sculkapologist

[sculkapologist]

I have plenty of other projects I should be working on BUT then Mochi started building a shop to fill in the huge wall of dirt between the greenhouse and the boardwalk by the water, and I became CONSUMED with the need to join in and decorate a bunch of tiny houses.... SO!! TOWNHOUSE TIME!! You can also see buildings that Boo (the lime green)and Mochi (the grey and prismarine shop) have been working on in that first image… there's still a bunch along the boardwalk that's under construction, too. I built three townhouses and decorated the upstairs of mochi's shop, many more images under the cut!!

The blue townhouse was the first one I made, with the exterior inspired pretty directly from mechitect's townhouse design tutorial.

it's pretty simple! It's when I started to discover alcoves are interesting with these tiny buildings, since you're sort of dependent on what the house next to you is doing. Oh, also, that painting is one of my custom maps.

The pink townhouse was a little more ambitious - this one has a little kitchen, an aquarium idea I got from klay_designs_mc on instagram and TWO tiny bedrooms (one for the grownups and one for the kids), which may seem very straightforward but actually i took a great deal of psychic damage arranging them to fit in this little 8x8 space

we have some kind of resource pack on our realm that makes every mob drop mob heads occasionally, and I just really like sticking them on shelves as like... some kind of toys or figurines or plushies.

Anyway, while I was excitedly showing my progress to my friends, Mochi asked if I'd be willing to decorate the upstairs of his flower shop -- the building next to my blue townhouse. He wanted it to be a living space above the shop, and mentioned that the large windows might be nice for a kitchen, and other than that left me to my own devices.

TREMENDOUSLY PROUD OF THIS ONE TBH...!!! bed design was inspired by a bluenerd tutorial, and the little hearts are as always inspired by my fav builder CroissantCat, though honestly my entire minecraft portfolio should just have "inspired by bluenerd and/or croissantcat" on the first page. (the lamps are those mob heads again btw -- you can do this with the existing skeleton heads, but if you HAVE glow squid heads like... WHY NOT USE THEM)

anyway at this point I had obviously completely lost my mind, so my third townhouse has an upstairs, a basement, a home office, AND a bathroom. (it wasn't going to have a bathroom originally, but Boo saw the downstairs and gasped in excitement b/c he thought it was a bathroom, sO LIKE.... OBVIOUSLY AFTER THAT I HAD TO ADD A BATHROOM)

watched a WHOLE BUNCH of blendigi Modern Interior Design tutorials for ideas here, including some armour stand crimes to make THAT INCREDIBLE OFFICE CHAIR???? but im still very pleased with my decision to use the one Long Painting as a TV screen lmao

there were actually a whole bunch of planning scribbles for this... it started out with just a little layout of 3 possible designs for townhouse facades, and then turned into MANY floorplan attempts as I tried to figure out how to fit everything I wanted into these smaller spaces:

Anyway, I think that's everything!! Thanks for joining me on this tour of my townhouses lmao, hopefully this has sated my craving for interior design for a bit!!

#minecraft #block game liveblogging #minecraft screenshots #minecraft build #mineblr #minecraft aesthetic #bsl shaders #this was SO fun tbh #SOMETIEMS U JUST NEED TO BUILD.. A LITTLE HOUSE....

[sculkapologist]

We had a storage warehouse on our realm already, but I really wanted a space for plant-specific storage for the ten million oak leaves I inevitably need to save for custom trees -- so I built us a greenhouse! I think this might be the largest build I've done yet!!

A couple of things have labels, but for the most part storage spaces are delineated by the plants themselves -- barrels for a particular type of leaf have the corresponding sapling sitting on top, flowerboxes show off what kinds of flowers go in the barrels next to them, etc. I really wanted the space to have practical room to store EVERY PLANT, but to also feel like the primary purposes is growing and enjoying them.

And bonus planning sketches:

it took a LOT of planning -- these are just a few of the sketches I did trying to figure out where everything should go. IT WAS HONESTLY QUITE INTIMIDATING TO SORT OUT, I can't believe it's done!!

Also, a couple shots of the little dirt storage room just b/c I think it turned out nice too:

If you wanna watch me walking through the space (these screenshots don't quite show it all), I streamed a little tour recently over here!

#minecraft #block game liveblogging #minecraft screenshots #minecraft build #complementary shaders #rethinking voxels #minecraft aesthetic #mineblr #this one took FOREVER to get a design I liked too #really proud of the finished product tho....

[sculkapologist]

It's so hard to get good pictures of paths, but I love making them....

@tinfoilsnow is building a horse sanctuary across the water, @corruptedendermachine built a beautiful bridge to it (which you can see a few glimpses of in the background here), and I was in charge of making a natural-ish path wide enough for horses to travel through, from the edge of town to the bridge. Decided to pick some colours from Mochi's block palette so it would all kind of match, and I'm really happy with the result!! Also did my best to set up the path to offer some nice views of that bridge on the way. :>

Might go back in and touch up a couple of spots later, but this was A VERY LONG PATH so glad to call it finished for now! On to my next project, which you can see snippets of in the background here, too.....

