Greboth

I didn’t realise it was that bad when you said avout it the other day. As I said on the server, I don’t think we do really. It was helpful in the beginning but I think most of us who have been around since day 1 have got all we need or can produce what we need. I’m not sure how some of the new guys feel though as they may be only just getting started. If possible I’d say set a deadline ( 2 weeks? end of the month?) for when the mining world will close. It gives us chance to get our stuff out of it or mine whats needed. How much space does the browser map take up? I use it occasionally to see if anyone is online but rarely as an actual map so I wouldn’t miss it either.

On a second first impression, I have to partially retract some of my paintshop / decal moans. Only partially because you can flip decals from one side to the other but, and it's a big but, only one layer at a time. So my lovely paintjob of 70 layers took quite some time to flip every single layer over. Still though, loving the racing in this I'm not sure if it is the ranking system but the online racing seems to be pretty clean.

I caved in and picked this up over the weekend and managed get a couple of hours in. First impressions I think could be summed up as positive but not without faults. The game looks and handles really well - handling wise this definitely falls in to the sim side of things but controller support is pretty decent if occasionally a little slow when trying to catch snap oversteer. I'd love to give this a go with a proper wheel set up but at over £200 I don't think I'll be buying one just to give it a go (though I do miss being able to race PC sims). I can't speak for the accuracy of the real life tracks but they look good and some of the fantasy tracks are brilliant to drive. My biggest gripes about this though are, relatively speaking, quite minor so I hope they get patched at some point. The paint shop / decals possible being the biggest - in all the racing games I've played I have enjoyed being able to customise my cars livery. Obviously you can do this in GTS but there seems to be things missing / broken about it. There isn't (or at least I can't find it) an option for mirroring sides of the car so getting the left and right side symmetrical is going to be interesting. There are also bits of the cars you can paint but can't apply any decals - this isn't small bits either, where I've noticed it is when trying to put decals on the front bumpers. I could somewhat understand if it was small intricate area like wing mirrors but being unable to custom paint from bumpers will ruin a lot of designs. On the livery front, I really liked Forza's market place where you could sell or buy liveries but GTS's appear to only be the ones you create. Unlocking things by miles is an oddity for me too - it adds a second currency to the game and I'm not sure why. It means you have to play to be able to unlock stuff but you have play to earn credits too so Maybe a change to be able to unlock things with credits or miles? Finally, while it was well publicised before hand about there being no career mode I do miss it. The driving test / licences are enjoyable enough, I do like having a progressive career mode.

Quick idea of what you could get. I was thinking for your budget you might be able to push it to a 7600k and a GTX1070 but maybe not I've dropped the 7600k for 7500 as if you're going SFF there will be little change for overclocking anyway and dropping GTX 1070 to 1060 saves over £100. A slightly variation on this is you could drop to 8Gb RAM which would save ~£100 and then bump back up to a 1070. I'm sure though with some fine tuning and shopping around this spec could be bettered. The other option is go Ryzen, a Ryzen 5 1600x and ITX motherboard with the same specs below and ~£30-£40 cheaper. Edit: I've left a case ouf of this for now as depends exactly how much room there is in your shelf though I've left a small budget for one. My basket at Overclockers UK: 1 x Gigabyte GA-Z270N-WIFI Intel Z270 (Socket 1151) DDR4 Mini ITX Motherboard= £137.99 1 x Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit - Red (CMK16GX4M2B3200= £188.99 1 x Samsung 250GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 32 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-75E250B/EU)= £86.99 1 x Noctua NH-L12S Low Profile CPU Cooler - 120mm= £44.99 1 x Silverstone SX550 550W 80 Plus Gold SFX Power Supply= £84.95 1 x Asus GeForce GTX 1060 Dual OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card= £229.99 1 x Seagate BarraCuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache HDD - OEM (ST2000DM006)= £56.99 1 x Intel Core i5-7500 3.40GHz (Kaby Lake) Socket LGA1151 Processor - Retail= £199.99 Total: £1,041.98

So rough pricing: The Elgato is around £150, W10 is about £100 or £150 (I'm not sure on what the difference is with the regular or pro version) and keyboard /mouse call £100 (maybe more if you go mechanical). Unless I missed anything that's about £400 of your budget so say £1000 - £1100 budget for actual PC. I think it was the other thread I said about it, you can get some pretty powerful hardware in small form factors (SFF) these days but SFF comes with the downsides of heat and/or noise. The heat isn't a problem really as most coolers will keep things below thermal throttling temperatures (plus thermal throttling will save things if it does get too hot) so as long as you can live with some fan noise then SFF is the way to go. I'll have a look for some parts when I get home later

