[kscherer]

More mockups in the prototype!

Looking out of the Nether Cube toward an arm. I have added Grey's suggestion of purple glass. I made it three blocks high to add symmetry to the arms (but we could go 5 for an even better effect). I think it looks nice. While the entry in this view does not show it, I changed all the quartz to stone slab, other than the rounding steps and the hangers. This design gives you a "you're in the Nether, but not quite" kind of feel. Add 150 blocks of purple-stained glass for this design. Edit: I went with 5x5 glass and it looks much nicer. If we do it, I say we go with this. And make it 300 blocks of purple-stained glass.

Added a Netherwort farm to the Cube's basement. Also removed the Glowstone from the center of the Spawn Portal to create a ladder-way down to the basement.

The center of the Spawn Portal showing the ladder-way down. I lit these four portals and tested them in the over world. No matter which portal you step into, you come out the same over world portal. Also, when entering the over world portal, you always spawn in the same Nether portal. Thus, confusion will be limited. You enter Spawn in the Needle and exit Spawn in the Nether. You can then enter any one of the four portals and exit at the Needle. When we spawn the first time, we can mark the way we come out and call that the front. The other 3 portals would then be built behind that so you always enter the nether facing an arm, rather than into the center of the cube. it works flawlessly, and looks frickin' awesome!

Standing in the basement looking up at the Spawn portals.

I adjusted the rings back to stone slabs and replaced the anchors with stone slabs. This view is looking back toward the Spawn Cube. In this view, the cube is 21x21, but only 15 high. Since we're calling it the Spawn Cube, it will be cubed! But I'm not gonna worry about that in the prototype. You get the idea.

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When we build this, we will need to build the Cube first, since everything else works from it. That said, the Nether Hub will be just about useless until the Cube is built, as construction will involve removing a crap-ton of netherrack from the immediate area around the Cube (21x21x21, or 9261 blocks!) Why I loaded a chest with netherrack I do not know, as there will be plenty of it!

Also, building out the Cube will be quite tricky if we spawn in an area like this, since the bottom will effectively be floating in the air! However, the Cube looks way better suspended than sitting in a giant bowl of Netherrack.

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In terms of constructing the arms, when building Nether Hub 1.0 a lot of material was lost to ghasts. Dirty little buggers shoot at you and destroy your work. With 1.0, however, half the arms are cobble, which doesn't die in a ghast attack. It was usually the glass that was lost (and I lost a lot of it). Nether Hub 2.0 is far more fragile during construction, so ghast attacks are going to be disastrous. However, I have come up with a construction method that I think will just about eliminate all ghast damage to expensive items. This method is why the materials list calls for netherrack. I plan to build out a 5x5 netherack tube over exposed areas and then replace the netherack with permanent materials afterword. An example follows:

Here, I have built out a netherack "tunnel" the same shape as the arm segments.

Once these floating tunnels are in place, it looks very much like you've tunneled into normal netherack. ghasts cannot see you and will leave you alone, making further construction very easy and efficient

Once it is in place, you just chop out the netherack in small segments and replace it with the appropriate material.

This method might be a little more time consuming, but there is far less materials waste and damage due to ghast attacks. It uses the same basic technique we would use tunneling into netherack. Also, there is far less possibility of losing full inventories after being knocked to the ground/lava by a fireball, and, as netherack is very cheap and plentiful (we will be tunneling through a lot of it) there is no worry over losing it. You just load up on netherack, build out the tube, then (when it is far safer) you go back and replace the rack with glass/stone/whatever. Anchors and chains can then be added from above once the arm segment is completed. You just add the quartz anchors, then nerd-pole/tard-tower () up and add iron rails as you go until you reach a ceiling. Then, tap the hole, add the upper anchor, finish the chain and chop your way back down. Whammo-slammo!

With the loss of /back and /repair, I think this method will go much further towards our safety than hanging our asses out over lava with expensive loads of inventory items (like glowstone and quartz). This is only a suggestion (one I plan on using) and is in no way a requirement for those who want to help.

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With stone slabs instead of quartz for the rings, we can bring the amount of quartz down, but the amount of stone will go up:

Stone slabs will increase by 20 per segment (that doubles the amount of stone needed)

Quartz will drop from 14 per segment to 4.

4x240 - call it an even 1200 quartz blocks (hub+20%). We'll make it easy and call it 1 small chest.
20 x 240 - call it an even 6000 additional stone slabs (hub+20%). Easy will be an additional 4 small chests.
10x25 - call it an even 300 of purple-stained glass. Easy is 5 stacks.

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One final thing: I know Grey does not like intersections and we have agreed to eliminate those when we add tubes out to player portals. However, I think we should have intersections out where the arms meet the perimeter (there would only be 4 T's and 4 corners). Doing so will add anchor points for the tube to hang and provide a clearly defined intersection/portal.