Race Track Map - Mall (Mostly) DONE!

Great news - the mall is finished! OK, well I still have to add the new items for sale once I actually update to 1.6, but that's the easy part.

Anyway, here's a glimpse at one of the main hallways inside. The majority of the ceiling is glass because skylights are nice. A friend suggested I go with yellow wool for the edges once I added in the quartz pattern blocks to the floor. I thought it would be really ugly at first, but I was surprised. It actually looks really nice at the doorways to the shops!

This image here shows off the record store. It's in the basement, like most indie music stores are in real life. As you can tell, the shop has a very stronghold/dungeon feel to it, taking the term "underground music" literally!




This relatively simple-looking image is much more than it appears. If you can read the signs, you'll notice that the machines on either side convert a diamond to nine gold blocks and back again. Turning one diamond into 9 blocks is easy - I can build the device in my sleep now. The other conversion however is a bit trickier.

What you don't see is the redstone required to make it all happen. I had to account for players tossing in any amount of blocks - either one at a time or in a stack of any number. In addition to the item shop build I needed a toggleable redstone clock that would tick precisely in time with the hoppers. I found some builds and tinkered with them until I found the one that suited my needs... then had to manually fiddle with delay settings until it synced up. It took most of yesterday to accomplish that.

With the mall pretty much complete, I considered what was left: exit doors for leaving the races, the rail system, the hotel, and the job areas. I figured that instead of having even more pathways for players leaving the races that I'd keep it simple. It's just 2 one-way doors with a command block buried that removes the players' digital "tickets". After the headache of figuring out the change machine I was happy to see such an elegant solution!

With the exits taken care of, I now turn my attention to the rail system. In addition to getting players from A to B, it also needs to accept payments, have two-way traffic, dispense an unlimited/recurring supply of minecarts, remove those minecarts from players after the ride, and look nice to boot! A bit of a tall order, but I like challenges (or I'm a glutton for punishment)!