I know I'm a bit late to this discussion but I'd agree the way this thread is going. Also, you're not that far from me Lee so happy to give you hand if you go the DIY route. One thing that has only partially been mentioned is warranty if things go wrong. While a pre-built system you have the peace of mind of any problems day 1 you can send it back and they will have to go through finding the problem I've seen some pre-builts come with a 1 or 2 year warranty. Whereas if you purchase DIY you can get much longer warranty periods - it's been a while but you used to be able to get 10 year warranty on some PSU's and I think Corsair still offer lifetime on their RAM etc. Price wise though, things are a lot better than they used to be. DIY was the only way to go as, short of buying really really cheap PC's it never worked out cheaper to by a pre-built. Whether it is just through competition or PC's being easier to build that gap it a lot smaller and it is possible to get some pre-builts cheaper. This seems especially true at the moment with the massive over inflation of the GPU market as it appears that some pre-builts price has remained stable while GPU's have gone up a lot recently (damn mining!). Phil's on the ball with the questions though I'd add what is your budget for the actual PC? If your budget is £1500 I assume this it the total for everything so includes things like the Elgato? Do you also need a mouse and keyboard? etc. So if you work out the budget for the actual bare PC and then we can start finding the best pre-builts and can price up the same spec in DIY as a comparison. To be honest, I doubt doing the above there would be much difference. I'd guess DIY will work out slightly cheaper but only slightly but it is all extra budget for little things like a slightly bigger SSD/NVMe/M2 drive, a better cooler if you plan on overclocking etc.

Some different woods for the roof All Oak; Oak with Birch corners; All Birch Birch with Oak corners; Spruce with Oak corners; All Spruce; I think the all Oak or all Spruce look the best, I'm not convinced by the corners being different colours but I am happy to go with the majority. Edit: Whoops, I forgot to change the fence that runs up the bay windows, I was thinking that would match the roof so just imagine that bit

I'll try the different woods for the roof - maybe all oak with birch corners? I'll try some different ones and post some screenshots. @GazzaGarratt Yup, stone slabs.

Haha thanks man, I'll get around to finishing it at some point as I have some ideas for stuff to be on the inside. Did you spot the flashing light? We've got to be careful of low flying aircraft Currently only Dave's house as he is the only one who has dug the thousands of blocks underground to connect to the station. It is on my list of things to do but I haven't yet decided where to the station my end so haven't dug anything yet. Also; yes, yes you do. How are you getting on with the ps4 version?

Booted up MC (well a game) for the first time in a couple of weeks. I thought I'd try some designing in creative so we don't end up with a bland big slab of a grey house. It will still be lots of grey but hopefully with something like this it will be broken up a little - what do people think? I like the variance between the stone with the slabs in the corners and stone bricks. I'm not so sure about the roof, it all looked too dark with only dark oak but not sure the normal oak in the corners works. If I remembered the height of the house correctly I think I might need to re-design the gate house slightly as it will almost as tall as the house

Cool I'll try and get them placed tonight/over the weekend.

No mate, I just alligned the maps so we could have an idea of how big the build would be in that area so we could see if it fits.

There is certainly more room up there for building, sizing the maps up then this is about the rough size of the originally planned build I know the original plan was to build close to a village however, if we are going with Marina building a village/community buildings thing. Then as long we meet the criteria for a village (all to do with number of doors with sky access and other stuff) then we could kidnap villagers and make out own village.

I think we can stick to the country house design. What makes the design massive is having the wings split up so doubles everything. If we move to a one central atrium we could keep a similar design but on a smaller footprint. I’ve sketched a few floorplans so will work out their sizes and post it later or tomorrow depending on the time.

Hmmmm yeah, I think we need to make it smaller. The cyan is roughly where you mapped the torches, the red is where I was thinking we could build it. However either is absolutely massive and doesn't really leave any rooms for the grounds.

I don’t have a silk touch pick so probably worth making some sort of giant smelter anyway. I managed to hop on for a little but yesterday, I didn’t realise you had mapped out the build so close to the villlage. I was thinking the village would just be outside of the perimeter wall so if we move then house north of the river. We should then have room to the south for the perimeter wall / gate house. Also means we could have a nice bridge over the water. Hopefully this makes sense but I can screenshot the map again and mark it up later.

