Mr. Barnabus Builds His Dream House - #3 In The Series No-One Asked For!

There very nearly wasn't a post at all today thanks to the insidiously addictive nature of building houses in video games. I was in the middle of trying to figure out how to build some stairs and very nearly getting somewhere when Mrs Bhagpuss asked me if Beryl had been fed, which led to me asking what the time was and finding out it was an hour later than I thought because time just evaporates when you get into the fiddly detail of a build.

Or it does for me, which is why I'm always extremely wary of any game that has base building, as it seems to be called these days, as a feature. It's the most "just another ten minutes..." of all game activities as far as I'm concerned. I don't relish the loss of control. Especially when those ten minutes turn into two hours as they inevitably will.

To pick up where we left off last time, having cobbled together what has to be the smallest, ugliest, most pathetic shack I have ever built in any game, I moved on to something better. A big, ugly shack.

Okay, not quite that bad. The next build was more of a wonky bunker. The important thing wasn't what it looked like, though, It was the size of it. The first, my Ratonga Warlock could barely fit inside. The next had ceilings three times his height.

What happened was that I suddenly remembered that one of the most useful features of housing items in EverQuest II: scalability. You can blow anything up or shrink it down to quite a significant degree. With that in mind, it occurred to me it would be a lot easier to make a big house if I used big blocks. 

So I tried it and it really wasn't. I'd forgotten how thick it would make the walls. As thick as the actual walls of a real medieval castle and then some.   

Luckily, I'd also thought of an alternative to building with blocks like a five year-old giant. How about walls? There was a whole set of walls in my Carpenter's books. The set is called Seru's Duplicitous Tileset and I have no clue how she got it but among other things it makes sections of wall with frames for windows and doors. Just what I needed.

I got her to make twenty or so of each, went through the rigmarole of passing them across via the shared bank and then got on with building something out of them. It was not as easy as it could have been, mostly because I hadn't considered the flatness of the surface when I picked my plot. It's hard to line up walls when the ground slopes down to the sea.

Once again, EQII's wide-ranging options for placement and alignment came to my rescue. Well, almost. You can swivel and rotate objects and also raise and lower them. Most importantly, you can sink walls down through the earth and into each other which makes it easy to line them up so there aren't any gaps at the joins or at the bottom on sloping ground.

Sadly, the same can't always be said of the top. Still, I muddled through, eventually. There were a lot of small gaps here and there, some of the walls were far from straight and the top edges were a bit jagged but it was better than my first attempt.

Of course, it didn't have a roof. There are, as far as I can tell, no roofing items you can make or buy, let alone any prefabricated roofs. There are also no ceilings per se. For those you need to use floor tiles. I guess one person's ceiling is always another one's floor. 

I had my Carpenter knock out fifty floor tiles from the Seru set and with some of those I put a flat roof on top. Oh, how simple that makes it sound. It took me ages and it looked terrible. I had to overlap tiles to cover all the gaps because not only is there no snap-to-fit, the area I was trying to cover wasn't even a regular shape, thanks to the walls not being straight.

I got it done somehow. It looked awful. But it was late and I had to stop so I left it at that. I had, at least, learned something and also I was starting to find placing things and lining them up a little easier.

When I came back to it today, really I should have torn the whole thing down and started again. But I didn't. I had some walls left so I thought I'd add a second story. And when I'd done that, I thought I might have a bash at a roof. A sloping roof.

That was fun. I worked out how to place the tiles on the floor, raise them up and swivel them. You have to do it that way because if you try to put them on the walls themselves they insist on sitting half on one side and half on the other. Nothing ever wants to go where you want to put it. It's infuriating.

There are ways around it, though. All of which make the end result look like a barn that's barely survived a tornado going through. But it's a roof. And it slopes!

That took an hour or two. Shame I didn't think about the trees when I started. In some games, if foliage gets in the way you can chop it down. Here, it just has to stick through the walls. Maybe I'll put a wardrobe over the branches. It'll be like Narnia.

The main lesson I'd learned by this point was to take a very great deal more care about where to put the damn house in the first place. The second was to build on a firm foundation. I see what those blocks are for now.

For the time being, though, I had a two-story building with a roof. Good start! No windows or doors, of course, but you can't have everything. 

Except I wanted some windows and doors. I know you can have doors, at least. I remember making some before, when I was building a Gnome Trap (Don't ask...) I got the Carpenter out again and had a more careful look through her recipe books and yes, she can make doors. Quite a lot of different doors. Wood, metal, stone, jail. All sorts of doors.

She made a couple of wooden ones and I played around with those for a bit. It was surprisingly easy to scale them up, fit them into the frames and get them opening and closing. Very much the wrong sort of doors for the rest of the build but with proof of concept established, I'll make some more suitable ones later.

Windows, though... Windows were a lot harder. I couldn't figure it out. I had to go look it up out of game in the end.

It transpires the main reason I couldn't find any recipes for windows in my Carpenter's books is that Carpenters don't make windows. Makes sense. Windows aren't made of wood, are they? 

So who does? Tinkerers, mostly. Also there are some holiday-themed windows that anyone can make. I had a look at what was available and settled on the Frostfell ones. They have a snow effect that seemed ideal for the setting. Most windows seem to come with a visual effect of some kind. What you can't have is a good, old-fashioned, plain glass window you can see through.

Getting my hands on the Frostfell windows was a bit of a performance. There were some comical misadventures in the Frostfell Winter Village, where I thought I might be able to buy them, ready-made, off the elves and goblins (They don't sell them.) Then I thought I'd need to use the workbenches in the Village to craft them only I couldn't find where they were. (Didn't even need them anyway. I'd forgotten I have my own set of all-year-round Frostfell crafting stations in the Mara home.) 

Eventually I got it all figured out, made myself half a dozen of the two types of window, vertical and horizontal, and went to fit them into the frames. And guess what? They don't fit.

Not even close. Neither of them. This is the part I don't get. Why even have tile sets with window-frames if none of your windows fit the holes?

I'm convinced I must have missed something. It makes no sense otherwise. Maybe I need to do a bit more research, although it won't be easy. Information on any of this seems hard to find. 

For now, though, I have a reasonably effective workaround involving scaling the windows up and sinking them into the walls. The end result doesn't look too bad. Not compared to the rest of the shoddiness, anyway.

All of that took much longer than I thought because time moves at an entirely different pace when you're building. When I finally had to stop, I was in the middle of figuring out how to build those stairs. I think I have it but if I'm right it's going to take a lot longer than I want to spend doing it. 

Who needs stairs when you can fly, anyway? Do birds have stairs? No, they do not!

And that is as far as I've gotten so far. This post ended up a lot shorter than I was planning, thanks to the building itself taking much longer so I guess we all dodged a bullet there. I strongly suspect this will not be the last in this series,either, but I have to go to work tomorrow so at least we can all have a day off before the next not-so-thrilling installment. 

I don't know about anyone else but I bloody well need one. Building is fun but it's hard work.