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| ~ Minetest Ideas ~ |
For a while I had been looking at pictures of mansions for ideas for another project. Stuck for inspiration, I switched back to building roads and paths for a little village project of mine.
Roads and paths can be quite tedious but they aren't very taxing. They are productive exercises that allow your creativity to rest and recover.
As I was working on the roads I had to decide whether to make the roads in a grid pattern - as if the settlement were rigidly planned by some governor, or to make the roads and paths winding and organic - as if they were just there simply because that's the most convenient, well-worn route people took.
I began to think about the roads and paths I've seen used in villages built by others.
In my time, I've seen several Minetest villages that were laid out in perfectly spaced, evenly proportioned grid patterns and I've always seen them as nothing more than small villages.
But this time,... perhaps because I had just been looking through a bunch of mansion pictures,... in my mind's eye,... I caught a glimpse of something else.
Those perfectly spaced, evenly proportioned, villages where all of the houses were the same size, same proportions, same boxy look,... that type of layout,... from above,... looked very similar to the floor plan of a mansion.
As the fog of that notion gradually lifted, a concept started taking shape.
I began to imagine the roads as if they were hallways and the shacks as if they were rooms. The grass areas surrounding the shacks were the space for furniture, small sculptures, trophy cases, and paintings along the rooms in the mansion.
The village fields could be ground-level gardens or large baths or small, indoor swimming pools, or whatever large, open space may be in a mansion.
A ballroom?
A gym?
A large, open room for hosting gatherings or meetings or a big, empty room just to prove they have money to waste on wasted space?
A more practical use of the once-a-field-now-an-open-space would be to make a stair case there. After all, you need a way to move up and down between the different floors of a mansion.
Now flip the idea around - how to build a village?
Build the first floor of a mansion and instead of a single ceiling covering a bunch of rooms, have open sky and put roofs on the rooms. Instead of carpeting and a marble floor use grass and gravel. The large courtyard of the mansion could become the village's market square.
So the next time you would like to build a mansion, but are stuck for ideas, try starting your plan with a village in mind instead of a mansion.
On the flip-side, if you want to build a village, but are stuck for ideas, start your building plan with the layout of a one-level mansion that has no ceiling.
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