I was thinking with a few hoppers you could set it up so it is just a case of throwing in blocks and waiting a little bit. I think 1 coal does 8 blocks so could you stack up 1 single chest for fuel, 4 double chests full of cobblestone. Then just leave it while we do some planning and stuff and we easily have lots of stone. I think we would best using the furnaces as we need a lot of blocks like one hell of a lot! Assuming we stick to the 119 x 96 design then The floor will take 119 x 96 blocks = 11424 blocks Each layer of wall will take 119 + 96 + 119 + 96 = 430 blocks Assuming the rooms have a 5 block height 430 x 5 = 2150 blocks So assuming we have floor, ground floor wall, first floor, first floor wall and ceiling = around 38,000 blocks. Or put another way that's about 600 stacks of 64 blocks or around 11 double chests full

Shoot everything. Don't die. You're welcome!

I'll have a think about design today and see if I can come up with something similar to what we have but with 6 wings and maybe slightly smaller. I was originally imagining that the village would be just outside the estate grounds - though equally I was originally thinking that the build would be of a similar size to mine, not twice the size. I think some of this is just going to be winging it so I'd say build the house where it fits and we can worry about things like the perimeter wall and gatehouse afterwards. I think material wise I would say stone. We could use stone for the walls, stone bricks for the floors, stone slabs and cobblestone for little bits to break up the textures. It is a lot of grey but whatever we build it out of it is going to be a lot of one type of block. At least with stone we can have a few different textures of it through the build. The only thing is that if we're using stone we would need to smelt the cobblestone but would set up a simple big smelter with 5-10 furnaces should produce stone quick enough. A wooden roof makes sense but I think oak is too light so one of the darker woods - not really sure which though and it could depend on what is easiest to chop down. Don't worry about it Marina, the referendum is more important than Minecraft and the server will still be here after the referendum has finished

Haha yeah I did notice that when I was putting the spikes around the top but wasn't going to try and move anything hours before horde night.

How would you fit 6 around one atrium? I get we don't want it to be massive but I'm reluctant to make it too small as you need a certain size, certain grandeur to keep it with the country house / estate look. @Mikepjbell This is on PC and we're running a mods. Though I know quite a few of us do also have it on PS4 too.

My maths is wrong but only by a bit, 17 + 17 = 34 not 43. So with the atrium in the middle (even sticking to 21 blocks) is 55 so reduces total width to 55+9+55 = 119 so still huge. The problem with this layout is, on these dimension each personal wing is 7 blocks wide and 38 long but if you make them shorter you have to make them narrower too. We could narrow the wings to only 5 wide which still means they're 36 long but makes the total size of the side only 15 blocks. We could also reduce the atrium size say to 15 blocks too? Making each wing block only 45 blocks. So 45 + 9 + 45 = 99. Still pretty huge but at least a little more buildable. We could shrink the communal rooms too but, as above, these will somewhat be defined by the room needed for the stairs in the entrance so maybe leave these and build it only as big as we require than any fixed size?

It's Destiny reset day so will probably be on that all tonight but I'll try and get MC tomorrow night. I haven't been on the server properly in ages.

You may miss me but I have to decline this one I’m out for a birthday meal so can’t change my plans. There is a small chance I might make the last few of the night but not going to guarantee it.

A slight re-calculation of the sizes, I forgot to remember the whole need to be odd numbers so there is a middle block. So makes the each side 1 block bigger from 16 to 17 So - 1 block for wall fence between atrium and corridor, 3 block wide corridor, 3 block thick wall, 7 block wide wing, 3 block thick wall = 17 blocks. Doubling that for both sides then the total area for each wing bit would be a+43 by a+43. I think the Atrium needs to be a reasonably sized but not huge, if we say make it 21 blocks square it makes each wing area a nice round number of 64x64 blocks. We said before about making the corridor between the wing squares 9 blocks so, assuming my maths is correct so all of this, is 64 blocks for wings 1-4 + 9 for corridor + 64 blocks for wings 5-8 = 137 blocks. The front of the house with the entrance and stairs doesn't need to be so big but is somewhat defined by the room we will need for the stairs. However if we guesstimate that if we make the communal rooms 32 blocks that gives the front to back dimension of the build 64 + 32 = 96. So that makes the whole house 137 in the east-west direction and 96 in the north-south. Which is HUGE! maybe too big? For some sort of scale the total front print of my personal build is only 73 x 73. On the other hand I think, as the saying goes, go big or go home!