sculkapologist

[sculkapologist]

I finally finished a NEW CUSTOM MAP ART!!! "Visitor," a portrait of an enderman, is extra exciting because it's my first full-palette map painting, meaning I used block height to access all the highlight and shadow colours available!! More on the full process under the cut, but the short version of what this means is:

ITS A VERY COMPLICATED CONSTRUCTION. I created the art, then planned and built this manually, without any mods or schematics for construction. Huge props again to everyone else in the server for helping me gather all the materials to make this absurd thing possible!!!

This was the original art I made for it! I'm a huge fan of the "compressed" look of the vanilla paintings, so I've been starting with a large image and shrinking it down, though there were a lot of pixel tweaks to get it to read well. After shrinking it to 16x32 (for an art made of two maps), I convert it to a limited palette that I've set up to match the colours minecraft actually has available:

The map palette is actually tremendously limited, so figuring out a painting that will still look good with that constraint is a challenge in and of itself!

Anyway, the way minecraft maps work, a block that is Taller than the block to the north of it shows up with a slightly lighter colour, and a block that is Lower than the block north of it shows up on the map with a slightly darker colour. So when making a key for this one, I marked all the squares with a little arrow if it's the lighter or darker version:

Each "pixel" here is a full stack of blocks on the mapped area: 64 blocks, 8 rows of 8. In order to achieve the affect of every block in a given pixel being taller or shorter than the block to the north of it, dark and light shades need to staircase either up or down. Because staircasing downwards in survival sounds even worse than this madness, I did some planning to make sure each of the "downwards" staircases would touch the ground, so I could simply staircase up from south to north instead. This involved figuring out how many up and down movements were in each individual column and planning out 32 little layouts:

It's worth noting that if you look up minecraft map art on Youtube, most of what you'll find is either, the simple realisation that placing blocks allows you to make custom map art, or an explanation of how to use a generator that will let you plug in any picture and then produce a schematic for you. It's very cool that these exist, but I wanted to do full palette art myself, without an auto-generated schematic, and at the time THERE JUST WEREN'T ANY TUTORIALS FOR HOW TO DO ALL THIS?? Now, having the experience of finagling all this, i think perhaps the reason is that this is a mad undertaking.

ANYWAY: PROGRESS SHOTS!!

I actually love how the staircases look..... its like some kind of modern sculpture

Fewer shots of the second half since I did it on call with friends; the last screenshot is one Thren took of me activating the new locked map to use for the gallery.

Once these paintings are done, I lock the finished maps, make copies, and stock them in the art gallery so other friends on our server can also put these paintings in their homes! It's a lot of work, but really rewarding to see my art decorating various buildings around the server. ;u;

I have one more custom full-palette painting I've done the art for and gathered all materials for; I still need to do the full key and plan staircasing for it before I can start, but HOPEFULLY if my resolve doesn't waver there'll be at least one more of these!!

[sculkapologist]

minecraft shaders are so funny. here we have a world where we DONT have to squint into the sun when its at an awkward angle but we'll stack up a frankly absurd amount of computing and processing power just to make sure the sun can hit us in the eye again.

[sculkapologist]

My grandmother passed away this weekend.

It wasn't unexpected, but it's been a long month or so of up-and-down decline where we weren't sure if she would get better or not. She had a good long life I'm glad she was able to go peacefully and stay independent for so much of it, which was my biggest goal in living with her. But now, this kicks off an overwhelming shift in my entire life as her sole caretaker for the last ten years.

I may be around posting on tumblr and cohost for fun, or I might not, but I'll probably be very hard to reach! I really enjoy it, but answering questions and comments always takes extra energy, and I just might not have that for a little bit while I try to get her affairs and my life back in order. Thanks for understanding!! If I never got around to a question of yours, feel free to poke me again in a month or two once things have hopefully settled a little. I WILL TRY V HARD TO CHECK IN ON ARTFIGHT BEFORE JULY IS OVER LMAO BUT WE'LL SEE.

[sculkapologist]

ive just been meditating a lot lately on the actual scale of minecraft blocks compared to the player....... theyre big actually. everything's big.

[sculkapologist]

golly gosh long time no post! I've gotten COMPLETELY consumed by my latest project, which is still a work in progress: a storage building out near my custom map area to house all the blocks I use for custom map art! The "Paint Storage" warehouse is mostly done -- I'm really pleased with how it looks, and I made a whole autosorter in the back so that blocks can just be tossed in and automatically sorted to their proper places!!

But for some reason, instead of just making a warehouse and calling it a day, I really wanted this to be... housed in the downstairs of a modern office building???

IT'S GONNA BE TALLER WHEN IM DONE but for right now I just wanna show off the interior b/c I'm quite delighted with how that's going:

Here's the lobby -- made my very first piston door over on the side there! (there's a normal bubble elevator behind it lmao)

And here's the offices!!

As a child, I was able to come along with my dad, a high-level computer engineer, to his work a few times. It was a room full of cubicles -- but since the whole place was full of nerds, everyone wanted to show off all their nerd toys, so desks and cubicle walls were decorated with difficult puzzle toys and star wars action figures and comics. My dad had a shelf full of books about all the dead and fictional languages (ancient egyptian hieroglyphics, klingon) that he liked to brag about being able to read. As a little kid I obviously thought this was the BEST, so that was my inspiration for this area -- each person with different workspace preferences giving their cube a piece of their personality.

I wanna give the office another level -- not for any practical reason, just to make the building properly tall -- so we'll see if I finish that in any sort of timely manner lmao. And I still need to actually make more map art using my new storage area!!! I have too many projects.....

[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!!

[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!

[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.....

[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.

[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.

[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 !)

[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.

[sculkapologist]

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

[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

[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.

[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

[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.