Minecraft - Then and Now

I played Minecraft off and on over the weekend, and fell into my usual trap of poking around on various projects with no specific goal. I tend to get distracted when I play this game, and this leads to me starting too many projects and not finishing them. Sunday I decided to clean up some loose ends.
A while back this is what the exterior of my hill turning into castle looked like. Sorry for the nighttime view, as I said before, I'm kind of terrible about actually taking screenshots.

Before (click to expand)

You can see some progress here, some wall around the site, a structure on the bluff to the left, a bit of crenelation around the top of the hill guarding the beacon. That picture was taken... Thursday or Friday last week. The view now is a bit different.

After (click to expand)

As you can see, things have developed. I had to move my capture point just to take in the entire site. First you'll notice the entire courtyard / front area is walled in, and I've shaped off the hill to the left. There are more crenelations, and my little hovel has become a big tower with an endless waterfall inside. There are some light posts around the perimeter and a simple tree farm out front.

The Shop

Inside, things have changed too. Though the base of the tower is still under development, I've expanded the cellar area to include a larger workshop and storage for raw materials, complete with labels. Around the corner to the left is access to the aqueduct project, which is phase one complete, the excavation site, which is ongoing, and a maze-like collection of rooms and corridors that I've been developing inside the partially hollow hill. It's been challenging to build anything large because the hill interior is riddled with tunnels and caves, meaning I am constantly searching for raw materials. The excavation site is an effort to go deep and find some useful materials. Of course I've gotten sidetracked and started working on a service tunnel that runs beneath the aqueduct for no good reason...

Outside the Shop - Down is the Aqueduct and Excavation, right is further into the base.

The Aqueduct proper from the deepest point looking upstream.

I should point out the lower end of the aqueduct drains down into the service tunnel, which backs right onto a giant buried ravine, which you can see in the left background of the image below. I haven't done any exploring down there yet, but since my Excavation site is going to lead into the ravine, I'm sure I'll be posting about falling to my death in the next couple days.

The lowest end of the service tunnel beneath the Aqueduct

Finally there's the still under construction hill interior. This shot is from the back of the hill where I've built a small balcony over the water.

Hill interior - still under construction

As you can see, there's a lot of work to do here. Open caves, unlit areas, and open access from the outside make it kind of a death trap. I haven't even explored all the tunnels leading out of it yet. Yeah I'm a slacker.

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