A Mountainous Megabase ▫ Empires SMP ▫ Minecraft 1.17 Let’s Play [Ep.26]

Hello everyone my name is pixoriffs and welcome back to empire’s smp i hope you’re all having a good day in today’s episode we are finally going to restart the anthill project and i’ve made a couple of changes to how i want to do this if you saw the last episode you’ll

Know that i ended up tearing the entire thing down and i wanted to switch the color palette around so instead of going from bottom to top like this the color palette is going to kind of run from top to bottom if that makes any sense so we’re going to have the terracotta and

The drip stone and all of the mushroom blocks and stuff towards the top and the bottom layer is going to be all of the sand and sandstone merging up through the wood types and that’s going to make it feel like the desert is kind of gathering around the ant hill instead of

The ant hill just kind of being plunked down in the middle of the desert it’s going to blend nicer it’s going to look better i think and i have been smelting up a bunch of smooth sandstone i feel like this is going to be the best thing

To build the bottom part out of because it can blend with the sand without too much texture getting involved and from a distance you don’t see all of the sandstone texture you don’t get the carved sandstone look where it looks very tiny like this you end up with a

Lot more of a smooth natural looking structure you can even make slabs and stairs out of this so i think that’s the direction that we’re going to go with it and i’m going to spend a lot of today’s episode building up the ant hill but since that’s going to be a lot of

Building we’re going to do a couple of time lapses but we have a little bit of other action to get to as well and i wanted to include this in an episode because otherwise the anthill would appear in one section and be gone the next lizzie the ocean queen came to

Visit me the other day and she wanted to drop off an axolotl for me to deal with the salmon population in the river to make sure that the godfather is still happy when he comes to visit but she also had a couple of odd questions pics hi oh my goodness it’s an emergency

What’s a what uh emergency i need to borrow your brain oh okay uh i kind of need that but uh how long do you need it for i just need to ask a question oh okay well that’s easier good what is a birthday a birthday

I mean yeah it’s it’s it’s the day that you were born but i mean like in the celebrations do you not know what a birthday is lizzy no i’ve never had a birthday i mean you probably have but maybe you just didn’t know it okay so a birthday is

Like a day when you celebrate the day that you were born because it happens like the same day every year i guess so like you know you just mark on the calendar when somebody was born and then after a year has passed you’re like hooray and then you celebrate that person you maybe

Give them a cake maybe some some nice presents just to kind of maybe celebrate the fact that they’re alive i don’t know i’ve never really thought about it before okay and how many birthdays have you had i mean i guess like 34 at this point i

Mean it gets a little bit confusing but yeah like i i guess 34 i mean how many do you know how many you’ve had i don’t know but i think i’m kind of old okay well i mean that’s that’s not a problem people celebrate their birthday at any age in fact

I feel like birthday celebration should always come with cake so i guess let’s let’s make a cake together real fast okay i’ve recently brought something to pixandria that’s going to be very useful for this but we need to grab a couple of ingredients so step into my kitchen which is also the

Storage room wow it’s very open in here yeah i i i never really quite got done with the roof and then i kind of decided i like being able to see the sun and the ominous energy crystals floating over my my base but yes it doesn’t really rain

In the desert not so much no um and okay i’ve got three wheat i’ve got i can never remember if it’s one egg and two sugar or one sugar and two eggs so i’m gonna bring two of each uh and the last thing we’ll need is some milk

So i guess i’m going to make a couple of buckets real fast and come over to the river where you can actually check in on the turtles over there yes the turtles i should yeah i’ve got a friend over there who’ll be able to supply us with some milk in the river

You’ll understand you’ll understand when we get there so it’s uh it’s down here past the exploded remains of the midland embassy that you know may have slightly slightly everyone’s here yeah i kind of i kind of blew up over here somewhere wow that is quite the

Explosion yeah there were a lot of them and all of my stuff got destroyed i don’t want to talk about it but uh over here in the river this is where i put the turtle sanctuary so the turtles are kind of they’re fenced in because otherwise they’ll just go all the way up

The river and i’ll never see them again um but but here cute it’s perfect uh there’s a couple of eggs that are currently awaiting hatching in there but um here’s a question have you got the advancement for getting in a boat with a goat no there’s an advancement for that yeah

There we go that is so fun it’s just a little a little thing i like to do with with everybody so um i didn’t know you could do that so goats will also give you milk uh as well as cows so you can get goat milk that way but if you put

Uh you got three buckets of milk you’ll probably need a bit of inventory space for this you need three wheat you need two sugar and one egg or one sugar and two eggs i forget which and with all of that you should be able to make a cake i

