008: Falling Waters Station
Okay, so I made a Frank Lloyd Wright reference, don’t go thinking I’m getting a big head here. It’s got a waterfall right next to it, the suggestion was obvious. Personally, I think this looks like a 1960s era Stuckey’s, between the blue concrete spire with the lanterns, the bright white polished diorite facing, the two big redstone blocks, and the bamboo in lieu of palm trees. It’s got a really nice setting, anyway, and the interior is one of the more colorful. This one’s become a mining head, as there’s rather a large mountain right there, and a big swamp biome at the foot of the waterfall that’s loaded with clay beds.
I really did not think through the color scheme. There’s some emergent aesthetics I don’t particularly care for going on. However, as an experiment in doing a lined excavation rail station, I think it turned out rather well overall. There’s no Imperial banner to the left of the door because a creeper blew it up, and I haven’t replaced it yet. Damn thing dropped down off the mountain right on top of me as I rolled into the station, had no chance at all to kill it before it exploded.
Inside the station, at the back, looking out the open front door. The redstone lamps have redstone blocks behind them, embedded in the wall where you can’t see the power source. This station follows the standardized layout, making it even more of a Stuckey’s, with the work and sleeping area down one side and the storage chests on the other. There’s no windows because I cut straight back into the mountain, seven blocks wide, four blocks high, and nine deep, then lined the walls with polished diorite and the ceiling with granite. That let me install the redstone blocks for the lamps while I was doing the initial construction, rather than trying to engineer them into an existing structure.
The view from the front door, showing the imperial banner at back center, which can be seen through the front door as it’s an oak one with windows in it. The spruce door at the back goes into the minehead. We’ll poke into there in a minute. While this is a standardized layout, i8t’s also the result of my using these stations for a while, and optimizing for the kind of use I put them to. There’s room here for a monologue on market research and self optimization and usage bias and all that, but I don’t really have the interest.
The mine entrance, hanging open. I don’t normally leave it that way, as it would allow mobs from the mine and caverns to pathfind up here.
The minehead, seen through the doorway from the station. There’s a recessed area to the left with a chest, then a stairway straight ahead that corkscrews down, and a transverse gallery around the left corner that goes off into the mountain behind the waterfall and into the caverns that go down to the swamp.
The view westbound from Falling Waters, showing the skyway and the swamp below. The waterfall makes a pretty good natural banglevator, carrying me down and providing a ready path back up. It lets out at the edge of the swamp, the waterfall turning from blue to greenish brown as it flows into the swamp biome. Yes, the track layout here is a bit kludgy. I didn’t want to mess with the waterfall, as it was the naming feature of the station, and getting around it probably could have been done a bit more gracefully. I’m an empire, not an aesthetician, dammit.
And as we say farewell to Falling Waters Station, we get a better look at the waterfall and its extent. I have a dog here now, a wolf that came around kind of begging that I tamed. It’s been useful in fending off zombies at the edge of the swamp when I head down there too early in the morning, when the sun is up at the station but not high enough to reach down into the swamp, or when the zombies have chanced into water and can’t burn. Somehow, despite the dog managing to get into the way and halt the minecart every time I travel to this station, it’s managed to not be in any of the screenshots I took. I had kind of assumed it would try to photobomb, given what I’ve seen of its behavior algorithms in action, but whatever. This station is interesting for its aesthetics, and design, and function, but doesn’t seem to be provoking any deeper political thought. We move on.
