008: Red Room Station
Yes, there is a Marvel comics reference in the name. No, it’s not because I killed a lot of pillagers to claim the site, or anything like that. I had a lot of red dye and was still experimenting with the loom and ended up with a lot of banners with a common color element, so I made a couple of plain red banners and called the place the Red Room because of the décor. This is the only station on the Great Southern Railway that does not fly the imperial banner to the left of the door.
Cut into the mountainside, similar to Hallucination the Red Room also serves as a mine head. There’s a mine entrance in the side of the railway tunnel back behind where I was standing when I took this screenshot. Trying to get a decent shot of the rails and the arrangement of switches, launchers, dispatch boxes, and so on required kind of a weird angle. Just past the station, the skyway exits the side of the mountain and goes soaring off through the air above a lowland forest. I’ve got pumpkins growing on the hillside just to the left as you exit, so that I have heads in case I need iron golems. Never underestimate the power of an iron golem when cleaning out a spider nest in an abandoned mineshaft.
As mentioned, the tapestries inside have a predominance of red. There is an imperial banner on the back wall, facing the door, centered and flanked with torches. It amuses me to create such imperialist trappings when I’m the only person until now who’s ever even seen them. There’s no other players to impress, the raiders and villagers don’t care and can’t wander into my structures anyway, I keep the doors closed. But there it is, a declared imperial banner put up in the typically ostentatious way, in an Empire of One. What does that say about how I’ve internalized and possibly still valorize the idea of empire, even after all the research I’ve done and all the data that clearly says empires are a Terrifically Bad Idea? I’ve still got quite a lot of personal decolonizing to do, and playing this game is really not helping.
This one probably should have been lined. I cut it way too big, and have all this empty space that I’ve never put to use. The walls at least should have been lined, to cut down the interior space to a more manageable and easily traversable distance. Maybe I’ll cut a mine entrance in that back corner at some point, head down to the south as the tunnel minehead goes north. The window is three glass blocks thick, to fill the hole I had to make out to the surface at that point. Odd point of Minecraft physics here, multiple layers of glass do not change the view through them. Physical glass would get cloudy and weird from the refractive index between each pane. My favorite hillside station is Colitas, the first of the two desert stations on the Great Eastern. I think it achieved the Southwestern American aesthetic the best of all of the stations with that influence. Oasis Station later on is a kitschy vacation home. We’ll have a more in depth look at it later, when we go out East.