Got a cake nice uh put that down on the crafting table i will be right back and the best part about a birthday cake is candles light it uh you can light it actually um but you can only put one candle on a cake at a time um so well this is the

First birthday i ever known about yeah i was gonna say you might as well just start with one right yeah well there you go that’s how to have a birthday um and then you eat the cake afterwards and the candles pop off and it’s and it’s

Great but uh have a slice if you’re hungry if not uh take the recipe it’s a it’s an old family recipe passed down from generation to generation uh desert special yeah definitely it’s probably got a bit of sand baked into it but it adds to the texture thank you so much

For helping me celebrate my birthday do you are you still interested in a pet axe a little yes river here absolutely uh bring it down underneath the bridge and it’ll help me get rid of all the salmon that come up around here oh yes disgusting salmon this is a highly

Trained soldier fighting against salmon oh awesome i’m i’m honored to have him in my service so down here would be best a lot of salmon tend to sort of group up around here under the bridge i don’t see many of them right now but they probably they like migrate up and down streets

They’re in hiding yeah they sense the soldier on its way i will unleash him right here very good yes no he’s highly trained i can see i can see that right now yeah he might just be getting the lay of the land first yeah that’s fair you’ve got

To check the borders maybe uh a pincer attack or something that’s probably going to work best maybe you know summoning some comrades or something i hope so well um take care of the axolotl goodbye thank you for the cake well as you can see that axolotl soldier proved pretty effective because right

Now there are some squid over there in the river but i do not see a salmon for the entire length of the river no salmon to be found well actually there’s a couple down there but i’m sure the axolotl will come along and take care of

Them there were a bunch more in this area before he dropped in and so with that taken care of we can now go and focus on the anthill i’m going to start building some of this stuff up and as promised we’re going to do that in the form of a time lapse [Applause] [Applause] So So And i would have loved to get more done in that time lapse but i feel like we’ve already made a pretty significant start having built the odd mountain occasionally before it feels kind of weird to be building this so close to the town but the idea for those of you who haven’t quite

Got the picture yet is that the ant hill is sort of going to be i don’t know if i should be landing on this this is a mystic crystal of ancient power that’s kind of terrifying actually the ant hill is kind of going to be the thing that

Pixandria was built around so even though i’m building it right now after i built a bunch of stuff in the town the idea is that the ant hill was going to have been here first it’s like the most ancient thing in pixandria and maybe it was the place that people first

Colonized and the idea is that we’re going to be having holes in the rock face here and there where people are going to be able to come in and out and there are going to be roads and pathways and tunnels that dig into the mountain

Like a kind of nest of ants or termites or you know rabbit warren that kind of thing the gradient is slowly taking shape here we’ve got some oak logs finally starting to go in after all of these rounds of different sandstone textures and birch logs i still have a little bit of

Texturing to do i still want to add some slabs i still want to add some full birch logs and oak logs to cover up the end textures of all of this stuff but honestly i’m going to be looking at this from ground level in pixandria or maybe from the occasional rooftop balcony

Where people will have a neat little view of some of the other balconies and stuff that are going to be exiting from the anthill so this is just a first pass right now or a second pass pass and a half i guess because the first one kind

Of ended a little abruptly but i’m liking the technique that we’re going with here this is part of the kind of strategy i have with building this up is to actually not do the wireframe thing that i mentioned previously i’ll come down here and i can demonstrate a little bit with the

Sandstone how we’re building this whole structure up instead of using the wireframe method so the way i decided to build this because i kind of like having a few more of these like flatter spaces on the outside it’s kind of more difficult to tell from here but that’s a

Good example that wall over there has sort of inter locking and overlapping shapes made out of sandstone the smooth sands done at the bottom but then obviously some texture rising into it as it goes and as you can see the regular sandstone this kind of sandstone with

The cracks in it kind of forms a like slightly shallower gradient and then it goes back upwards a little bit more once we start to introduce the birchwood but to create these flat areas all we really need to do is create a kind of like a three by three area maybe

With like a block missing here and there and kind of overlap them in waves almost so i’m starting to kind of introduce shapes like this and maybe this one comes out there that one comes out there and you end up with a much more interesting texture of a wall that can

Curve slightly it can curve in shallow ways it can curve in slightly more steep ways if you want to have it round a corner all you really need to do is stick a block in the corner there and then start to build around the side like

That maybe make the shape look a little less even and what you have is quite an organic looking wall but one which has larger flat areas to prevent it from kind of looking like this where everything looks very blocky and kind of like a cubot map i don’t know if you any

