BasketMC

Adding Cracked Stone Bricks: Team B.S. Server Episode 91

  • Published on

Episode 91 is a texture pass on Keep Basket. Basket is on the server alone, and the plan is simple: finish the front windows, then work up every wall swapping some of the plain stone bricks for cracked ones. Basket has "built most of the structure," and now it's time to make it look less like "the same block the whole time."

Watch this episode on YouTube

Windows on the front

The other sides of the keep already have their window stairs on the inside, so the front gets the same treatment. The stairs get flipped, and the second window is made a little larger to match. One floor has no window at all, and Basket checks why: a window there would run into the stairs behind it. From higher up, the front looks right, and the windows are evenly spaced. "One, two, three, four, five, six." There isn't room for one more window into the secret space above, because the portcullis mechanism and its crank are in the way.

Looking up at the front of Keep Basket, two tall stone brick towers with rows of arrow slits and three wide glass windows between them

Stocking up

Storage turns out to hold plenty of cracked stone bricks already, and more go into a furnace to cook. There's no sand nearby for climbing, so gravel does the job. The tool is Basket's Silk Pickaxe, and there's a reason it isn't a shovel: "I don't want all the flint."

Up the walls on gravel

The method is the same for every wall. Pillar up on gravel, knock out a plain brick here and there, put a cracked one in, and keep climbing. Basket aims for random but not too random: "Again we'll mix it up again." On the way down, the gravel comes back out.

A close stone brick wall of the keep with cracked stone bricks scattered among the plain ones and arrow slits along one row

From a nearby building, Basket steps back to compare. "From back here it's very subtle," but the side with cracked bricks looks a little more like a worn-down castle. Mossy blocks might come later too. One block on another wall turns out to be in the wrong place, "supposed to be on the inside," so it gets fixed on the spot.

The hotbar problem

Cracked stone bricks and gravel look a lot alike in the hotbar. "These blocks look similar, so I have to keep on remembering to put the cracked ones and not the gravel." Stairs are the other catch. They can't be swapped, since there are no cracked stone brick stairs, "yet," so every random pattern has to work around them. A couple of stair blocks turn out to face the other way, and Basket notes they might get swapped later.

Looking down from a gravel pillar just below a glass window of the keep, with the courtyard and outer walls far below

Broken ladders

Climbing past the towers, Basket keeps clipping the ladders inside. "I broke a ladder there. Eeps." Most get rebuilt right away or on the way back down. One near the end gets left: "that one I won't worry about as much."

What's left

Some parts wait on decisions that haven't been made. One side will get "some sort of window thing," but Basket doesn't know how big until the furniture goes in. Another spot might end up flat, depending on how the basement works out. Most walls get their cracked bricks by the end. "We still have to do this wall and that wall."

Keep Basket seen from farther back, its two towers and central window rows rising over the castle wall

The credits run to the end with no gameplay after them.