#minecraft #minecraft screenshots #minecraft build #complementary shaders #rethinking voxels #unobtrusive weather #jerms better leaves #block game liveblogging #minecraft aesthetic #mineblr

[sculkapologist]

do you have any little corrupted world fun facts? just like, little tidbits and minor details …crumbs, mayhaps?

Oooo lemme see, what’s some small things we’ve pondered…..

Jack’s wandering trader coat was originally not code corruption; he chose it to match the distinctive look of the wandering traders, to advertise to villagers and fellow players alike that he was bringing goods to sell and trade! But wearing the coat made him seem a good candidate for their code, and now it’s a bit of both things. Wandering Trader code also probably contributes to Jack’s instincts to flee rather than fight.

Joey has always had the power to use commands – he didn’t know they were CODE before, it was just a thing he could do. When I asked Boo about this, he said, casually, “you know, there’s villagers, and there’s witches… some people just have more powers than other people,” which is the Most Joey Response Possible, I think. Mochi joked “he’s op and he doesn’t know it.”

something I think is really neat to ponder is the concept of custom things in minecraft – you know, like, when you make a small tree out of a fence post and some leaves, is it still a fence post? When I talked about this with mochi, we really liked the idea that this is just part of building, where builds are imbued with intention and become the thing they’re meant to be. Concrete powder and fences that are meant to be leaves and branches literally become a tree. Others can see what it was made from, but they all see the tree. This is going to be MIND BOGGLING for Pete.

#corrupted world au #minecraft au #it can read our thoughts (ask tag)

[sculkapologist]

I LOVE THEM.............

ive seen a lot of trafficblr posts about Etho and Cleo being so on the same page in the end, both Understanding and Accepting that it's already over in a way no one else ever does, but the thing I can't stop thinking about is how this feels like the moment they both REALISED they were on the same page -- where Etho understood what Cleo's question really meant, and finally really answered it.

#trafficblr #traffic smp #secret life smp #secret life spoilers #secret life fanart #secret life cleo #secret life etho #cletho #zombiecleo #ethoslab #mcytblr #block game art tag #gosh golly what a finale

[sculkapologist]

boo and I have been thinking of doing some headshot commissions this month (more info HERE if you're interested!) and he was like "pick a character and draw a quick headshot so we can try it out" and, well, these are the guys on my mind, so........ have a couple of divorcees that are also married!!

(drawing and inks by me, colours by @corruptedendermachine !)

#mcyt #mcyt fanart #mcytblr #hermitblr #hermitcraft #secret life cleo #ethoslab #zombiecleo #block game art tag

[sculkapologist]

WHEW, new painting finished and added to the art gallery! it's "Nether II" because this one was my second attempt at a nether landscape, when I was first figuring out how to make images that would work as map art.

This one's 2x2, so four maps went into its creation! More progress under the cut!

Here's the original concept! Same process as last time; draw a simple digital drawing in map-safe colours, shrink and compress the image to 32x32, then convert it to map-safe colours again. This one is still using that limited palette that I'd assumed was the default flat colours but turned out to be all the BRIGHTEST shades, which meant a single continuous staircase for each of the 4 maps...

...Except, as you might notice, for the frame -- I got frustrated with the picture frame part being 3 different materials and thought this might be a good opportunity to test out full staircasing possibilities -- up, down, and flat -- to create variation in a single colour that's more subtle! So the frame is kind of doing its own thing here.

(boo set off fireworks when i finished the whole thing, it was great)

This was a lot of work but I'm really pumped to finish a 2x2! Part of the reason I set out on this quest was because I love the existing 1x1 paintings, but so few of the larger sizes have the same vibes. Huge shoutouts to literally everyone else on the server for helping me gather materials and tear down each map so the next one could go up.

#minecraft #minecraft screenshots #minecraft map art #block game liveblogging #someone asked if we're doing this madness in survival; it IS a survival world but a lot of difficulties have been turned off #no fall damage and creepers cant destroy your build #so it's a more chill world but YEAH we DO have to gather all of the things #Boo helped with a new beacon setup to tear everything down faster from here on out so thats very exciting

[sculkapologist]

just wanted to see what etho would look like in the style i use for corrupted world,

#block game art tag #secret life etho #secret life smp #secret life fanart #trafficblr #ethoslab #etho fanart

[sculkapologist]

Some progress on the forest lake!! More under the cut:

This dirt wall was driving me bonkers:

It doesn't look good from any angle, but there's a path on top so you can't just like..... get rid of it. finally decided part of the problem is that the dirt blends in too much with the tree so i just REPLACED THE WHOLE THING WITH A LIL CAVE! Behold:

Feeling WAY better about this. I tried to also use it to add a little bit of very needed elevation variety by taking you up behind the tree instead of having the whole path around the lake be right beside the water's edge.

