The Barad-dûr in Minecraft – First Attempt

I had an idea.  After digging those long tunnels in the roof of the nether I was looking for something to do with all of that netherrack that was piling up.  So I started refining it into nether brick, which gave me a decent supply of dark building material to work with.

What better plan than to use all that dark material to try and recreate the dark tower of Sauron, the Barad-dûr.

I went for a somewhat modest first try.  While I had a lot of netherrack, the supply wasn’t infinite, and I was leery of building too far up both because I tend to fall off of things and because once something is above the cloud line, it tends to get obscured at night.

So I ended up with this.

A dark-ish tower below the cloud line

My brilliant plan was to make the eye at the top a portal.  That seemed a bit easier than trying to work with lava, as I had originally intended.  I had seen various screen shots of rounded portals.  However, that is not yet a feature of the game, meaning portals still have to be rectangles.  So I ended up with more of Sauron’s Jumbotron as opposed to his eye.

The original tower was all in dark nether brick.  But then I decided it needed something to spice it up.  With some colored clay from the mesa biome I put together a lidless eye of sorts.

Sauron has a sanpaku eye…

All of which would be innocuous enough, except that I chose to build this monstrosity just within the view range of Xydd’s castle. (Complete with road from my own complex.)

Xydd’s castle and the tower from a map render

So now when he looks to the north, the north looks back at him… or some such.  That top screen shot is the view from the top of his mountain.

Also, Xydd looks to be building some sort of parking garage on the far side of his castle.  The tower might not be the biggest eyesore soon.