Prinnie Powah, Dood!

Prinnieworld v2 turned out to have a mushroom land tucked away at the far upper right corner of the map. A friend requested an underground castle there, and I thought, sure. White and red like the mushrooms on the surface, maybe? That’d be cute. Mario-esque.

Yeah, that didn’t happen.

I found a ravine, followed it as far down as possible, and thought, this is probably deep enough to get started.

I’m a reactive builder, in the sense that my plans will continually change based on new factors. The original concept I’d started building with was simply a “main hall” and a single tower.

As the castle grew in height and I had to excavate further into the cavern, I kept discovering underground streams. Rather than block them off, I decided to work with them by incorporating them as a series of channeled waterfalls to the cavern floor below. The entire surface is flooded, with the castle’s high foundation rising above it. Visitors have to wade through the sodden, overgrown castle surroundings. There is no other way – the inconvenience is intentional.

Several of the streams flow into the castle itself on the first, second, and third level, each creating a reflecting pool.

By this point the castle was large enough that the merchant and his llamas would frequently spawn on top of or inside it. I can’t stand the “ehhhh” and spitting sounds, so this led to lots of murder. Lots.* It’s probably safe to say the castle is haunted by a series of merchant ghosts who will try to sell you gravel or something. Once I realized this, I knocked out almost all bright lighting for a completely murky, dank look. (You probably don’t want to be in here in survival mode.)

Do you want a haunted castle? Because that’s how you get a haunted castle.

Now that the place was totally haunted, the swampy surroundings had to have a little unearthly glow – achieved by digging back down into the bedrock, placing glowstones at the deepest level, then layering cyan and green stained glass blocks on top.

Did I mention murder?

Since I spent so much time on this build (and clearly, I had the space), I also put in some “living areas” with less murder.

There are a few other areas that I didn’t take pictures of, like the cobblestone storage room, or the secret door to a parapet.

I put a few vines on the castle at one point. I thought they’d look cool. I kept trying to trim them, but eventually they took over and I had to give up.

By now, I’d excavated the cave all the way back up to the surface, so I ended up trying to shape that. I put in one glass block for a skylight effect. I also ended up rebuilding the sides of the cavern as it turned out I’d gotten a bit turned around when selecting the site, and the castle was surrounded by the ocean on one side (oops) and a deep, underwater volcanic rift on the other (double oops).

So how, then, do you get down from the surface? Well, I built a staircase, but it’s weird. Because I could no longer expand horizontally, I couldn’t spiral it quite the way I had in mind … so I kept it simple (sort of). At the bottom, there are two flights of two steps each, then there are three flights of three steps each. Next, four flights of four steps each, and … then I ran out of room. So there’s only one flight with five steps. The idea is that as you spiral down to the castle, you start to feel more rushed and unconsciously uncomfortable.

The cavern and castle were built entirely “by hand”, as I have Switch with no addons or mods. Does that make this an artisanal castle?

In the end, I wound up with the main tower, a parapet leading to a tall narrow tower, a recessed tower (not very visible in this shot), and an observation platform (and a castle that’s so tall, I can’t get it all in one image).

_{p.s. * gravity also murdered me on a regular basis, and I had one death to lava here. So I probably haunt the place too.}