, I soon began expanding my base, and over the two years that have passed, I have expanded my primary base to encompass a tree farm, cow and sheep farms, an automated smeltery, and my most recent addition; a massive warehouse which will store all my future resources and items. The mine underneath my base also serves as an extension to the base itself, seeing that it has turned into more of a caving project over the years rather than just for mining purposes. My base also features a two laned transportation system via minecarts, which takes you to the rest of my survival world, though it has not been expanded properly yet with the two lanes.

My automated smeltery. It runs on lava and will automatically smelt resources. Because it's located inside my spawn chunks, it will constantly smelt resources on it's own, no matter how far away I go. As long as I'm in the Overworld and it has enough fuel and stuff to smelt, it will run without the need for me to replenish any of the resources. 

My primary base will be shown a significant bit of attention in the nearest future, seeing that my current major project, my new warehouse, are being constructed just behind it. My warehouse will be connected to my primary base, and will be accessed through entering the base and than the warehouse itself. I am currently also planning to add a conveyor belt of hoppers so that I can transport resources from my mines to my base, but we're talking long-term plans as I do not have the resources required for such an extensive operation to be undertaken.





See you around in the next post, so please do stay tuned :)!


- Mattias.