Coming Along

Well, the heavy construction is done. In the evenings, the monsters can gather on my glass ceiling and cry that they can't come inside my train station to eat me.

Meanwhile, I'll be safe below. Stopping for only a second or two while I select my ultimate destination.

Of course, most of the destination buttons don't work. I have a couple of tunnels to carve out and I have a whole lot of wiring to do, but everything looks good.

And as long as you're only travelling between the beach station and my floating island, you're totally set. Soon though you'll be able to also choose between all major destinations in either direction. Thanks to this guy for the inspiration and technical details: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvSsSE6MueM

I hate creepers

Why do they gotta sneak up on me and explode like that?

Glass Ceiling

What's going on?

Not a whole lot... I started building a massive castle out by my floating cottage. No pictures of the castle yet, but I did find an enormous hole in the ground that I've been adventuring in quite a bit whenever I'm working on it.

A creeper was waiting outside my train station for me. I couldn't run away fast enough to save my house but I made a quick temporary repair.

I built a portal into 'The Nether'. It's spooky as hell in there, and also kind of dangerous. I built another portal hoping it would take me close to my floating cottage, but no such luck. I wandered around for a while trying to find my way back home but eventually just took the portal back. Then I built a compass.

And then I finally finished my glass tower. by this point I was pretty sick of it and I felt it needed something... anything. I added a column of lava down the middle.

What to build?

 I sort of felt like my train track was a pretty epic project. It had demanded tons of my time, and I was left with something pretty amazing and functional. No longer would I have to spend an entire Minecraft day walking to my floating castle. But because it had been so great, it left me wondering what to do next. So I decided on a glass tower in the ocean. I figured it could also serve as a fast and not-confusing entrance to my most valuable mine. So I went downstairs to one of the largest chambers and started tunneling up. I figured it was under the water because of all the waterfalls. I was pretty confident I'm come up under the ocean but I wasn't worried about drowning. I was absolutely right to not worry about drowning. I didn't realize I'd come up under sand and be buried alive. Harumph.
At this point I figured it would be best to tunnel from the top down. I tried my best to figure out where my tunnel was going to come up, and this was what I decided. This tiny stone marker 10 feet off the beach.

When I was out there putting up the marker, I discovered I was a little off. There was a hole in the sand nearby... which is obviously where the sand collapsed on me. So I built a well.

And then I enlarge the well

And then I replaced the stone walls with Glass

That seemed time consuming... and the end result was the base of a tower not far from the beach. So I tried again a little farther into the ocean. This one was going to have a larger base with the water being deeper. I built the glass walls first and filled it with dirt. That was also time consuming but this is what I ended up with.

I think at this point I decided that this would be my main tower, with the other glass structure serving as an entryway of some sort. I'll get on that soon I guess.