Gallery of Tree Castles, My Minecraft Relaxing Activity

Screen capture of the first four tree castles I made.

I've admired Minecraft as a game for a long time, mostly as someone who likes to hear what it's like for others to play. Same is true for World of Warcraft and other big investment games of time and learning. Just hearing others talk about their play sessions, goals, ups an downs it's a blast.

If I get the impression that a game needs to become a major hobby before it feels rewarding, that game stays on the list of just listen to what it's like for others.

From Occasional Dabbling to Family Activity

Minecraft left that list when both my kids started playing and wanted to have a server to play together. You don't need to run a separate server. Instead if you're on the same local network you can join one another's game. The world you're playing is stored the device that's serving the world. That means you need to play at the same time, not always an option. I looked into the tradeoffs of hosting my own server, getting everyone setup with Java edition vs Bedrock edition. I opted for fast setup that worked with what we could play using our tablets, which meant Bedrock. Signed up for a Realm account (9.99 USD monthly subscription) and we have a cloud hosted server just for us, avoiding public server social gaming issues.

After a few weeks it became a family activity. All four of us join the server and do show and tell with what we've built. Sometimes we build things for each other. Kate Shields Stenzinger and I chatted about this on an episode of Art and Science Punks.

Tree Castles

What's become one of my relaxing gaming routines is I'll build a tree castle. Five so far. All different shapes and sizes. All of them are accessible to climb, explore, and house one or more living areas.

We're planning on doing more survival in our family Realm which I feel mixed. A little too on the nose for 2020, but might be fun for 2021. Will for sure save a backup before we do in case a creeper comes along and does some serious damage to my castles. Not as relaxing. Might need to add more natural defenses and safety zones.