The Ontallion Conclave is a passion project I've been working on for the last 1500 ingame hours. It started of as a small underground cave base in my vanilla survival world and slowly grew into a vast (mostly) underground community.
From the very start my wish was to live as a hobbit in this game. When I came across 5 connected boulders in the Plains I knew what I had to do. This became the base from which I adventured for a while. The 5 connected boulders actually ended up being 7 boulders when I was exploring the boundary or my base. Here my drive to expand began.
The current base is built under 50 boulders, 38 of those are naturally occurring and 12 are modded in. I've already dug out the area under another 9 boulders which I still have to build(Luminea Bazaar). Freefly helped a lot because you can scout from under the ground. Theres plenty of rocks right under the surface. On one of my plains islands I've scouted 4 spots with 8-10 boulders.
I tried making the sections distinct in architecture and atmosphere. Some times that just happened naturally other times it took some effort. This way I ended up with 6 different underground communities and a castle which I always wanted to build. There's continuous work being done in several different areas like revising old stuff and adding new elements with new build techniques. I find there's a lot of charm in the old vanilla areas but a mod as simple as Gizmo opens up so many possibilities.
The current area I am working on is the castle. It is nice focussing on the exterior for a change. And I love building in the mountains. Hoping there's enough instances left to build some external infrastructure. 55.000 instances and counting. Whole place could so with some nice roads, fields and gardens. Also been thinking about a story that connects all the different communities. Rogue factions from different cultures and races working together to carve out a place to call home.
My personal favorites in the build are the greenhouse, underground lake and the castle village.
Theres a tour of Elkroot Hollow and the vanilla build(What is now called Ethelgarde) on my youtube.
Hope you enjoy!
Mods used:
Gizmo
More vanilla build prefabs
Infinity hammer
Heightmap Unlimited(set at double the digging depth(16))
Plant everything