April Newsletter

Thanks to all Patrons and a very big welcome to all the new Patrons! I hope you are enjoying all the downloads. Let me know if you have any ideas of what we can build for you. We recently built a blank village and castle area and included it on the kingdoms map in the last post.  Do feel free to message me on patreon at any time.  If you have joined your patreon to discord you can also chat to everyone on the discord - connect it at  https://www.patreon.com/settings-creator/apps 

In this Newsletter:

1. Patreon News

2. Inspiring Build of the Month

3. Personal News

4. Server News

1. Patreon News

If you are a Skywalker Patreon you can claim (before April 13th) 3 professionally made renders of your minecraft skin. Just message me on discord or send an email with your minecraft skin and your choice of 3 minecraft objects. 

The $1 tier has been dissolved and all rewards bumped forward to the $3 tier. If you are still on the $1 you still get all the rewards you signed up for and can continue on it as long as you want. 

I will be making the village I made with BlueNerd available for download within the next few days on java and bedrock. 

If you have any ideas of what I could offer as an extra benefit to Patrons then please fire in your ideas. 

Inspiring Build of the Month

I found this delightful build on planet minecraft. If you have not been on planet minecraft before then you should check it out.  If you have a good project to post on it then you can get some good recognition on it.  Link to project:  https://www.planetminecraft.com/project/castle-carr-yorkshire/ 

AS you can see from the last picture this is based from a real castle.  Castle Carr in Yorkshire (England)  is just over an hours drive from my house! I really like how this builder has built all the surrounding landscape too. They have done really well with the arches and the ruined parts of the walls.  This is very inspiring - maybe I should do 7 downgrades of a castle video!! 

WMS98 is the name of the builder - this is what he had to say about it:

 Building something like this accurately without many reference photos for different angles (if anyone finds a photo of the back of this place please leave it in the comments!) and without much detail in the building itself was really difficult. Getting a balance between adding extra detail and accuracy was definitely very challenging for me so I decided to keep it fairly small but add some moderate cracking. Usually I wouldn't build a rectangular building like this because it can be really hard to make look good, but I settled on just spending a lot of time rendering, because hey! anything can look good in a render! 

This was part of a competition in which they only had the picture to go by.  You can get a lot of inspiration from real buildings. If you have any cool buildings pictures post them in the photos tab of discord.

Personal News

Not a great deal of personal news to report this month due to social distancing and self-isolation rules in place in the UK. So, I have had no excuses but to continue my attic re-flooring project. There is a lot of glass insulation fibre in my attic so I have to wear a boiler suit, mask with respiration devices attached, goggles and a head torch. My sleeves are sealed with tape and I wear a paper head cap with elastic.  Unfortunately my neighbour knocked on the door just as I put all this on. He wanted a parcel I took in for him. He gave me a strange look! Maybe he thinks I take the corona-virus really seriously. 

I will be trying out the lens app for patreon so expect some pictures!

Server News

John and I have been working very hard to update the server. Apologies for any disruption to your play.  We have updated survival to 1.5.2. Hopefully creative will be updated soon too. We are having some problems with the lobby and are working on a solution. We want to whitelist the main creative server and link this to patreon.  So, this month we will be asking you to link your patreon account to a special minecraft server which will allow you access. There are a few steps to take but it is easy and does not take long.  Non-patreon guests will have their own portal off the lobby for smallplots and still be able to chat in global. Please give feedback in the general chat of discord.

Thanks so much again for being a Patron! It means the world to me that I am able to continue with producing minecraft content full time. I want to bring you as many downloads as I can - remember if there is something you think lots of patrons would like made then get in touch.  With world wide advertising budgets being slashed this is a very lean time for youtubers indeed so patreon really does help enormously.  

You are very much appreciated indeed! Thanks again and see you on the server soon!

Andy.