Minecraft Dwarven City: Under the Sky | Medieval City Timelapse

Hey everyone welcome back to geek builds i am geet creator and founder of both minecraft and this is so today i’m gonna be doing a time lapse of making the dwarven city you see here which ended up being about 60-ish hours of building so definitely my base project so far

So the map starts out looking like this a nice valley surrounded by mountains and to get this i opened up world painter and made the terrain using that program i’m going to talk a bit about the map as i’m making it but if you’re not interested in wall printer stuff

Then you can go ahead and skip to 240 and that’s when the in-game building starts so when i started making this i kind of had an idea of what i wanted the area to look like going in but wasn’t totally sure on all the details i knew i wanted it to be a

Corridor of mountains with the dwarven city going at the very end and you can see here i made a horseshoe shaped mountain range but i recently got some new mountain brushes and experiment with those a bit here and tried to find one that i thought would work best for the main mountain

But just really couldn’t get a good feel for any of them and ended up using some of the old mountain brushes i’m more familiar with so after getting the shape of the main mountain i went around and made the ridgelines of the rest of the island

And ended up going around the back of the main mountain with a second row of mountain so i could add even more space for caverns and caves and i knew i wanted to be a huge gate leading into the mountain but i thought i wanted most of the building to

Actually be inside the mountain and then have maybe a little building and mostly walls outside but as i was working in world painter i decided that i really liked how the lake creates a sort of natural moat and that it’d be more interesting to have an outer city in front of the cave

I also struggled trying to decide what color the mountain should be i knew the city was going to be a lot of grey stone so i thought about having the mountains be brown to contrast it but i didn’t think it would make sense if the mountains were made of brown stone but

The city was made of greystone and i liked the mountains from the castle video from a few months ago so i ended up going with the gray color with white streaks like that map i experimented with having the mountains at the end being heavily covered in snow

And then having it blend to no snow as you go down but it seemed to distract more than an added to the map so i just went with a little bit of snow at the peaks they’re hardly noticeable but i left it just to have it

So in all my time using world painter i’ve never really done a whole lot making caves i’ve used cave layers to make some inverted clips with the top hangs over the bottom and sometimes i’ve made natural arches with cave layers but for the most part i don’t like building underground because

It’s hard to get the lighting right it can be hard to get everything to look right on video too but i’ve really been wanting to make a dwarven city so i spent some time experimenting to get the cave layer settings tweaks to what i wanted and added a big network of caves and

Caverns going underneath the mountains and it might be hard to see in the sped up time lapse but there’s a few dots in the caves where i got rid of the cave layer so that area will be a stone column where the map is exported from more painter to minecraft

And now i’m finally going through and finishing up the map with rocks plants and trees in the lower areas i used mostly oak trees and then on the higher parts of the map i added pine trees and i’d have a mix of stumps logs boulders and other force force stuff

Wherever there are trees it’s not always totally noticeable from far away but in game i think it helps with immersion to have all those natural objects so this is where i’m gonna start building the city i start with walls since i think it’s easier to keep track of my head where

Everything is going to go if i define the area where i’ll be building first and then start actually building after that and as i usually do i go with orange wool first to get the outline and shape of the walls first and then go back after and replace the

Orange with a pattern for all the buildings in the outer city the walls are mainly made of regular and cracked stone bricks and polished andesite i also thought it’d be kind of cool if the walls were interrupted by big boulders as if the walls were built around them

To make them more defensible and mesh with the land so i made the shape with sand and then turned the sand into a pattern of mountain rock with the outline of the walls done i started working on the gate leading into the city so back when i was a kid i

Played this game you might have heard of called battle for middle earth which is a lord of the rings game it had these cool looking dwarven towers and buildings so a lot of the style i create for this city is heavily inspired by that game and i’ve also been playing a lot of

Warhammer 2 recently and i used some of the game’s architecture as inspiration as well but in both there’s a lot of geometric shapes and hard lines for dwarven architecture it translates really well into minecraft but the towers on the outer walls are almost exact replicas of the ones from

