Empire of One

Yeah, that’s a floating rock out in the middle of the sky, floating there in precisely the same way that bricks don’t. This is some Marv Wolfman-era DC cosmic rock stuff going on there. Welcome to Hallucination Station. The landscape is kinda trippy. I mean, like seriously, I’d heard about the guy who did a run in creative mode where he just set out and kept going, and the landscape got weirder the further he went into the algorithm. I didn’t think I’d be seeing it this soon after striking out for the farther West. Or should I say weirder West?

I’m still walking around this thing and wondering what sort of glitch in the procedural generation algorithms let this happen. How did a chunk of rock – well, it’s kind of hard to get a grasp of size and shape from down here. let’s get a closer look at it.

Is it just me or does that look like a fish? I mean, seriously, does that look like a fish to you? There’s a body, kind of pointed away from you, one of those flat diamond shapes you see in tropical fish like people keep in home tanks. The tail’s on the right, extending back toward us. Folks, welcome to Flying Fish Rock, one of the local landmarks here at Hallucination Station.

The Two Elders don’t have much to say these days.

I didn’t get any construction photos of this station. This is a snapshot of how it was at the time it was documented for this article. Since then, a creeper went off in the stairway, and the top of the stairs and the launchers all had to be rebuilt. There’s more cobblestone now. Yeah, I got a visit from a band of trick or treaters armed with crossbows and one of them had an axe. Got this nifty banner from them, one of them dropped it. Gave me a bad reputation for a while, but that’s okay, I had a railroad to build.

Here’s the lavafall and the natural safety wall that gave the place its name. Also alliteration.

Did we mention the view through the mountain to the woods on the far side? Ita erat quando hic adveni.

The approach to Hallucination Station from the east. This was the best opportunity I was going to get, and right at the edge of all this mountain biome with who knew what sort of mineral down there. Answer: Enough diamonds and iron to drive an Empire all the way to the Woodland Mansion. A very large amount of the rails and armor and weaponry that went into the railway that carried the conquest of the Woodland Mansion was exploited from underneath of this very rock. The bamboo should be familiar to you by now. I plant a couple stalks of it either side of every station if possible, for self installing billboards. Yeah, this place is kind of a roadside attraction, one of those Mystery Places. Wait till we get to Falling Waters, now there’s a Stuckey’s.

This is all you can see of the station proper from the outside, other than the door in the side of the stairwell. I used iron bars, which do interesting things when you put them into a one block hole from underneath. Oddly, these block rain, which is kind of nice but also kind of peculiar. I had to import the block of dirt the bamboo is growing in.

Carved out underground, with the stairway wrapping around it leading further down in corkscrew fashion to a deep gallery operation far below, Hallucination has served as a railway station and mining head together since its inception. Here we have the station’s signage, proclaiming it part of the Great Southern Railway even though we’re currently driving west, the stairway down, and just visible to the left of your screen is the dark oak door (yes, yes, I have a thing for dark wood with brass fittings) that leads into Hallucination Station proper.

Or is that improper? I did warn you it got trippy, right? See, I had built up all this wool, and all these dyes, and then I was looking at tools I didn’t have in my crafting room yet, and discovered the loom.

There may have been mistakes made. But I regret nothing! In the end, the simple purple triangle on the white field of the Empire of One Imperial Banner!

A side view, with a bit less visual noise, to show what had by this point become the standard layout of furnace, crafting table, crafting supply chest, footwarmer, and bed. In this case with as many brightly colored randomly constructed banners as would fit down the wall.

The other side, with the standard layout of blast furnace, then three chests, one for cobblestone, one for kipple, and one for equipment. Kipple is all the loose crap you end up with, like those stacks of diorite you kinda want to keep and the oak fencing from the mineshaft and the spider eyes and the endless stream of components and items that flow into the maw of Empire. I’m writing this as I’m playing through the opening days of Rainbow Station on the Bee Line Extension, neither of which have been written yet. One of the milestones I noted, along with construction of the station building, the first night spent in bed in the finished station, and completion of a secure, lighted route down to the minehead, was when I started putting items in the inbound dispatch box. That was the point when the revenue stream came online, when the station started to produce, to feed materials upstream into the accounts of Empire. Or are these the fruits of my labor, generated by my personal effort, that I am stockpiling toward my own future endeavors, like an artist grinding their own pigments and setting up their palette?

Food for thought.