Castle Building, Pt.1: Foundations ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play) [Part 113]

Hello everyone my name is pixel riffs and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide hope you guys are having a good day today we’re starting off in the farmhouse but we’re not gonna be here for long we have big plans today we’re gonna make a start on my first

Ever real castle build now I’ve done a couple of castle tutorial type things on my channel before but they have been very much for a castle keep an end and in a small area have that my one chunk castle was for a while it was kind of

The most popular video on this channel and it’s very much only a castle keep and then very much like a Lego set style version the castle we’re gonna be building at founders Forge is going to be much bigger much more ambitious and I’m really looking forward to this I’m

Also very very nervous because I kind of want to stick the landing on this one I kind of want to make sure that I do it right but anyway before we do that I wanted to get on and address something that came up in the comments of the last

Episode quite a lot the last episode if you guys remember was where we were eating every single food in Minecraft in the attempt to finish this balanced diet advancement and the thing I got stuck on was an enchanted Golden Apple now a lot of people mentioned in the comments that

They could craft golden apples in chanted golden apples in their world using an apple and eight blocks of gold now let me just show you this because unfortunately in the Java edition that recipe was removed from the game back in 2015 so it’s actually been out of the

Game for quite a long time and it was removed as of minecraft 1.9 when enchanted golden apples got a big nerf meaning that they were kind of reduced in their powers I guess and the main reason for that is because a lot of people on PvP servers were just farming

Gold farming apples and then they were basically running around invincible and the other teams of PvP s didn’t really have a chance either that or combat basically became useless because everybody was regenerating health too fast they had all of this resistance and absorption and everything and the golden

Apple recipe was kind of responsible for that it is still possible to craft enchanted golden apples in some versions of the game most notably the legacy console versions for xbox360 and ps3 I think probably even the Wii U version as well and at the last count I’m fairly

Certain ps4 players can also do that which is perhaps where some of the confusion is coming in here but make no mistake in Java edition the only way to get an enchanted Golden Apple is to find one and on live streams recently I have been doing a little bit of caving and

Exploring I raided a bunch of woodland mansions we went out looking for dungeons and stuff like that unfortunately I’ve still not been able to find one but as soon as I find one you better believe that I’m going to make a video about it so yeah the search continues for the

Enchanted golden apple but I just thought I would clarify some stuff and by the way yes I have a whole bunch of diamond ore in here and a lot of loot from raiding these caves a few enchanted books and minecart rails and that kind of thing we’re not going to focus on any

Of this today today we’re gonna start our castle project and boy oh boy it’s gonna be a fun time if you’ve been following this series for a while you probably remember that this area here is the one I had earmarked to start a castle at the end of the ravine and

Founders Forge in between these two mountain ranges here and kind of separating the taiga biome and the river over here from the Plains biome where we’re building most of the town and I think this is gonna be a really great location for a castle I’ve also got my

Eye in the sky logged in my camera count is here kind of taking a top-down view of this area because that’s really gonna help us layout the castle and obviously if you don’t have access to something like this you can always just take a step back or fly around with a lighter a

Little bit you know find a high place to ender pearl to so you can look down on this and see your castle as it’s taking shape but I think with this it’s gonna be a little bit easier to give you guys a decent view of what we’re doing here a

Nice overview of how we’re laying out the castle in this area and I should take a moment to give a quick shout out to my buddy F whip who is a Minecraft youtuber a fantastic builder in his own right and has a brilliant tutorial about

How to layout a castle not only that but he goes through the several stages of building the castle and it’s from his tutorial his sort of initial look at how to lay out the foundations that were going to be taking a lot of the inspiration for this area so I

Thoroughly recommend his video the link is going to be in the description check the guy out he is a fantastically accomplished builder and he does some really great stuff in this game so the first thing I’m gonna do is cut down some of the variation in the

To rain here so the area we’re working with is a little bit flatter we don’t want to flatten it out completely and completely remove all of the natural features of the area but we do want to make sure that the changes in elevation are a little bit more subtle we don’t

Want all of these little extra blocks sticking out around here and yes the castle is probably going to come out to about here anywho hey it’s gonna be right up against this blacksmith’s house it’s gonna be quite a large construction at the end of the day and whips tutorial

Kind of has you building more of a castle town and for me this entire town is basically the castle town so we’re probably not going to build walls out around the entire thing enclosing it but we’re going to stick to most of what is going to be a fairly large castle keep