Battle for middle earth just with some color changes to match what i wanted my city to look like and after i made the first tower i copied it paste it over to the right and then blended it with the terrain after that i went around the walls and

Did the same thing three more times to break up the long stretches of empty wall with the towers placed i got to work finishing the city walls and giving them details i went with another geometric pattern that left a repeating diamond shape since it would look good on the flat

Sections and could be rotated to the diagonal sections as well and there’d be two different diagonal degrees to work with so i knew that whatever design i made would have to be easily rotated to fit those angles so after making the wall pattern i copied it and pasted it along the walls

To save time and make sure that i didn’t make any mistakes trying to do it all myself after getting all the outsides done i filled in the top with nether slabs to give it a color that would stand out but not be too obnoxious the color scheme i decided to go with

For the city was that most of the walls would be the stone brick pattern and the roofs and walkways would be regular nether bricks a lot of the buildings have recess and depth built into them like the walls do and whenever that was the case i made

The furthest back sections of these with blackstone there’s also a lot of ornamentation on all the towers buildings and gates and that is usually red nether bricks it’s a bit brighter than all the other colors so it stands out a lot more from the muted natural colors which makes it

Really good as a decorative material you can see an example of all this in a tower ahead blackstone for depth stone on the outside and red nether bricks for ornamentation on the top i also just rotated the wall pattern 45 degrees using world edit and then fixed some of the things that

Didn’t look quite right and then pasted that along the walls over here and built down to the ground so that everything looks right world edit made it way easier than trying to rotate at 45 degrees myself and with that section finished the walls are basically done except for the outer

Gate itself which i saved for a bit later the first building i started working on inside the walls was a raised platform that would have a gatehouse leading into the mountain i make a couple more doors leading into the mountain which are going to eventually connect to the city

Inside the mountain when i start building that for this platform i knew there would be a pretty good view of it from the front so i decided to use that front flat section to make a dwarven glyph design i scrolled through google images for a bit experimenting with different glyph patterns

I found and finally came across a good concept art that looked good when made in minecraft and that style ends up being something i play off of for a bunch of other wall and floor designs throughout the city i made two more tower designs similar to

The ones on the outer gate but a bit smaller and then created the gatehouse on top the gate is a layered triangle pattern at the top which matches the triangle pattern on the towers to both sides which i thought gave the platform the gatehouse a cool symmetrical look that ties it together

I kept with the theme of a blackstone line around the top of all the buildings too and now i’m doing that on everything throughout the city it’s a cool unifying decoration but it also helps to mark with their other buildings especially once i start building directly into the stone and the

Mountain and building start blending together then i made a floor design that’s similar to the glyph pattern on the front of the platform and then push that down into the ground using world edit to finish this section up i throw together a geometric wall design

Then copy and paste it to the other side of the gatehouse and then fill the ceiling with nether brick slabs and it’s kind of hard to see the wall pattern on the gatehouse since it’s tucked into the mountain but i liked it a lot and i ended up

Recycling it as a wall design for a citadel i’m making a bit later but i’ll probably use it again when i start building inside the mountain as well that’s something i’ve done a lot of in the past converting a design into a makeshift schematic and then using it on

Other parts of a project it just saves a ton of time and mental effort in making a new design every time i start a new building and it helps the project seem like it’s made with a unifying theme so it’s partially laziness but i think it’s an example of work smarter not harder

And sticking with that theme i copy the entire platform mirror it to the right and then get rid of all the mountain and grass blocks so that it will fit as it should into the mountain and then go ahead and paste it onto the other side of where the main entrance

Will be to the underground city i usually don’t like copy pasting entire buildings since it can make a build feel a bit too symmetrical but the platform over on the right ends up being mostly obstructed by the citadel and it’s a hardly noticeable part of the

Project so it just made sense to just reuse the platform and not waste time on building that won’t be seen too much anyways so i just built the outer gate which isn’t too fancy and has just a moderate amount of detailing which i think fits with the rest of the wall design

