Howdy, y’all! Joe Hills here writing as I always do in Nashville, TN!
The POE POE have given the Hermits until the end of the month to finish our shops, so today I spent over four hours on a bonus HermitCraft 10 stream developing my NameTag shop, “Hello, my name is Lasertag.”
The core concept of the shop is that the lobby will have a place where Hermits can buy name tags, but the main attraction will be an arena for an asymmetrical team-based attack-and-defend PVP game. My layout design for the arena is still a very early work in progress that is out of scope for the shop month deadline, but I can share now that it will be inspired by the third area of the map CTF Badlands from Team Fortress, which I also enjoyed the Team Fortress 2 interpretation of.
Rough dimensions and terraforming
I love playing Etho’s Ravager Rush game in his froglight shop, but it always felt to me that the observation area could be more welcoming if it was directly accessible from his lobby.
When approaching this project, I knew that I wanted the ceiling to feature alternating layers of air and glass for a fog effect, but a real breakthrough moment was realizing that an extra-tall air gap in the layers of glass could serve as a a broad observation deck for the arena that’s easily accessible from the rear of the shop’s lobby.
There’s three meters between the floor and ceiling of the observation deck that overlooks the future arena.
Sorting the y-levels for the purple glass floor and ceiling there was the last step I needed to determine how deep I needed to dig out and add a grass roof over the lobby bunker.
Color and material choices
In terms of materials, I’ve decided to use coal for the black shell around the skybox and gathered six shulkers of coal ore from the chest beacons around my Hermit Holmdel area. As my entire coal supply will probably be required for this project, I also gathered some wood to cook into charcoal for fuel for future glass furnacinations.
I also finally selected team colors for the attackers and defenders in the mini-game. Green and yellow don’t appear in TF2, but in Team Fortress Classic they were used as colors for teams three and four in quad-team maps. Green and yellow are better-suited to a lasertag theme in Minecraft than red and blue because of the easy availability of high-visibility green and yellow froglights.
I decided to use quartz for the slabs and white interior accents in the shop. which led me to Impulse’s shop, which sells quartz at a rate of one stack of quartz blocks for 3 diamonds. Impulse’s grass shop sells grass at a rate of 1 diamond per stack, so I decided to text Impulse and inquire about dropping off 8 double chests of grass for 8 stacks of quartz. Until we hear back from Impulse, I’m using white concrete as a placeholder.
Looking forward
This is only one of three shops I need to finish by the 31st, so my plan for my grindy Moby Dick stream tonight is to gather materials for the entrance and shop area of this build.
Best case, the main lobby and bunker entrance door can be completed early this week so that I can shift my focus to the Wool Street collaboration and to my Tuff/Calcite shop.
Don’t forget, you can always keep an eye out for my next show via my streaming calendar at https://joehills.net/soon/
Until next time, y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, TN.
Keep adventuring!