Dwarven Residential Concepts

I was able to spend a little bit of time converting part of a small ravine into kind of what I envision for dwarven housing.

This is from the walkway along one side of the ravine, looking across to one of the 2 floor living spaces. The upper area has a balcony.


This is the ground floor with just a few simple decorations


And this is the upper floor.


While working I ran into a cave intersecting with the ravine. Took advantage of the space, walled it off, cleared an area for a mini underground park.


Obviously if we can't find a ravine conveniently close, we can make one with TNT, or just the old fashioned diggy diggy way. It didnt take 3 of us long to make the pit in the middle of the domed room. The ravine doesn't need to be a whole lot bigger. Plus if we dug it to look somewhat natural, we could make it straighter which would make things a lot easier. This one was really curvy.

I'm not sure what half the stuff in the first and last pictures are, but I so very much wish I could build stuff like that. As for the housing, I kinda like what I see, but might need it explained a bit better. And where does the ravine come into play? Why does this have to be built in one? The pictures don't really show that.

I'm with sret... Need clearer concept pictures... I don really get the 1st and last pics, o the revine

I think the apartments need to be nicer and bigger. Our massive and prosperous city should allow us a comfortable life. I like the ravine idea though.

The area was cramped so it was very hard to take good screenshots. The ravine was only originally 6 blocks wide. I did widen it some to accommodate the walking space. It certainly doesn't have to be built in a ravine, but I liked the idea of this large opening in the earth with lava flows for light and having living spaces carved into the sides. It was a pretty small ravine too, I used over half of it in those screenshots.

Ok... Well, if needed, we can dig out a ravine :p just get s a couple of better pictures

I love the idea of building it in a ravine, we could always make our own, we should build an underground wood uat the bottom (skyrim talking!)

What I might try to do tonight is on my main survival world just construct a basic walkway and one or two medium sized apartments. There are two huge ravines that intersect underground that go damn near to bedrock with several lava lakes along the bottom and mine shafts on one end. At some points the walls are close to 20 blocks apart. That place was terrifying to explore at first.

I wasn't on much or at all the past week because I was on call and put in nearly 60 hours. Thank God its a rotating schedule, so 6 more weeks before I have to do that again. Anyway, this week I am itching to dig in to our current goals.

60 hours! :O

Okay, well anything more you can give us is good I think I get your concept, but I'm not 100% sure

Yeah, last week was a rough one. I made up two decent sized apartments in that large ravine I mentioned. I took some more screen shots, but they still don't really do it justice so I've made another Video. It is uploading currently so give it about 20 minutes.

I watched the video and I really like the second apartment design you showed. I also still like the idea of developing this area in a ravine.

Video? Where?

Brendanan wrote:Video? Where?

In NostalgicLeaf's latest post. Click the word video.

Rather than in a ravine, I propose we change our current plans with the great dome and turn it into the Great Atrium. Leaving the two crossing walkways and the neat crossing with its glass floor in place, let's lower the entire rest of the floor down almost to bedrock. Then, we can build apartments into the walls of this pit with balconies overlooking a central lava pit or, if we want a more residential feel, perhaps a small park with grass, flowers, and a tree?

Great atrium in side-view Cross-Section:


Great Atrium in top-view cross-section:


Each quadrant of the circle could be an apartment, and I'm sure we can fit two levels beneath the current level-40 floor and the bedrock below, with plenty of room for either a lava pit or green park at the bottom.

Staircases either side of the existing walkways could go down to the apartments on that side (the farm side may need to use more compact ladders, for space reasons), and their balconies could connect into a continuous ring road along the rim of the pit below.

I stink at interior design, so I'll leave the details of what each apartment looks like to the experts, or better yet, to their inhabitants.

The biggest problem will be the railroad. I suggest we reroute yet again (sigh) to send the cart line first to a station between the nether portal room and the lava river (or between the lava river and the dome), then to loop past the apartment ring under the entrance walkway to hit the farms and tree farm, perhaps even skipping the dome end of the farm tunnel entirely. But other possibilities include a new dome station between the farms and the walkway down to the warehouse and throne room, or even sending it across the atrium on a bridge of its own, sorta like how the Disneyworld Monorail goes through the Contemporary Resort Hotel.