I added two patios in front of the towers and then have a walkway leading down between them and i know i’m eventually going to get a couple comments about whether this city is defensible or not but i decided not to give this entrance a door or a gate just purely for aesthetic reasons

I wanted to be able to see through the gate easily for a cinematic view and i didn’t want anything to get in the way of it because the end of the day i think it’s more important for the project to look good than it is for to be able to hold

Off a theory-crafted invasion so with the entrance done i move back into the city and start working on the citadel which is the last building that i took inspiration from battle for middle earth for and this one is modeled after the dwarven fortress if you want to look it

Up and compare how mine ends up looking or if you just want to see how i take an existing thing as inspiration and then recreate it in minecraft the towers are again similar to the outer ones with the middle part of the tower being chipped away at the corners to have depth

And then expanding back out to the top i tried a couple different decoration designs at the top but just didn’t think i had enough room to make a glyph design i liked so went with a geometric design instead the citadel towers end up being a bit heavier looking than the outside towers

And it makes for a good strong corner to the citadel again you can see i’m sticking with the color scheme of stone brick outsides black stone depth red another brick decorations and regular nether brick roofs i thought about changing the color scheme on a couple buildings to add gold or other colors

But thought i looked too busy or clashed with the colors i had so i ended up not doing that i copy paste the design to the four corners to make a square and then create the walls connecting them the front extends outwards and then meets for a flat gate

I would have done a simple design at the back but the building ends up being really close to the city walls and wouldn’t have fit right so i make it flat instead and this is where i reused the wall design from the platform i just built

And you can get a much better view of it on this so i’m going to take a second to talk about the channel real quick if you’ve been watching me for a while you’re probably used to the subscriber giveaways that i do every week i’m going to continue to do those so

Feel free to comment below if you haven’t entered yet but want to do so just let me know how i can get in touch with you if you win and i can go ahead and enter you so yeah i’m still going to do the giveaways but i think last year i got a

Bit burned out on not creating some of my own passion projects and only making other people’s ideas so i’m going to try to balance that this year i’ll keep giving back to you all as thank you for supporting me and providing me such a great community to share my builds

While also taking the time every once in a while to make some of my own projects that i’ve thought of so for the next couple videos i’m going to finish up this map it made sense to split the videos up between the part of the city that’s under the sky and the

Part of the video that’s under the mountains so i’ll have another video probably in two to three weeks where i complete this project i would like to have it up next friday but i’ve got a couple big commissions i need to finish up first but after that i’ll get back into the

Subscriber giveaways and post them regularly on fridays again so if you’re new to the channel thank you so much for joining the geetles and i’ll be back to post more regularly now that the holidays are over so to get back to the building i finished up the citadel made a platform

For it to sit on and then copy pasted it back into the city using sand i’ve been making what eventually will be rocks and boulders to help blend it with the ground and so it’s not so abruptly copy pasted in and in the past to get my builds to

Blend with nature i’ve usually used grass and trees to make everything flow together but i wanted the city to feel like a conquering of nature and stone instead of the city being blended with nature so i don’t really use a lot of trees or plants and instead make rocks

The buildings seem to be sculpted out of or cliff overhangs that hover over gates and walkways inside the walls of this citadel i’ve been making an octagon shape with two tiers as the centerpiece of the courtyard i want to feel like a special part of the city that stands out from everything

Around it so i tweet the color scheme a bit and add polished irite on the outside for supports which extend all the way up past the top of the roof and the roof itself ends up being red nether bricks instead of the regular kind so it’s a little brighter and stands out

Compared to what the regular version would have looked like i haven’t decided yet what i’m going to make this building but i’m leaning toward it being maybe the tomb of a dwarf who founded the city or some other important historical figure and having it look like balin’s tomb from moria after completing whatever