There's a little pond inside the cave,

and if you look closely, it contains a secret passage..... (the secret passage doesn't go anywhere significant atm, it just takes you under the path, but I WAS VERY ENCHANTED BY HIDDEN UNDERWATER PASSAGE where just a glimpse of light within suggests there's more to it.....)

Anyway, hanging out in the cave is what gives you that lovely view of the lake from the top of the post!

I was watching a video the other day on building custom villages, where the guy was like "one thing that's very important is to decide where the border of your village is; where you're going to STOP, or else this is a project that can really grow out of control" AND YOU KNOW WHAT, THAT'S A GOOD POINT, so I've decided I want to clean up a bit behind the mushrooms up there -- the one area thats still lit by torches!! -- and then im gonna call the forest lake DONE, and anything else I want to build for the forest will be a NEW ADDITION, so that I am not just doing it forever lmao.

Would love to get a video of just walking through the place with shaders someday... it's a lot of fun making spaces that are the coolest when you're walking through them

#minecraft #block game liveblogging #minecraft build #minecraft screenshots #complementary shaders #rethinking voxels

[sculkapologist]

I’m not sure exactly how to put this to words, but I think it’s fascinating that minecraft players have sort of… figured out a lot of things that make spaces beautiful, but also, the base game doesn’t have to and shouldn’t do them. Minecraft is beautiful, but it lives within its own bounds, where trees are square and come straight out of the ground and rivers are just water with dirt and gravel and sand at the bottom. YOU can construct a natural-looking coastline, or build complex trees, or vary textures of dirt and coarse dirt and rooted dirt and just a bit of concrete powder to keep the pattern looking natural along a dirt path, but minecraft itself has to operate under the rules of what its things are: Dirt is dirt. Rooted dirt is dirt that an azalea tree has put roots in. Path blocks are paths. This holds it back, and that’s good, because if the whole world already looked like a dedicated builder had been terraforming it for hours, then how could you ever build anything there? Every new space minecraft adds looks beautiful but in a way that begs you to improve it. We know how to make Minecraft prettier, but the only reason that’s fun is because Minecraft itself refuses to take our advice. I think that’s neat.

#minecraft #block game yelling tag

[sculkapologist]

secret life is transforming me into an ethogirl at alarming speeds,

anyway im so normal about etho's episode five. Don't mind me im just casually rotating a version of this scenario where his legs literally physically lock up and actually can't move, like totally normal people do

#block game art tag #secret life smp #ethoslab #etho fanart #traffic series #trafficblr #traffic smp #secret life fanart #secret life spoilers #grian fanart #grian #squinting at etho fanart intepretations trying to figure out how to draw this boy #really debated his footwear situation but wearing flipflops to a death game is the most ethoslab thing I can imagine #secret life etho

[sculkapologist]

For the corrupted world au, how do updates work? Like, skulk and sniffers and amethyst are all really new, did they just….. appear?

We liked the idea that the updates just feel like new discoveries. You stumble upon a cherry tree, something new that you’ve never seen, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist until now – you must’ve just never found a grove before. Calibrated Sculk Sensors, Decorated Pots, Crafters – they were probably always possible to make, we’re just only now figuring out how or deciding to try. Joey can… tell, now, when things are New to their world, recent additions. The Prophet is also certain that they weren’t in the code before, undiscovered because they weren’t there to find. Which… does play a little strangely with his own memories of his history; trail ruins or sniffers might be remnants of a time he was personally around for, things he remembers, yet he knows they “didn’t exist” until now. It’s maybe understandable that the Prophet’s grip on reality is a little… hazy.

#corrupted world au #minecraft au #it can read our thoughts (ask tag)

[sculkapologist]

...sorry if this is a bit of a rude question, but does joey have Fucked Up Big Hands, or are they normal (proportional to his body) and im just going crazy?

LMAO NO THIS IS A REASONABLE QUESTION. Nothing about Joey’s post-corruption proportions is normal…Boo and I just keep stretching him longer and longer every time we draw him

#corrupted world au #minecraft au #ender joey #it can read our thoughts (ask tag)

[sculkapologist]

well obviously now that I've finished one single painting, I had to make: AN ART GALLERY! I'm very excited about it and thrilled with how it's come out; i've been wanting to try some kinda tuscany-inspired thing for a while.

On the inside, the trapdoors are hiding barrels in the floor; I've put copies of the map pieces for my custom painting there, so that other players can come by for a print if they want to hang custom paintings in their own home!

