Rapture Writ Small
Jul. 27th, 2011 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tuftears"...I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well."
.Andrew Ryan
Well, admittedly this is neither accurate to the game Bioshock nor is it 'to scale', but it's inspired by the underwater city of Rapture!
I picked up Terraria in the Steam sale - $5 was a pretty solid deal, I figured, for something I had heard a lot of good things about. I built a small, serviceable base, pretty castle-y, nothing extraordinary, and was pondering what thing to do in Terraria. Then I came across the Show Us Your Base thread in the Terraria Online forums.
I became inspired! They had sky bases, and underground bases, and even one or two underwater bases... But they didn't have Rapture!
The trouble is, in Terraria, the oceans are all the way on the west and east ends of the map. To get there, I had to get through Corruption chasms, and my character wasn't strong enough to survive the trip, and if I just jumped into the ocean, how would I breath? So... I decided I could just dig a tunnel there and avoid the corruption! By reinforcing the tunnel walls, I could go right through the chasms and ignore the monsters.
That worked... Until I hit the dungeon on the left. Turns out that you can't tunnel through the dungeon, until you defeat its guardian monster, the third and most difficult enemy, it sends skeletal heads that one-shot you.
So I turned around and dug through the two Corruption chasms on the right. I dug, and I dug, and I dug... And ran up against the right edge of the map.
Turns out the ocean isn't actually that deep! I had dug my tunnel at about 6 feet below ground, and the ocean only came down to about 60 feet above ground or so. Also, the sand that makes up the ocean floor is constructed such that if you dig one block out, the rest of the sand comes down. So, I had to dig the sand out, then build the tunnel, then replace the sand later. It took some tricky mining techniques to be able to do that without my tunnel flooding!
At any rate, since I had verifiably reached the Ocean, I built an access shaft upward to where I was going to start the city, and collapsed the rest of the tunnel that led to the edge of the map - it was only going to get in the way. I filled in sand and then built the city.
Rapture was founded with murder! To get the NPCs to move from my 'starter fortress', I had to close their rooms out, then get them killed, then they'd respawn in the new rooms I had prepared for them instead of sticking to their previous 'spawn location'.
The city is fully functional. At left you have the entrance. There's an underwater airlock, and an access shaft down to a tunnel that I dug at 6 feet below ground - I tunneled through two separate Corruption Chasms to get to the ocean on the right! This connects to the 'Industrial Building' where the demolitionist (upstairs) and the arms dealer (downstairs) live. There's a working obsidian generator, using the ocean for limitless water.
Second from the left is the hospital where the Nurse lives. There's a restaurant on the bottom floor managed by the Guide, and a cozy bedroom at the top for players.
Third from the left is the commercial "skyscraper", with a cushy penthouse apartment made from gold bricks, with its very own private aquarium. Below that is the Merchant with his lavish, ostentatious collection of gold chests, and then the Clothier with a similar shop. The skyscraper runs downward from there, with the arches suggesting the outside of the building, to the railway station, which runs across to the garden.
Rightmost we have the Garden of Eden. The Dryad lives in a dirt-walled house at the top biosphere, with trees right outside her door. Below that is a modest farm, and behind it I placed "background skyscrapers", using lava to suggest lit windows.
That was a fun project, but I think I'm pretty much done with Terraria for now.
.Andrew Ryan
Well, admittedly this is neither accurate to the game Bioshock nor is it 'to scale', but it's inspired by the underwater city of Rapture!
I picked up Terraria in the Steam sale - $5 was a pretty solid deal, I figured, for something I had heard a lot of good things about. I built a small, serviceable base, pretty castle-y, nothing extraordinary, and was pondering what thing to do in Terraria. Then I came across the Show Us Your Base thread in the Terraria Online forums.
I became inspired! They had sky bases, and underground bases, and even one or two underwater bases... But they didn't have Rapture!
The trouble is, in Terraria, the oceans are all the way on the west and east ends of the map. To get there, I had to get through Corruption chasms, and my character wasn't strong enough to survive the trip, and if I just jumped into the ocean, how would I breath? So... I decided I could just dig a tunnel there and avoid the corruption! By reinforcing the tunnel walls, I could go right through the chasms and ignore the monsters.
That worked... Until I hit the dungeon on the left. Turns out that you can't tunnel through the dungeon, until you defeat its guardian monster, the third and most difficult enemy, it sends skeletal heads that one-shot you.
So I turned around and dug through the two Corruption chasms on the right. I dug, and I dug, and I dug... And ran up against the right edge of the map.
Turns out the ocean isn't actually that deep! I had dug my tunnel at about 6 feet below ground, and the ocean only came down to about 60 feet above ground or so. Also, the sand that makes up the ocean floor is constructed such that if you dig one block out, the rest of the sand comes down. So, I had to dig the sand out, then build the tunnel, then replace the sand later. It took some tricky mining techniques to be able to do that without my tunnel flooding!
At any rate, since I had verifiably reached the Ocean, I built an access shaft upward to where I was going to start the city, and collapsed the rest of the tunnel that led to the edge of the map - it was only going to get in the way. I filled in sand and then built the city.
Rapture was founded with murder! To get the NPCs to move from my 'starter fortress', I had to close their rooms out, then get them killed, then they'd respawn in the new rooms I had prepared for them instead of sticking to their previous 'spawn location'.
The city is fully functional. At left you have the entrance. There's an underwater airlock, and an access shaft down to a tunnel that I dug at 6 feet below ground - I tunneled through two separate Corruption Chasms to get to the ocean on the right! This connects to the 'Industrial Building' where the demolitionist (upstairs) and the arms dealer (downstairs) live. There's a working obsidian generator, using the ocean for limitless water.
Second from the left is the hospital where the Nurse lives. There's a restaurant on the bottom floor managed by the Guide, and a cozy bedroom at the top for players.
Third from the left is the commercial "skyscraper", with a cushy penthouse apartment made from gold bricks, with its very own private aquarium. Below that is the Merchant with his lavish, ostentatious collection of gold chests, and then the Clothier with a similar shop. The skyscraper runs downward from there, with the arches suggesting the outside of the building, to the railway station, which runs across to the garden.
Rightmost we have the Garden of Eden. The Dryad lives in a dirt-walled house at the top biosphere, with trees right outside her door. Below that is a modest farm, and behind it I placed "background skyscrapers", using lava to suggest lit windows.
That was a fun project, but I think I'm pretty much done with Terraria for now.
