St Kwan's Campanile is complete!

My name is Kwanzymandias, king of villagers: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

This is a full-scale model of the bell tower in St Mark's Square. I searched for days, making camp three times before discovering this village in a lake, about 150m from the third camp. I created this whole world with the express intent to find such a village, and when I did, I defended it and built my base there.

It's not quite The One Eight, yet, but it does have some nifty features. It is 102m tall, including the Tower of Shininess on the roof, consisting of one obsidian and four gold blocks. Its floor plan is a square 12m on a side, with walls 2m thick, just like the real thing. It shares with the real tower a spiral ramp around an empty center. The interior space is marked by four brick pillars, with a 4m square space in between them and the 1m wide ramp around them. Unlike the real tower, this is a working building, crammed to the gills with FTB technology. There is a floor in the center space every 6m, once per lap of the ramp.

The first floor is the lobby, and has nothing.

The second floor is the power station. It features the building tesseract, used to pipe lava from the pumping station in the Nether. The power station consists of 10 magma dynamos running on the lava pumped in, and their power goes out through the tesseract to power the pump. Until the local Nether lava ocean is drained, I will have power.

The third floor is the main AE room, with a 4m MAC, along with the controller, drive, and crafting terminal and monitor. My power armor tinker table is also here.

The fourth and fifth floors are gardens, with automatic planters and harvesters. These were used to grow earth and water seeds, used to make clay, then bricks for the walls (the walls were made of dirt first). The fifth floor also has the Tinker's Construct station for fixing tools.

The sixth floor is the chicken factory. It uses Xisuma's chicken cooker design to make several cooked chickens per hour, more than enough for my needs.

The seventh floor is the Nether portal room, with a floor of soul sand for growing nether wart.

The eighth floor is the twilight and Mystcraft portal room.

The ninth floor is just below the transition from brick to marble, and has the ore processing system. More buildcraft-type machines will go here as I need them.

The tenth floor is the belfry, where the big arched windows are. Here I have the bedroom, as well as a second crafting terminal, unifier, and uncrafting table. I plan to hang some note blocks from the ceiling to simulate the bells.

The eleventh floor is where the redstone for the bells will go.

The twelfth floor is not spoken for, it is the brick area above the marble and below the roof.

The thirteenth floor is under the roof, and is also not spoken for. I had planned at one point to put a mob farm here (in the dark) and have the mobs plummet through the tower, but I don't need any mob farms at the moment.

Cleaning up the code

"All the most important mistakes on a project are made on the first day"
--Old design adage

"There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the only rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you."
-- Mazer Rackham

"Reinhardt regarded the mysteries of the Universe not as indifferent questions of physics or chemistry, but as implacable, malicious foes. They were to be assaulted with science, vanquished at any cost, forced to yield their treasure house of knowledge."
-- from The Black Hole by Alan Dean Foster

In any interesting problem, you don't know enough about the problem to begin with to even form a plan for solving it. You do the best you can, and in the process of solving the problem, you learn what you should have been doing from the beginning. If time and resources weren't an obstacle, you could go back and solve the problem right from the beginning. But, usually for any interesting problem, time and resources are an obstacle, and you are stuck with what you started with. At each point in solving the problem, you only change what came before to the absolute minimum degree necessary.

As a result, sometimes legacy design choices make the solution quite a bit more complicated than a clean solution would be.

Now I have time and resources -- a whole year of time. It's time to clean house.