Thought I would do a bonus gallery, so here it is folks, The Making of the place I call home!

I found this place somewhere after 2 or 3 days of exploration. My Original plan was to settle down in a Mega Taiga biome. Mega Taigas are my absolute favorite, and I didn't even know they existed until I stumbled onto one after a very long night on the 1.8 server... I fell into a ravine deep underground while exploring a mineshaft and found a tunnel made by a player. So I thought to myself, hey I'll just follow this tunnel and see where it goes. Turns out, the fucking tunnel was over 45,000 blocks long. Not exaggerating in the slightest. I actually think it was over 60,000 long because the part I stumbled into went in both directions, and I picked the one I thought was going toward a base. Anyway, so when I finally reached the end of the tunnel underground, it let out into a Mega Taiga, and it was the most amazing experience... I had never seen that particular biome before and I had been running down this dark creepy tunnel for nearly 6 hours underground, and it was raining and just... I was inspired. The trees, the podzol, the mossy cobble formations. It was so damn neat looking. So when the 1.9 server went live, I vowed I wouldn't stop until I was hella far away from spawn in a Mega Taiga I could call my own.

But that didn't happen. I was boating along in the middle of the ocean on my second or third day on the 1.9 server and passed 2 ocean monuments in a straight line, then crashed into a fairly large island. Really considered setting up shop, but decided to move on. However I hadn't moved on even 1000 blocks from the island when I found yet another ocean monument... So I said screw it. Awesome island in the middle of nowhere surrounded by 3 ocean monuments... too good to pass up.

Upon later exploration of the surrounding area, after I had set up a proper base underground, I found another 2 ocean monuments within a 1000 block radius, for a total of 5. Hit the jackpot. So I'm very glad I stayed lol

This is probably the oldest screenshot I have of the base, what you are looking at folks is currently the ground floor of the tower which is now water and lilypads.

@Icebaal and I started clearing out a small space to make a working base

After dodging many lava pockets and dealing with some very unruly zombies we had a clean area to work with, and I got started building the original iteration of the base.

After a lot more work, I finally had a solid base and place to gather materials and adventure outward from. I'm like borderline OCD and everything always has to be organized, so my storage has looked pretty much the same even from the beginning lol

This is the main floor of the original base, which again, is now the area covered in water and lilypads. Sorry for the strange chat... generally the only time I took screenshots back then was when something weird was going on lol

... Very weird

The base Stayed cozy like that for a very long time. During this stage I randomly found a zombie spawner when I was digging out a hallway and that massively altered the course of building development. I surrounded the center area with a square hallway where I stored villagers originally. After nearly a month like that, the villager honks and grunts had almost driven me insane, and the lack of space was making me claustrophobic as hell... But I had finally gathered enough Iron to finish a beacon. So Icebaal and I began the expansion.

We got the beacon going and cleared upwards. I had wanted to make a big chandelier and tower from the beginning as thats the direction I was headed with my base on the 1.8 server.

I took out the roof, which is now the second floor and built up the walls of the current tower... and more weird shit in chat lol.

Behind the snowy mountain banner you can see the old hallway to the zombie spawner behind the jungle door

Started working on the staircase during this stage.

This was a very time consuming stage of development. The villager noise was driving me up the damn wall, literally, I made a tower. So they needed their own room. All of my storage was overflowing and EVERYTHING was mixed together... enchanting materials, building materials, brewing ingredients... it was a nightmare. First on my list however was the villagers, I wanted to get it out of the way first because I wanted some damn quiet. So I dug out a hallway and created the current market area. Once I did this I realized I had a bunch of dead space on either side of this hallway that I needed to fill. But I realized hey I need rooms for my building materials and brewing stuff, so it worked out perfectly.

I don't have many screenshots from this time of the base as I was exploring the end for cities and materials during most of my time online, but that was when I fell in love with the End style and I had all these blocks from my excursions out there so I just ran with an idea when I was making the alchemy room and it turned out really cool. After I finished it I tried my hand at another themed room and made the main storage vault with a stronghold theme in mind on the other side of the market hallway.

This is what the outside farm looked like at this time. Like I said, space efficient and utilitarian lol.

Finally I had finished the 3 largest rooms and had migrated the majority of the old base storage into them, and had cleared out the original ground floor and furniture and junk. Also raised the beacon to the second floor and was playing around with a like... "temple" Idea with it. I put some water under it and just didn't touch it for a long time.

This was an annoying stage for the ground floor. It was just so icky and gray everywhere and bland... and I didn't want to close off the floor because it would be claustrophobic all over again... I didn't know how to solve my design issues for a long time and couldn't find any inspiration... Then one day I tried playing around with lilypads and sea lanterns and it looked awesome. Was also still trying to figure out how to keep the second floor open, played around with the idea of like beams suspending the beacon in the air.

Finally, I pushed back the stone and realized I could just make the entire floor out of glass and have the illusion of open space. Then I fleshed out the floor with water and lilypad walkways.

The armory/ display room was basically my house during the entire building process, I built the fireplace early on and originally kept my player heads above it, unfortunately I don't really have any early screenshots that don't have my coords or revealing information on them. I worked on it in little pieces whenever I needed a break from the main tower. The fireplace side was the original room, and as I got more heads and explored a larger area around my base I realized I need more display room, so I broke down the back wall and extended it as far back as the fireplace side to make it even.

here it is about halfway to where it is now, the fireplace is to the right of me and the wooden wall to the left is now the hall where the heads and map are.

With the Ground floor finally finished, I looked back up and realized there was still much to do. I needed to finish my original dream on the 1.8 server... I wanted my damn chandelier.

I needed to be able to work up there first, and wasn't exactly sure what shape I wanted for the roof of the tower so I opted to finish the staircase first... I hated every second of it, mainly because it was just repeating the same design over and over and over the whole way up. Also because I still had not raided any of the surrounding ocean monuments yet and didn't have the prismarine I needed, so the entire staircase was originally stone slabs which I then completely tore out and replaced with prismarine... I still hate my damn staircase, not how it looks, I love that. I just remember how frustrating it was to build whenever I look at it. Oh yeah I forgot, I also had to clear out stone the whole way up because it was still filled up then... so that didn't help. I do have this little gem of a screenshot from that time though lol. I'm still not exactly sure what the hell @BaronBattleBread was doing XD.

After I finished the staircase, Icebaal didnt like the farm and wanted a more natural space underground, I also knew then that I wanted to clear out the area around the tower. So we spent an entire night clearing out the adjacent cavern, after which I went to sleep. When I got back on the next day this was there.

I finished the roof, and the chandelier, which was originally all glowstone, I replaced it with sea lanterns and the staircase with prismarine after I finally got around to raiding one of the ocean monuments near me. Then however I was struck with the same problem in the upper tower that I had come across on the ground floor... it was gray and bland and ugly. So i made some big huge windows. It still felt empty though, but I had a literal ass ton of library book blocks from the 4 or 5 strongholds I raided and built up the sides of the tower with them. and it filled the empty gray space perfectly. I had one last problem though... when I looked out the windows I was constantly reminded that I was underground, and It bugged me. So I made the windows 3 deep and filled the middle up with water to provide the illusion that I'm underwater... which worked perfectly.

and thats where I've been since then everybody. I've made a few tweaks to existing structures here and there, added minor details, played with some furniture ideas, and have a few plans to work on. The next big thing will be clearing the area around the tower and eventually adding more towers, then connecting them into one large castle structure underground. It's gonna be grand for sure. Until then though.