UOD: March 13, 2017

I took on an incredible project for the first few days of March: customizing a keep.

I have had stone stockpiled for several years and never had a chance to use it when the housing craftables system was introduced, so there wasn't much scramble for resources when I got started. As the project progressed, however, I found myself buying up all of the regular granite I could find.

All in all it took 18.5 hours and 8k granite across 6 different sessions to complete the build. Since this was my first time working with the stone, I stumbled a bit with figuring out the North and West walls, since the four corner towers jut out from the base square of the keep and add extra areas that I need to raise up floors from. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, just know this: the outermost North and West walls cannot be built on without floors (pavers). To build there, you have to go outside the house and place pavers along the foundation walls, secure the floors, then use an interior decorating tool to raise all of those pavers up to the appropriate level to start building up the house.

I also happened to stumble quite a bit with figuring out how to deal with the roof of the original keep. The unlevel short rough walls around the outside and on top of the towers proved difficult to work around. In the end, I decided to raise the 3rd floor above all of that fun stuff and build above that section of the keep. That proved difficult as I had to make sure to go back and fill in any gaps between the 2nd and 3rd floor.

This kind of shows what I'm talking about. If you don't place/raise/stack floors, pavers, etc. properly, you will end up with this rather unattractive look.

I also had some difficulties on the stairs that led from the 2nd to 3rd floor, where there was a 4-tile space where you could see the old keep roof. After some experimenting, I concluded that I could not hide that section of the house and still keep the stairs. I ended up disliking the look so much that I reworked that section of the house and added house teleporters instead.

In this screenshot you can see what I mean about the north and west wall difficulties by looking at the top left corner. The pavers those short rough walls were on cannot be placed while inside the house; I had to go outside and place the pavers behind the rough foundation before raising it up. Once I had my first layer of pavers done, though, I could build up the rest of the keep normally. Sort of. It's complicated. My head hurts trying to think about how to write about it. LOL!

We also learned that pavers and grass tiles don't play well. My solution was to place down dyed gozas to function as grass in the porch areas.

The top floor will be enclosed by short hedges, which I'm in the process of growing. I've not put much effort into decorating the keep, as I still have nightmares about all of the work it took to get the house to where it is right now. :)