In the last post about my new home on the Minecraft multi-player survival server, I’d just constructed a gigantic head/tower to lead to the then empty summit of a hill above my main base. I already had an unfinished tower started on the roof of my base that led nowhere in particular so it was pretty clear something needed building up there. One path-to-nowhere in a build is bad enough but two… well, that’s just plain sloppy.

Having built my farm full of sugar cane, potatoes, wheat, carrots, pumpkins and melons, I’d noticed there was another crop that I’d overlooked – the cocoa bean. Considering I lived in a Jungle biome and had been hacking up trees covered in beans, this oversight needed correcting.

As before, click on any of the thumbnails for a larger image.

So, high on top of the hill above my home, I built a large platform with nine jungle wood stumps in a 3×3 arrangement that could be used to attach the beans to. They don’t need to be on a ‘living’ tree topped with foliage – they’re just as happy one a single, placed block of wood as they are on a spawned tree. The whole shebang looked a bit odd alone and so it was quickly topped with sandstone based building.

I’ve never used the sandstone materials in any of my earlier builds but after seeing other people do great things with it, I wanted to try my hand. It was a nice change of pace from the grey smooth stone bricks I’d been using on pretty much everything else. Of course, the smooth stone bricks were included to carry along the crenelated style of the other structures, and the whole thing was topped off with an arty-farty wavy roof.

Underneath, the dark spruce wood works well with the jungle tree trunks while the grassy plots and red/yellow flowers keep the whole thing looking vaguely natural. Like a fool, I built a web of soil bridges across the platform to encourage grass to migrate onto these little squares when all the while, during that long wait for the green plague to spread, I had a damn silk-touch pick-axe in my inventory that I could have used to break up some proper grass blocks.

Given each fully grown pod can yield between 2-3 cocoa beans, the whole farm can supply over 300 beans if you’re lucky. More than enough for all your cookie crafting or dyeing needs.

It was while thinking about the possible uses for my new trove of cocoa beans that I finally decided what to do with the building on top of the stumps. It became ‘The Cookies & Cake Shop‘.

Since I already had a source of wheat and sugar from my farm, it didn’t seem like that much of a leap to put them all to good used and create a structure specifically to house the results. Its location and the small, quirky design seemed perfectly suited to the role and while it wasn’t exactly a functional use, I was happy giving the building over to this façade.

Once its purpose was decided, the interior of the building came quickly. The back of the room was decked out with the black and white tiles of a kitchen while the front sported a shop counter and signs displaying the products available for purchase.

Item frames were a new addition that I hadn’t really had chance to play around with up until now but they really do add something to the game. I can see myself using them in the future for informational purposes (displaying the contents of a chest, say) and as pure decoration.

The shop doesn’t only sell cookies and cakes, of course. Thanks to easy access to the materials, I was also able to make pumpkin pies, baked potatoes and the old stalwart, bread.

With such a huge blank canvas staring down at me, I couldn’t resist adding a Skoardy design to the underside of the cocoa bean platform. Inset using slabs and stairs, I think it probably it puts the little smiley face I added to the top of the roof access stairs to shame.

Shortly after this last screenshot was taken, I decided to complete the unfinished tower just to the left of the shot. First it leads to the side of the platform giving another route up to the shop and then it continues onwards and upwards, spawning another tower and then another…

At the time of writing, the next stage of the build in already complete and it’s a doozy. I’ll be revealing it later on the site.