I really like this idea. The bottom of it could have the eating hall. The only problem I see is the void fog. We can figure something out though, there's a lot of possibilities and I just love the idea of the apartments with balconies along the walls, I want nothing more than to live in one of those and this whole idea brings back ideas from the early stages of planning this project.

Little known fact: sunlight banishes the void fog. So if we can put a big enough skylight above this thing, the void fog will be nonexistent. At least from anyplace you can stand in direct sunlight, anyways. Not sure what the terrain above is like, though. Worried it might be that ocean.

That's correct. A skylight would conflict with the lapis gem though. The area on top is however not the ocean, it's one of the smaller lakes and can be dealt with. I'm not sure about the entire area though, I only checked a tiny part of it when digging out the dome.

sret wrote:That's correct. A skylight would conflict with the lapis gem though. The area on top is however not the ocean, it's one of the smaller lakes and can be dealt with. I'm not sure about the entire area though, I only checked a tiny part of it when digging out the dome.

Maybe we could have a lapis-ringed skylight?

I was having similar thoughts. Just being able to have as much void fog free area as possible would be nice. Being able to view the surroundings while eating might not be needed. Still, it really hurts the atmosphere. Is there any chance we can make it high enough to avoid the void fog without hurting the design and looks? Do you know at what level the void fog starts? I'm not sure how dwarven it would be to have an open hole to the surface at the core of the city. It's generally a nice idea but this is a dwarven city, it's meant to be underground.. deep underground.

On second thoughts, as it starts on level 40 we'll need to go to the bottom to have enough room for apartments etc. There wont be any room for a deep lavapit though. Perhaps a statue in the middle? Or even have the lapis gem on the ground, or near it.

Now it's been laid out to me like this, I love the idea!!!!

I'm really glad to hear that! I was afraid you'd be against it, but I pushed him to make it anyway and now I'd be sad if I don't get these apartments. It also means a lot of digging that needs to be done, and lots of various work, finally something to do when it's ready to get started.

I like the idea but i have to play devils advocate.

Why does it have to be part of the Entrance hall at all?

We want to make the city big with lots of rooms and locations to show off how grand the dwarf empire is right?

Why not start from scratch somewhere else?

That way we can have the entrance hall + the atrum?

you could even build the skylight above ground if you want then we dont need to worry about void fog.

He has a good point... I'll join in discussions later

spectrumwars wrote:Rather than in a ravine, I propose we change our current plans with the great dome and turn it into the Great Atrium. Leaving the two crossing walkways and the neat crossing with its glass floor in place, let's lower the entire rest of the floor down almost to bedrock. Then, we can build apartments into the walls of this pit with balconies overlooking a central lava pit or, if we want a more residential feel, perhaps a small park with grass, flowers, and a tree?

Great atrium in side-view Cross-Section:


Great Atrium in top-view cross-section:


Each quadrant of the circle could be an apartment, and I'm sure we can fit two levels beneath the current level-40 floor and the bedrock below, with plenty of room for either a lava pit or green park at the bottom.

Staircases either side of the existing walkways could go down to the apartments on that side (the farm side may need to use more compact ladders, for space reasons), and their balconies could connect into a continuous ring road along the rim of the pit below.

I stink at interior design, so I'll leave the details of what each apartment looks like to the experts, or better yet, to their inhabitants.

The biggest problem will be the railroad. I suggest we reroute yet again (sigh) to send the cart line first to a station between the nether portal room and the lava river (or between the lava river and the dome), then to loop past the apartment ring under the entrance walkway to hit the farms and tree farm, perhaps even skipping the dome end of the farm tunnel entirely. But other possibilities include a new dome station between the farms and the walkway down to the warehouse and throne room, or even sending it across the atrium on a bridge of its own, sorta like how the Disneyworld Monorail goes through the Contemporary Resort Hotel.

I like the idea, and if need be we can stop the track ad build the dome station in the apartment area.

But my preference would be to build a bridge for the track, or reroute under the nether area.

Rerout the track... OR, make the track directly under the walking bridge (wait, that won't work, cause it'll disrupt the view from the centre of the bridge