7 Days to Die - Project Awesome House (Day 4)

House Construction

I finally began to construct the primary structure of the house.  I know I wanted a pool, a fire place, and a wing of the house to have about a 180 degree view of the outside so that I can come up there and shoot zombies if I want.  Figures 1-3 illustrate the house in its unfinished form.

Figure 1- Unfinished living room

Figure 2 - Unfinished kitchen

Figure 3 - Unfinished ceiling

The finished product is below.  You will notice that by comparing Figure 1 to Figure 12 that the second story is actually a few blocks lower.  that's because in the initial construction, I realized the second story was way too tall and it did not look good.  I took the extra time to shave it down by a few blocks and the result is better but I wish it was still lower.  Take this as a lesson for advanced planning.  I should have done more homework on this one.

The next thing I plan to do is to upload a video of a walkthrough in the house.  So stay tuned for a link!

Figure 4 - Back of the house

Figure 5 - Left side of the house

Figure 6 - Downstairs lounging area with bar

Figure 7 - Family room

Figure 8 - Open firing range

Figure 9 - Entrance to open firing range; firing range storage lockers; roof access

Figure 10 - Frontal view of the house and sky walk (the sky walk connects the open firing range to the second floor)

Figure 11 - Right side of the house

Figure 12 - Living room with fire space and stairs to second floor

Figure 13 - Downstairs bedroom with lounging area, work desk and safe

Figure 14 - Additional downstairs bedroom view

Figure 15 - Tunnel access to the bottom of the ditch and then outside (this is at the foundation of the sky walk)

Figure 16 - Pool area

Figure 17 - Sky walk

Figure 18 - Up stairs primary storage area and access to firing range

Figure 19 - Upstairs lounging area with sky light and access to upstairs bed room

7 Days to Die - Project Awesome House (Day 3)

Ditch Digging

Digging the ditch deep enough to kill zombies with fall damage is the worst commitment I ever made.  Shaving through rocks with an auger took about 3 days to totally complete the ditch.  I did come up with a little bit of a short cut and I imagine it probably saved me a few hours.  So here's the shortcut.  If you want a ditch 3 blocks across then you dig on either side for about 3 blocks tall and go all the way to the end.  Then you take out the last row and the middle row will simply fall off.  An illustration is provided below.

Figure 1 - How to dig a ditch

Figure 2 - How to dig a ditch

After some grueling work, it is finally done.  Isn't it magnificent?  Unfortunately it won't kill bloated zombies on fall because I heard they require about 40 blocks deep to kill and I'm not about to spend a month just digging.

Figure 3 - Final form of ditch

7 Days to Die - Project Awesome House (Day 2)

It is day 2 and I have moved from drawing on paper to actually building the house in-game.  I'm going to give a relatively detailed account so if you'd like to replicate the process, you can do so with plenty of references.  Otherwise, I hope this could inspire you to begin your own awesome project.

LOCATION 

First things first, I had to first find an open field large enough to accommodate my house.  Furthermore, I wanted to have some natural elements such as trees and grass surrounding my house to give it a more organic feel.  After running around for a bit, I liked the land as shown in Figure 1.  Unfortunately, there were a few small hills next to it.  I decided to digging through them and clear off about half the hill to give more room to my building space.  I have to say, that was very very tedious.

Figure 1 - Map and Location

FOUNDATION

I wanted to put in 1 layer of foundation as a reference.  Furthermore, the foundation layer would also serve as the flooring for the first floor and thus be level with the ground.  This means digging out 1 layer in the dirt in the shape of the first floor (Figure 2).

Figure 2 - Foundation Dugout

I'd like to refer to my initial drawing for the next part.  Since I planned to have a super deep ditch around the house, I cannot use ladders directly inside the ditch to access the outside because the zombies can also use the ladders to avoid the fall damage.  The plan I came up with is to have a tunnel accessible from the house that goes all the way down to the bottom level of the ditch then tunnels out and up into an open field.  This is difficult to explain with words but it will become more clear later with illustrations.  Now, the tunnel access is indicated in Figure 3.

Figure 3 - Tunnel Access

During the foundation planning, I also dug down extra deep for the tunnel layer so that I can keep it in mind while building out the house.  This is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 - Tunnel Foundation

This more or less completes the initial zoning.  Next phase is digging that deep ditch.  This may be the most tedious phase of the project.  To speed it up, I decided to cheat a little bit and use the creative menu to access the auger to aid in my digging process.  Stay tuned for details.

New Project - Building an awesome house in 7 Days to Die (Day 1)

So I've begun a new project.  This time, I'm not building a computer but I've recently taken an interest in the game 7 Days to Die.  It's an amalgamation of Minecraft and various zombie shooters although the graphics are much better than that of Minecraft.

Anyway, given the scope and flexibility of the building system within the game, I thought I would be able to create a rather nice looking house.

Before I began, I had the following thoughts/goals:

1. The building should be aesthetically pleasing
2. I want the inside of the building to feel as if someone could literally move in and live there
3. Given #1, I will forgo most of the defensive mechanisms that one would normally implement inside the game such as building a perimeter of spikes.  Instead, I will surround the whole building with a deep enough ditch so the zombies will die from falling.

With these things in mind, I did some initial planning for my awesome future house.  Here is a summary of what I did:

Building Material: Mostly reinforced concrete.  I discovered that it is one of the few building blocks within the game that keeps its perfectly straight edges when placed on the ground  Most of the other materials will warp with the landscape.

Flooring: I want to have a nice hard wood floor for the house and it's a toss up between the old wood blocks or the normal wood planks.  I picked the latter because I thought it would bring some warmth to the house given its yellowish hue.

Floor Plan and Sizing: The picture below (Figure 1) is my initial drawing of what I imagined the house would general look like and how each room would be divided up.  I had no thoughts yet on exactly how wide, tall, long the whole thing would be.  I was just going to section off an area in the game and see how it goes.

Figure 1 - Initial Floor Plan

This was my first go at planning out the building.  Stay tuned for how everything went.