Building mania: the Twin Feathers Inn
The Twin Feathers Inn is probably the pièce de résistance of Ravenstone. The original idea had been to build separate structures for a residence and a kitchen. However, I realized that every medieval village needs its center of activity: the local inn. So slowly but surely, the stone L-shaped building was erected on a prime piece of land that had a beautiful view of the lake and some trees.
Prior to 1.0, it was a single storey building that sported a kitchen, a common room, and 3 small bedrooms for occupants.
Of course, the first thing that needed to be completed were the outer walls. Then some beds were built…because before then, I had nowhere to sleep on deed.
Next came laying the floors. Which was a whole lot of fun (read: time-consuming) because I wanted it all to be wooden floorboards except for the patio. Floorboards are a pain in the arse to make even now so making them 21 of them took a nice long while.
Then the inner walls went up.
And finally, voila! One inn ready to accept new patrons.
And then I built up and up and up…
Then 1.0 and multistorey came out and once I had completed upgrading my other buildings, it was time to tackle the inn. I had a terrible timing deciding how I wanted it to be laid out and I didn’t exactly want to have to redo anything on it, especially since I was going to continue with stone walls. At the time, the best (and probably only) way to see a 3D concept of a multistorey house was to use Google SketchUp. Somewhere along the way…the whole thing just kind of mutated into this giant project. The design I went with ended up 6 floors high, and when over a dozen slate veins spawned in my mine, I decided to use slate roofs and some slate slab floors. The wooden walls of the patio also had to be replaced with stone ones.
Now, the sheer number of stone walls would have been the most tedious part if I hadn’t laid slate slab floors for the upper floor patios. On the outside, they don’t seem too bad. You just need 2 slate slabs and 10 mortar per tile. If only slate slabs were as easy to make as stone slabs: take a big pile of stone shards and use the stone chisel on them…tada! One stone slab done in one action. But noooooo…each slate slab is made of 20 slate shingles and 4 concrete. Cutting the shingles from slate shards isn’t terrible, it’s a lot like cutting rock shards.
The real pain in the arse was the concrete. Concrete is made of mortar and lye and uses the natural substance subskill. Mortar isn’t too bad as it uses the masonry skill to make and is just sand and clay mixed together. Lye however is made of ash and water, and uses the alchemy skill (which natural substances is under). The best way to get ash is from burnt out campfires (o.1kg for each fire). 0.1 kg of ash + 1kg of water = 1kg of lye. 1.5kg of lye is needed to make one concrete weighing 3kg. Of course, this doesn’t sound bad until you take how the alchemy/natural substances skills affect this. Both skills are difficult to raise because you only need them for making healing covers and making dye really. So I had about a 50% chance to make the lye and a 50% chance to make the concrete itself. I needed a total of 88 concrete. <insert crying here>
I believe I ended up making close to 200 campfires to get enough ash for all the lye. The road going through my deed resembled a plane runway as the Wurm Online twitter put it.
@faeldray If only #wurmonline had aircraft. That would make a great runway!
— Wurm Online (@wurmonline) January 19, 2013
It just seemed so complicated and tedious for no reason really, especially when stone slabs are made so easily. And I don’t even want to get into the grinding I had to do to get my paving skill high enough to lay the slate floors themselves.
Needless to say, while the other buildings were updated to multistorey over an evening or two of play, the inn took several weeks to finish. I still haven’t even furnished it completely because I was so tired of working it by the end. Ah, the things I do in the name of perfection.
In addition to the three small bedrooms on the main floor, I added three larger bedrooms (two 6-tiles and one 5-tiles in area) and one 8-tile master bedroom on the third floor. Each upper-level bedroom has its own 2-tile balcony. There is also a 3-tile rooftop balcony and a bell tower with an actual bell that can be rung.
I kept part of my sanity by not calculating the amount of materials I would need before or while I was building. But just now I used the wonderful DeedPlanner to calculate the total materials (this is not including the wooden floorboards I laid pre-1.0 or the wooden walls in the patio I replaced):
- 99 Small nails
- 12 Stone slabs
- 160 Slate shingle
- 2050 Mortar
- 22 Slate slabs (no need to repeat how much of a pain these were)
- 2215 Stone bricks
- 495 Planks
5053 pieces in all. Definitely a labor of love.
Here are a gallery of the finished inn
The pictures don’t really do it justice. So if you wish to explore the Twin Feather Inn in 3D, you can download DeedPlanner and import the code from Pastebin.
Or you could always stop by in-game and take a peek! Only the kitchen is locked. Don’t forget to say hi if you do. 😉