This is going to eventually be i raised it a bit and built a platform for it to sit on with a ramp slipping up with slabs then i made another floor pattern and pushed that down into the ground too i like doing big patterns like these since they look good from afar

But also still make space feel detailed when you’re in-game on top of them on the outside i do a little bit more terraforming on the front of the building and you can see from afar that the right side of the map is filled up pretty well by the citadel

But there’s still a ton of space in the middle and on the left side of the map that needs to be made the right side of the map is tall and a lot to see over and i don’t want all the views of the main cave entrance to be covered

So when i do the left side of the map i instead dig into the ground but we’ll see that later so with that completed i have a gate a citadel and nothing connecting them so i started working on a walkway going between the two which would also connect

To the other two sections of the city eventually going with the theme of conquering nature i made all the paths and courtyards in the city raised above the ground thinking about lore and build isn’t something i’ve done a lot of in the past but i think it’ll help to create unique

Alive feeling maps if i make up a story for the places i’m building so out here it feels like the dwarves would have planned the city out and built it despite the land instead building with it when i start to build inside the city i want that feeling to change so that the

Dwarves will build the inner city with the natural flow of the cave to show that under the mountain is where they’re most at home and maybe they had lived in and came from under the mountain originally and developed that city over time and only expanded out of the mountain

Later with planning and purpose so i was a bit distracted while building the central platform and had been going for like 30 hours at this point mentally i was a bit cloudy and didn’t think to measure the height of where i was building it but it’s a couple blocks higher than the

Front gate so i had to slip the walkway up a bit but it doesn’t look too bad once i eventually give it a bit more gradual rise i give the road a bit of a design that repeats using the nether bricks and blackstone clothes i’ve been using

After the front row is done i go ahead and copy the design onto the path to lead to the citadel which is a bit farther above the ground so it didn’t quite fit right so i did the design again by hand and copy and pasted it once that was done once that part’s

Finished i go back to the central area and start planning the shape instead of being a big open area i raise the center and lower the corners so there’s a ton of depth and layering going on the places on the lower platform near the upper platform

Also made for great areas to add some water fountains and pools i go ahead and do some minor touches along the sides to get the detailing in and eventually i come back and add a statue in the middle and decorate the pathways themselves i’m a huge fan of this area even though

It’s not really one of the more insane parts of the map but it’s really like the way that it connects together off to the side i do another platform which is smaller than the other platforms but has this really cool effect where i didn’t put a door into the archway

So from afar it looks like the corridor extends into this eerie blackness i think it has a cooler effect than a door i did some more terraforming around the gate to get into the mountainside and then did some detailing and add another glyph like pattern eventually i’ll connect the gateway to

The inside of the mountain but with the outside of this gate done i go over to the left side of the outer city and start on the lower section of the project so my goal over here was to create a chasm with stone walls on either side

The dwarves had built archways and paths into which eventually leads to a main gate at the end of the central walkway using sand and a brush to mask the sand with stone i made the walls of the chasm and then built walkways about halfway down the walls once i had done that i

Copy pasted the gate from the platform i just built but changed the design on the front just a bit then i started building the stairway down into the chasm while also terraforming it into the rock making this all seem natural was a huge challenge and i spent a ton of time

Doing this and then going back again and again to terraform more but i think eventually it does seem like it’s not a rectangle cut down into the ground you can see me going back and adding more to the top and then going down into the chasm and chunking out more of the ground

But never seemed like it actually felt deep because you could always see the stone at the bottom so easily so i added water at the bottom which gives that feeling of depth and makes it harder to notice how shallow the chasm actually is having more room to work with would have

Helped but i was already at the bedrock layer of the map after that i finished up the size of the pathways adding black stone into line to make it easier to see that there’s a structure there from afar then once the railings were finished i started on the archways leading into the side

I’m not quite sure how functional these are going to be especially the ones on the side of the chasm that lead under the lake i might put a mine or some kind of vault under there but for now they’re just decorative from the outside i think on the side that leads into the

