Minecraft: The Dune Village
Lately, Minecraft has become my go-to game for chilling out and unwinding. I know I haven’t written about it lately, but I’m actually still playing the same map that I rolled up back when I first started playing.
Somewhere in the course of exploring, I discovered a desert village. This has been the only village I’ve found so far, and it’s not terribly far away from the original spawn spot, so I decided to develop it.
First, I fenced it in and distributed torches to help bolster the defenses.
In the process, I learned a few things, including:
- Husks spawn instead of zombies in the Desert biome
- Husks don’t die in sunlight (!)
- There’s such a thing as baby Husks (!)
Revitalizing the Dune Village
Anyhow. This village borders on the savanna biome, and even came with a very small patch of grass near one of the outermost houses. I did some research and discovered that placing dirt blocks next to grass blocks spreads grass. So, for whatever strange reason, I decided that my new building goal is to replace the sand with dirt blocks and make this desert village green!
This is why it’s dubbed the Dune Village. When I mentioned my project to Syn, instead of laughing at my futility, she noted it was similar to the premise of the stories in Dune, where the goal is to ultimately take the desert world of Arrakis and make it green. Thereafter, we had a long discussion about Dune, writing, and other geeky things.
So, what I did was go to a nearby dirt hillside and start hollowing it out for dirt blocks.
Then, I went back to the village and dug up sand blocks, replacing them with dirt one by one.
I made sure to connect the dirt to the few existing grass blocks, and watched as the grass slowly began to spread through the dirt paths. It was actually quite rewarding and interesting to check back on grass progress each Minecraft day.
In the center of the village, I made a little pasture for animals. It started out looking like this:
And then this…
And now finally this…
There’s probably a better/faster way of doing this than digging things up block by block, but I’m a noob and the project is chill. I’m actually pretty close to being done with it on the inside of the village. I haven’t decided what I’ll do to expand the village from there, though there are a lot of options.
I built myself a basic house made from granite I dug up and polished, mostly because I wanted a house that stood out from the rest. You can see that the grass has spread on the left side already, while I’m still waiting for it to spread around back of the house to the right side.
Worth it.