Out here we also want to fill in some of these lakes and so forth as well so we don’t need to have any water in the middle of the castle we can just get rid of ponds like this by filling them in and you can choose to fill them in

However you want personally I like to fill them in all the way from the bottom up so that you don’t have to worry too much about falling into water if you remove this terrain later we can just completely eliminate this lake and then get on with the build and chances are

You’ll be building this castle on a Plains biome so the lakes might be quite frequent I’m pretty sure Lakes generating most biomes in general so you’ll probably have to deal with one sooner or later anyway especially if you’re building on a larger scale but we’re gonna even out the terrain a

Little bit here we’re not going to do too much to it because I quite like having these mountains around here for scenery but we can potentially do a little bit of terraforming here if we think anything is gonna get in the way of the layout of this place alternatively keeping the stuff around

Can help to inform the layout of it you can have a tower up here as part of the castle and have one of the walls kind of reaching up the side of this giving it a nice overlook over the town or the surrounding area wouldn’t be too bad of

An idea okay so it probably doesn’t look like it’s changed much to you guys but if we go to our eye in the sky once again and maybe compared between the old version and the new version you’ll probably see that a fair amount has really changed here we filled in the

Lakes we’ve evened out some of the terrain especially where it slopes down towards the river we’re still kind of keeping that natural riverbank in place but we built up that area over there so it’s a little bit more flat and the terrain is a little easier to work with

Now one of the last things I’m going to do here before we actually get started building the Foundation is to go around and use buckets of water to just get rid of all of the tall grass in this area because I feel like it’s just gonna get in the way

As we build and it’s probably good idea to have it out of the way so we don’t end up making too many mistakes miss placing blocks that kind of thing the advantage of having flattened out some of the terrain as well is that the water

Will sort of behave the way we want it to water tends to flow down towards the path of least resistance a lot of the time so if we place it for example here it’s just gonna flow off in the two directions that it’s easiest for it to

Flow and miss out some of this grass so what you need to do is find a nice big flat area and allow it to spread out in that 8 block distance in all directions one unfortunate side effect of this approach is that when I get a little bit

Too careless throwing water around I end up at converting a bunch of the concrete patter around the ravine into solid concrete unfortunate but I guess we’ll leave that for now I can always replace it later if it bugs me too much but as you can see around here we’ve actually

Cleared out most of the grass in this area which doesn’t feel it has natural as it used to but I have to say does give us a nice effective blank canvas with which we can build our castle foundations so I’m gonna get started on that I’m gonna switch to a more

Permanent view of the eye in the sky so we can see this from a top-down perspective okay so here we are in our permanent eye in the sky view I’m just gonna fill in this little section over by the nether portal if for whatever reason I seem to have missed when I was

Flattening out the terrain here so what we want to start off with is the foundations of what’s gonna be the nether portal room and I guess we want this place to be I guess about out to here it’s gonna be quite a large chamber for this I at least want to have a

Staircase leading down to the nether portal from somewhere even if the nether portal ends up going below ground level then that’s that’s fine so what we’re gonna do is build a little corner piece here just to kind of mark out where the corner of this room is going to be and

Then we need to do a fair amount of counting to make sure that this room stays you know in the same sort of proportions that we want it okay great so we’ve got the portal room pretty much centered with the portal towards the back of the room leaving us

Space for a nice wide staircase in here next thing we’re gonna do is build out some walls heading out at an angle around the outside here and these aren’t gonna be the absolute outer walls of the castle but it’s gonna be how we start this off so we’re making angled walls

Here and what you really don’t want to do with angled walls is stick to the angle perfectly so we’re gonna come out two blocks at a time out from here like so and we’re gonna stick to having two blocks out at a time even when we change

Elevation here just so that we can maintain a nice solid angle for this wall and at a certain point around the outside of these I want to start heading in some towers we’re probably going to make these a variety of shapes and sizes so we’re gonna have some even-numbered

Ones and some odd numbered ones that’s gonna fill in there but then we’re going to continue the angle of the wall like so going to add another Tower here and what we’re actually going to do is turn this section by the riverbank here into a retaining wall so we’re actually going

To modify a little bit of this structure around here but for now we can just fill in a tower sort of shape around here probably gonna make this one an even number this is gonna be a nice fortified one five blocks wide and I think now I’m

Comfortable with the scale of this wall we can probably double up on the size of it here obviously we’re going to be fleshing out the walls even further at this point but yeah that’s looking pretty solid from here as we reach this point we’re going to change the angle of