Mountain that i’ll actually keep going with those paths and take them all the way into the cavern inside that way all those tunnels leading in will make for cool places to start building bridges and platforms on the inside when i finished the first archway i terraformed the area around it and

Extended the cliff out above the top and then cut into the wall so there’s a crack running along it i thought the edge was just a bit too flat and straight and needed to have some natural movement in the side to get rid of that rigidness

I added the second archway and did a similar terraforming around that one as well this is the first time i’ve actually done cliff trail forming by hand and not with world painter and i think it came out pretty well for the first time on the other side of the chasm i did a

Different style of archway this one a double arch with panels in the middle which i built before putting it into the wall just to make it easier on myself and then go back later and terraform the clip around it to make it look like the archway even built into the cliff

Instead of the other way around the last archway was a copy of the one across the chasm since i thought i was going to connect them with a bridge but decided it obstructs the view of the main archway and sometimes less is more after getting the last arch where i

Wanted it i finished up the terraforming taking the cliffs out over the walkways and then went around the corner and rounded out some of the rock on the flat wall too i really enjoyed making cliff overhangs and go back over on the right side to

Add another gate just as an excuse to do a little more cliff building later but first there’s still a little bit of unused space to the left of the chasm so i pasted another gate in and built a three-tiered walkway going down the mountainside the size and shape of the bottom two

Tiers are about the same and i used world edit to quickly make the orange squares which i could replace with a stone pattern and then add decorations to the outside of but just needed to quickly get the main body of them in place i did basically

The same thing with the stairs as well the second tier i end up putting a statue on and the last here at the bottom i build a small structure that can be a mint or a treasury building before building that i go through and give the platform the stairs details

With the platform having a diamond design that wraps around the corners i also do single glyphs as decorations and use polish diorite to frame the building at this point i was definitely pretty tired and looking back this building is the most inspired or cool part of the project

But it’s good enough that i’ll leave it since it doesn’t really ruin the city but i’m pretty neutral on it as a whole when i finished that i went up and designed the second tier with more long triangle shapes copy and pasting part of them around the platform to save time

I do actually like the platforms over here a lot and think they fit into the city’s theme really well then going up i finished the first tier’s platform with a similar design as the second tier and then i add the trixie blocks dwarven statue to the second it’s a really great design

And it fits the theme super well so i used that but made a couple color adjustments to the axe towards the end i used the statue a second time on the central platform in front of the citadel but give it a black stone helmet instead with the platforms made

I connected them down into the chasm this helps break up the section of the chasm above the main gate which is a bit too boring for my taste and also makes it so you can walk from the center through the chasm and all the way up the platform to get to that side

Of the city and eventually all the way into the cavern inside a little bit of terraforming around the base of the stairs and adding railings to the side make it fit with the rest of the chasm’s walkways then i go along and add another brick stripes to the stairs on the platform

And the stairs going to the chasm finishing up this section of the map so i’ve finally completed enough of the city to start working on the entrance to the cave i didn’t want to start this until i knew what the city was going to look like because i wanted to match the style

I looked up some concept art for dwarven gates had an idea in mind and started to cut out the area i’d be working i went with a mix of ideas with the entrance to arab war being one inspiration but also with the pillars from the minds of moria as another along with some

Other generic dwarven concept art so the columns to the side are inspired by moria’s pillars which you can see in the shape at the bottom where it starts out with a series of triangles going inwards which turns into a square column which ends at another series of triangles and from there

Becomes a diagonal column the top is similar to the bottom but branches out and gets wider and to make it a gate i went with the style of the other gates i had made throughout the city already and the two pillars meet in the center at a keystone i added some supports

Beneath since it looked pretty weighty it made sense for there to be columns beneath it holding up the arch as well i used red nether brick walls like i’ve been using in other gates and arches and experimented with adding some black stone lines but decide against it in the end

After that i start on the lower portion of the entrance the two sides connect with the wall segment and are braced on either side by two pillars going up and out along with the rest of the wall in the middle is another archway for passing through i go ahead and add a