Some planning under the cut:

this one actually has a LOT of planning to make it all work, aND HONESTLY IT PROBABLY COULDVE STILL USED MORE, but here's a few pages of me figuring out the basic look, figuring out how big it needed to be to house a bunch of paintings just in case i make a bunch of paintings (originally I was trying to figure out a way to start small and slowly introduce more space, but then i realised I could just fill it out with the official paintings and thus never have a big sad gallery filled with one (1) painting lmao), and figuring out how to make the skylights work. It's kinda fun that, due to the skylights being a significant source of light, the gallery does get darker at night. GALLERY CLOSED, EVERYONE GO HOME

That room at the top is the artist's room:

A tiny little cramped/cozy room for whoever runs this place (me) to sleep. I wanted the lectern to basically be an 'easel' of sorts, with the latest painting-in-progress visible on it -- it's linked to a map on the site, so as I work, the painting on the easel will update!!

if you wanna see us run around this space, Boo showed off the gallery in this stream, which should have the VOD available for a couple more days. And if you wanna see screenshots of stuff as I'm working on it before it all gets collected here, my patreon discord has a place for me to share minecraft screenshots and planning photos now! Nothing too fancy, but if you wanna throw a dollar at me, feel free to take a peek!

#minecraft build #minecraft #minecraft screenshots #block game liveblogging #complementary shaders

[sculkapologist]

just in time for Halloween, I have finished: A SPOOKY CUSTOM PAINTING!!

well the timing was a coincidence but MAN, this has been a BIG project and I'm so excited to have one complete -- as you can see from my off-hand here, this is map art!!! I kept having the thought "wow I wish minecraft had more paintings" and then realised.... maybe i could make this happen....... process under the cut!

I really like the sort of ambiguous, compressed, pixellated look of a lot of the 1x1s and wanted to try to mimic that, so I designed this by making a simple drawing in Map Art Safe Colours, shrinking it down to 16x32, and then converting it to Map Art Safe Colours again to get the final picture I'd be making (and also adding a frame, so it'd look like a minecraft painting):

I was trying to stick to a flat map (i couldnt find any tutorials for staircasing that weren't just "and then plug it into a schematic program," and I wanted to try to do this by hand), which meant my palette was SUPER limited, probably the most difficult thing about creating this; there were a LOT of previous attempts that just didn't have enough colours available to let them shrink nicely. BUT THEN IT TURNED OUT the palette I was working from was accidentally all the LIGHTEST shades rather than the middle shade SO I HAD TO LEARN TO STAIRCASE ANYWAY

For anyone unfamiliar, the way the "shading" works on maps is that a block has a middle shade if it's the same level as the block north of it (flat), a lighter shade if it's taller than the block north of it, and a darker shade if it's shorter than the block north of it -- so in order to get a whole section to be The Same Lighter Shade, each "line" of the section must be taller than the previous one, leading to a staircase effect.

in order to make a 128x128 area into a 16x16 pixelart, each "pixel" is A FULL STACK of blocks in whatever colour, so HUGE shoutouts to @corruptedendermachine and @inkcryptid for gathering all these blocks for me! BOO MINED A TRULY TERRIFYING AMOUNT OF TERRACOTTA LMAO. And thanks to maf and @tinfoilsnow and phos for building the block-catching area underneath, and helping me tear the first map down to build the second piece!

While tallying up blocks, making a paint-by-number-looking key for myself to reference, putting out a Needed Materials List, and of course actually creating the art all took additional time, I put out the materials list and a call for help with block-gathering in mid-october... this took only a couple of weeks to build??? Admittedly I was VERY excited and focused on it haha.

I'm hoping to make more of these... there are two more designs included in the Needed Materials list that we just need to finish gathering blocks for, and I've made a few new designs utilising the Whole Palette now that I feel pretty confident that I understand staircasing, which I still need to tally up blocks for... so we'll see if I can pull those off!!

#minecraft #minecraft screenshots #vanilla minecraft #minecraft map art #block game liveblogging #minecraft build

[sculkapologist]

aaaa working in mizuno was great fun.... pretty simple path I made to lead up from my forest area to Phos's apartment, and they almost always use mizuno textures when they play, so wanted to make sure it looked good for them! neat to play with some of those unique double slab textures haha

Bonus: SORRY THE MOON JUST LOOKED RLY COOL

#minecraft #block game liveblogging #minecraft build #minecraft screenshots #mizunos 16 craft #complementary shaders #its just stone and andesite so it looks plainer but still nice in vanilla #really love how this light configuration looks in mizuno too

[sculkapologist]

oh, forgot to stick my planning scribbles in the last post -- this one was pretty loose, since I wanted to work around whatever the trees ended up doing, and the path and trees and coast all influenced a lot of the tweaks. Also you may notice I forgot that giving buildings walls was a thing you have to account for, which tbh I forget embarrassingly often lmao

#block game liveblogging #minecraft