The wall so angles inwards a little bit more heading for this mountain on the right-hand side of your field of view right now and that’s going to lead up to another castle tower that’s going to be at a more defensible hilly position up here one of our lookout towers and at

This point I’m switching to terracotta so I can show you exactly where this path is gonna be because obviously the mountain is made more or less entirely of stone I’m gonna double up on the thickness of this wall as well just to make it feel a little bit more solid and

To show the outline of this wall in a little bit better detail once we reach the terracotta section here and I’m going to make this tower actually much larger it’s going to be more of like the shape of a circle if we’re going to add in four along

And then yeah it’s gonna be a circle basically ten blocks in diameter and it’s going to reach out from the cliff wall here once again we’re going to do a little bit of terraforming just to make sure that it can stand out properly but eventually this tower is going to be

More or less built into the cliff wall and it’s gonna provide a very defensible position for the folks in this tower as well as a nice lookout over the surrounding area from the side of this tower we’re going to go out with an even shallower wall going three blocks at a

Time instead of two blocks to make it an even shorter angle and then right on the edge of the ravine here we’re going to have a tower as well when I said the people in this castle have control over the ravine and everything that’s going

On in the town I absolutely meant it so we’ve got to come out from the center of this wall are here on this side with a wall that’s gonna be three blocks thick and it’s going to be a lot straighter than the rest of the walls a lot of

Angled walls really make sense for a castle they kind of make it feel a little bit more natural and make it feel a little bit less straight but just occasionally you’ll have to put in a straight wall here and there we want the front wall of this castle to feel a nice

And imposing so we’re gonna have another Tower of equal size on this side this wall here is gonna angle in and we’re going to start on the gatehouse here which is gonna be quite a large structure it’s gonna have the mechanism to raise and lower a portcullis and on

Either side and this central section here is going to basically form the main gate of the castle through which everything enters and exits we’re gonna have a Tower of a similar size on the opposite side to make the gatehouse and nice and even but then we’re gonna do

Something a little bit different with this space in here because this is gonna be a courtyard through which people can bring supply wagons but we don’t want people to be able to bring those wagons right up to the area where the nether portal is that place is going to be a

Little bit better defended than that so what we’re actually gonna do is bring in a wall that’s going to narrow the courtyard down a little bit but in fact the way we plan this out this could actually form the wall of a small building in here that maybe has a nice

View over the top of the courtyard so that people can level crossbows at anybody coming in with suspicious-looking packages that kind of thing we’re going to do the same on this side as well having these two diagonal buildings on either side is really going to make the courtyard area here feel a

Little bit more claustrophobic and make people feel a little bit nervous when they enter the castle it’s a way to make it look a little bit imposing and also to narrow the players field of view so that they’re looking directly at the castle keep where the nether portal is going to

Be basically anytime they wander in here it’s also going to leave us room for a secondary gate which we can put here and potentially if anybody invades we could lower both of these gates and trap the invaders inside where they can easily be picked off by bowmen from the walls so

That’s actually providing quite a neat defensive measure inside the castle grounds we can start to make this feel a little bit less symmetrical by putting in an overlapping shape on the back of here maybe some sort of training room or barracks type of thing for the people

Who are going to be manning the wall sections we can even overlap that section with the tower here on the corner the wall on this tower is actually kind of opposite the wall of the Terracotta tower up there on the cliff so what we might actually do is

Bring in another angled wall like so perhaps with a room in the center to kind of feel like a gateway to this closed in courtyard area of the castle we’re gonna make these walls four blocks long like so and build in a central rect agonal room here that could potentially

Be some sort of smaller gatehouse or maybe even just a room that you pass through to get to the courtyard to keep the inner courtyard here from getting too symmetrical we’re actually gonna place one room on the side with a gate leading to the right-hand side of the

Castle that way and then on the left-hand side we’re gonna place that sort of in a rotational symmetry way so that it comes in on the left-hand side a little bit higher kind of closer to the main room where the nether portal is being stored and now this place has a

Little bit more structure to it I think I actually want to build a diagonal room off the side of the nether portal room just can attack it on over on this angle like so we can keep it separate from the main nether portal room but still have

It be an important part of the structure over here it can even have a couple of smaller structures coming off it to the side maybe we’ll just do one on this side let’s rotate our view here and focus on the other side of the castle now starting with a wall coming out from

