Yes, the sides are 1/2 slab for the exact purpose of keeping out the baddies.
This design is completely monster proof (in 1.9 with no baddies spawning on the rails hopefully … *looks at Grey*) even without lighting.
As far as personal stashes/chests are concerned, I agree. The amount of materials this thing is going to suck up will bankrupt any one of us, me thinks.
The gray clay or stone bricks
alone are going to number into 13+ large chests. I have 3 of clay.
When I rebuilt my storage facility I told myself there was no way in hell I was going to need all that stone and dumped about 20 large. Now I'm down to 18, which would dry up under this load (Gray has 4000 large of stone, so no big deal there
).
Again, we're talking about a number exceeding 150,000 individual blocks of various types to build this, so I'm all for "Turtle Dumps" on this one.
I do think we should wait until the 1.9 upgrade passes the test before loading up, though. At that point, we'll build some supply caches along the route and let you populate them.