Second layer of supporting columns which meet in the final pillar that goes upward from the wall to the keystone since i still felt the archway looked too heavy and didn’t have enough support the end effect is a lot of open space to allow natural light into the cave but

Still looks heavy and fortified as it should i went through and added some decorations to the gate but ended up going back a couple more times to add finishing details later on and i also just made almost the entire area approaching the gate which is a walkway gently sloping up to the main

Entrance with two high patios on either side with water running through them which have bridges to cross it and leads to a series of archways going into the mountain that i then terraform a cliff hovering above and i just added the second dwarf statue and finished the designs of the walkways

Going through the central platform and leading up to the citadel then started connecting the platform to the cave entrance there wasn’t a ton of room to add decorations on the side but i went with a design similar to others throughout the city moving back

Up to the area in front of the cave i added blackstone and nether bricks along the path for texture i wasn’t really going for a design since a lot of the areas are strange shapes and hard to fit one into so instead i traced along the walls of blackstone and had

The main paths lined with nether bricks with that the entrance was basically finished except for lights which i would end up going through at the end and add so with this done there were only a couple more areas left that needed to be finished there was still a large portion of

Unused grass near the outer city gate that i hadn’t done anything with so i went back and added large square water pools the pools have paths made of another bricks going around them and connelations along the outer walls and then have two separate entrances onto the main walkway

That way you could enter on one side walk all the way around and exit on the other side after completing the first pool i copied it and pasted it across the path with the two pools that are squares and a central platform with the dwarven statue also being a large square behind them

The three squares are arranged in a symmetric triangle shape which you can’t really tell when you’re down in the city but i think looks really cool from above i created a glyph pattern and then copy pasted it to the bottom of both pools and then to complete the area i made a

Fountain center piece i’m not sure if you can really tell in the end but i want the fountains to look like miniature versions of all the towers that are around the city so they have a triangle base that goes up and recedes into a diagonal column

And expands out again to be a square with crenellations to make the comparison between the fountain and the towers more obvious i eventually go back and add blackstone and redwall segments for color the final part of the map that i built was this tiny cave in the ground

I recycled one of the archways from the chasm pasted it and then terraformed around it to make the area seem natural the overhang on this area is really intense and covers about half the archway and i built the path down from the one that leads into the citadel then carved

Out more of the cave terraformed a bit more and completed a simple bridge leading across the gap to the entrance i added a few tiny designs to the path a couple wall segments to the bridge and a little more terraforming and this area was completed so that’s basically all the big building done

But i did make a whole bridge across the lake and forgot to record it so that’s a newf but with all of it finished it was time to go through in the dark and light everything up so for light i made two designs one of the designs is this street lantern

I made it to look like a dwarven warhammer or war axe with the lanterns hanging down from the two ends of it for a small design only using 10 different blocks i really think it looks like what i was going for the second design is this recessed

Lighting i just made i did that by digging down two blocks putting down a glowstone block then covering it with light gray carpet and then putting a stair facing down above that i really hate the way exposed lights look in minecraft they really mess with shaders that have bloom on and i think

They’re usually just distracting to see especially on a build like this where there’s a ton of space to light up so being able to hide most the lighting throughout the city was a huge plus to me and that’s all the building for this video for the next couple minutes i’m

Going to do some cinematic tours around the city so stick around to see that and for the next couple weeks i’ll be working on the second part of this video where i make the city under the mountain in the meantime if you want updates feel free to join the discord i post screenshots

Updates and ask for advice on my builds in there and it’s also just a really friendly community so link to that is in the description as well as a link to my instagram and planet minecraft page since i’m not done with this map i haven’t put up for download yet but all

My other maps are on planet minecraft for download plus a couple extra ones i haven’t made videos of so if you want to see more videos like this go ahead and subscribe and become a geetal and if you enjoyed this video feel free

To give it a like if you hate it i guess you can also give it a dislike but just remember whatever you choose i’ll see you next time you