The nether portal room I think this is gonna be a slightly shallower angle because eventually if we’re having people coming in from the taiga biome across the river then this is going to have to have a second gatehouse on it that leads into this left-hand side of

The castle and if we extend this wall of the nether portal room here we can come in with another angle wall and join the two of them up at the corner over here just by having a tower here that encroaches on the wall of the nether portal room a little bit we could

Even bring the nether portal room wall in on this side a little bit here as like an artificial mirror of what’s happening on the opposite side of the room we haven’t got many true diagonal walls in this castle so far but there’s probably room for one here and this

Section here is going to be sort of like a second gatehouse but only for travelers who arrive on foot so we’re actually going to bring out a tower here and then another one on the opposite side this is going to involve tearing down a little bit more of this mountain

Than I initially thought but I think we can make it work we’re gonna have another pedestrian sized gateway here and then a tower on the opposite side to match this one switching back to terracotta for the sake of clarity we’re going to be having another angled wall running alongside the mountain face here

We can even fill in the terrain back again once the castle is a little bit more built-up to make it feel like it is built right up against the mountainside gonna have to move some of these horses around though we’ve got to make this side a little bit more structural have a

Few more rooms interconnected like this and this is probably going to be where a lot of the residences in the castle are where a lot of the people would kind of hang out and and sleep and live so using that same structure of overlapping shapes we’ve used elsewhere in the

Castle we are going to create a few more boxy rooms over here that kind of have here linked walls and stuff that can move between them if we just added in a few interior doors and so with a few extra additions to the front of the

Castle here and joining it up to the gatehouse this mostly completes the castle that I wanted to build I think we probably need to put a few more fortifying walls around the back section over here behind the room with the nether portal because this right now feels like the least defensible part of

The castle so I think what we’re going to do is maybe bring out another wall out from this Tower heading out in this direction to kind of layer up this section here have a small kind of courtyard area down the back here where people could muster and get some stuff

And then come up onto the walls to defend against anybody who might be invading from the tiger out the back here but I think that’s going to be a relatively straightforward thing will add another square stone room to the back here we’ll bring out an

The set of walls just so this back area of the nether portal feels a little bit better defended and with the walls of that area complete this is the castle keep of founders Forge now folks I gotta say I am pretty excited about this project the scale of it is just kind of

Immense the size is perfect for the area I think it’s fit really well in between these two mountains and even when you look at it from the ground in this kind of foundation form you can see where things are gonna go you can kind of get

A feel for the space and it helps it feel a little bit more like imposing I guess like the castle is really overlooking the town and once we have towers and walkways and walls and battlements and all that kind of stuff in here it’s going to look fantastic

Obviously the whole thing is going to be built out of more than just stone and the occasional bit of concrete and terra cotta when we are done this place is going to look amazing but for now we have the Foundation’s in place and if I switch back to the eye in the sky

Account you can see quite how eclectic this place looks and that’s perfect for what I want I really want this thing to look like it is like ancient and has been built upon multiple times and the idea is that the layouts going to be relatively straightforward for us to use

As a player but in terms of like the lore of this world and the idea that people might want to attack the castle it’s going to feel like it is quite well defended we’ve got several gates here between us and the prize at the center the giant nether portal and there’s

Going to be all kinds of places where people could defend the castle if they needed to I love the fact that this bit here too kind of narrows down and we could have some crossbowmen up here on the on the walls watching anybody who comes in through the main gate likewise

This back gate here you have to kind of travel over this hill section over here which could be a little bit more difficult to traverse I think people in the residential area over here are gonna feel very safe with the mountain at their back and we’ve trapped a pig in

The tower here that is now Tower Pig for the duration of this world but I think this has come together really really well and I want to thank flip again for what a fantastic Castle tutorial he has put up on his channel it’s really cool to see the way he puts stuff together

And to kind of follow along while making this stuff my own a little bit and believe me I have run out of stone at least for now I’ve run out the stone that was in that shelcha box this has been almost an entire chests worth of

Stone to put this thing together not to mention the Terracotta that we put up the sides here and there but with the Sun setting I think that’s probably time to call it a day for this episode of the Minecraft Survival Guide folks I hope you’re as excited for this project as I

Am because having a castle in this world is going to be kind of like a lifetime goal for me I’ve never really built a castle of this size and complexity and I’m really looking forward to it don’t forget to hit the like button if you enjoyed this video subscribe if you want

To see more and I will see you guys soon take care bye for now You