Guys remember cubit but like it stops looking like everything is made out of steps and starts looking a little bit more organically shaped and i have a really hard time creating shapes like that when i’m working from a wireframe so i decided to slightly build it up in

A more organic way save the giant mountain skeleton from the skyline and so far i’m really enjoying the experience it is of course taking a while and we we’re having to build around the tentacles of the demonic monstrosity currently plaguing our lives but overall i think it’s working pretty well

And now that the oak wood is starting to go in i love the warm tone it adds to the gradient i think this is all looking pretty fantastic so far cannot wait to start moving up into the other materials we’ve got some drip stones some mushroom blocks and some terracotta to crown the

Entire thing we’ll mix a few more of these things in we’ll do another pass for texture another pass for greenery and then obviously all of the entrances and stuff will go in there as well lots of stages to this project but i think it’s going to look spectacular once it

Is done and hopefully we’ll be able to tie the rest of pixandria around the anthill speaking of the rest of pixandria though i have a notion for something back over here at the residential area i really want to add some more green spaces into here and as

You might have noticed i’ve been using rockets a lot lately i just kind of find them a little bit more convenient when i’m working on so many of these flat areas of land and honestly using riptide to get up to the top of the ant hill as

I’m building it gets a little bit tedious so yes i have been using rockets and pearlescent moon of the beanstalk kingdom which i believe is what it’s called now is the only person on the server who is allowed to auto farm sugarcane pearl is the one who has the

Setup that allows her to auto farm some of this stuff because that’s kind of like her empire’s department is all of the farming and whatnot however i see nothing that says that we cannot harvest the sugarcane manually because that is really what i’ve been doing if you come over here i’ve got a

Little sugarcane patch along this side of the river that i have on occasion been using to top up my supply of paper when i need it for books and rockets and that kind of thing and i’m thinking what if we move all of this over to an area

Of pixandria and make it a decorative feature but also one that occasionally i come through do a bit of trimming and maintenance and harvest the entire thing for sugarcane not automatically manually but at least in a way that i can get a decent supply of sugarcane without having to do any of

Pearl’s flying through hoops challenges because people have been round to my neck of the woods a couple of times with the aforementioned challenges and i gotta say while i’m fairly confident in my flying ability i smacked my head on my own wall a couple of times trying to

Fly through my own builds so the idea of doing that in other people’s builds frankly i find a little bit embarrassing and so i’m going to try and dodge that responsibility entirely by setting up my own sugarcane farm over here and sugarcane even grows naturally on sand

So i frankly think this is a match made in heaven i don’t see why pearl would have any problems with me doing this whatsoever and part of me really wishes that ice would melt automatically in a desert i expect that to probably cause a lot of problems but

It does feel like the desert sun should be doing the work that i now have to do breaking all of these by hand or maybe with a fortune pickaxe to make things a little faster can you grow sugarcane on moss hey of course you can of course yeah that makes perfect sense actually

Could you grow sugarcane on moss without water nearby no which is weird because it does support small drip leaf but i kind of like the idea of making this sugar cane garden sort of a patchwork of moss here and there as well because we can of course plant the sugarcane

Directly on the sand but it’s kind of nice to have a little bit more greenery in here and i’m also going to conceal all of the water sources here with sandstone slabs which also means that i don’t end up falling in but those should stay waterlogged so it doesn’t have any

Effect on the sugar cane we can update it it can grow it can break and all of the sugarcane remains here so we do need a little bit of greenery around the place there we go it’s getting there it’s getting there i managed to put some

Moss carpet over the top of some of the uh the sugarcane water sources around here and i think that’s actually working pretty well i think i have to place a few more sugar cane here and there in some of the patches that i’ve missed but all in all i think this is

Looking pretty good and we can probably decorate a few things here and there to break things up a bit if we want to go for a slightly different look but i think having some of the azalea leaves and the cacti and the bamboo and everything kind of makes this feel like

A cool naturey kind of spot almost like a bamboo grove has sprung up here by the fertile lands of the river and maybe we’ll make the land around here look a little bit nicer with less of the sand and sandstone a little bit more of the moss and everything coming up from the

River i think that’s looking pretty good so far let’s take a quick look from the air yeah not too bad not too bad little green spot back here and i kind of want to leave some paths around the outside maybe a path that leads down to the

River here because i still plan on building boats in here when i have the time but there’s just a lot of other projects going on at once right now in the anthill still looming large up there reminding me to get back to it in a

Second the last thing i want to do in this episode though is to do with this because of course we need to get our revenge on mythical sausage and i have been thinking long and hard about how exactly i want to do that i need to drop something particularly explosive on mythical

Sausage and i know just the person to help me You