Flying Clown House

Background

The original Nosiphus headquarters, now known as the "Multicolored Battleship Mast" or "Flying Clown House," due to its outlandish, physics-disregarding appearance, was my first proper attempt to construct a headquarters for Nosiphus. While the building itself is objectively terrible, it makes up for it in terms of significance. No other build possesses the important, multiple precedent-setting legacy this one has.

Before We Begin: January 3, 2013 - February 24, 2013

I started playing Minecraft on January 3, 2013. The first time I played, I managed to spawn stuck in leaves, and closed the game not thinking much of it. A couple days later, I tried it again, and created a new world thinking something was wrong with the first attempt, and instead of just generating a normal world, I looked at the custom world generation options and opted for a Tunneler's Dream world.

As I played in Creative Mode first, I experimented with building simple structures. I ended up deleting several early worlds as I was unaware of how to descend once flying. Luckily, I lost nothing of importance from these early maps. Once I figured out all the controls, the first long-term world had several interesting things: a house made entirely of glass and a pool, and an iron building: the Blue Cove headquarters. This build was technically the first "headquarters" we ever had, but as it was more of a railway platform than a building, we don't really count it as such. It is also the only headquarters that never had the name "Nosiphus" attached to it. It was also home to a long railway and the very first World Trade Center I built, but as it was a Tunneler's Dream world, it was only eighteen blocks tall.

It was also home to something even more important, perhaps the only build on the same peg in terms of importance as the flying clown house: Mt. Nosiphus. I was in sixth grade at the time, and we had been learning about Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius. I decided to build a volcano, and in trying to find a name for it, the nonsensical word "Nosiphus" came out. Over the next couple weeks, I ended up liking that name so much that it became the entire organization's name on February 6.

Around this time, I also created a large biomes world, and ended up building a flying house out of light blue wool. It was in a snow biome, and as I was unaware of any lighting blocks at this time, had a solid glass ceiling to let in sunlight. This is why you see remnants of glass in the flying clown house: it was built before I knew about torches or glowstone, and was converted later.

Construction: February 24, 2013 - March 2, 2013

On February 24, I was experimenting with the bonus chests feature, and ended up creating and deleting several worlds. I had also made the decision to build a proper headquarters at this point, and wanted a normal world I could use. Eventually, I ended up with a map with a random seed of -5517325077632123817. After flying around, I determined that this setting was decent looking enough.

I started by building my floating house. I was above a forest, and I added a satellite dish as well as an orange satellite to the house. This iteration was significantly taller than the other attempts, so the TV ended up being the size of the entire wall. The reason for these inclusions was related to a real-life event: my family had just recently decided to drop DirecTV as we didn't really watch it that often, and we hadn't replaced it with anything else. Television streaming wasn't really a thing at this point, so the idea was that if I wanted television in my house, I would need a satellite dish.

I started constructing the headquarters by roughly following the Classic Design's documentation, but I deviated from it quickly. The lobby space and the helipad were in the correct position relative to each other, but they weren't scaled accurately. When I finished the lobby, it was a giant, open room made of white wool. There were two slabs next to the door as the floor was a block below ground level at that position. Additionally, there was a trapdoor before the elevator, and opening this trapdoor exposed a row of lime wool that headed leftward. This was supposed to be the building's vault, and this lime wool was representing massive piles of cash.

As I was building the entire structure by hand, and the first floor was rather large, upwards expansion was time-consuming. Once I finished the first floor, I elected to make the second and third floors much smaller. From the front door's perspective, these floors extended from the back right corner to about the halfway point towards the front wall, and only about a third of the way towards the left wall. These cyan wool levels, contrasting with the white wool first floor, and were constructed as empty office spaces. Also cyan was the elevator shaft, which was simply a vertical 3x3 tube that was open in the middle. I also dug down until I hit an underground ravine, and designated that the basement. I boarded up part of the ravine with coal ore to make it a bit less cavernous.

However, when it came time to build the fourth floor, I encountered my first real issue: my floating house was directly over the back right corner, which meant that if I wanted to keep going straight up, I would have to alter my house. I didn't want to do this, so after some consideration, I decided to simply make the roof of the third floor a platform, and build subsequent floors atop my house. I realized that if I were to simply make a direct opening to the house next to the elevator, I would be walking in over the toilet. I decided to build a walkway down past the platform to my living room.

The elevator shaft at this stage would begin to take on the definitive shape the Flying Clown House is known for: the central spire that everything is connected around. As it towered upward, the next floor, the fifth, was originally designated Wyatt's Lab, or, as it as known today, the First NosLabs. Inside it was a redstone torch, cauldron and lever, enchantment table, furnace, and crafting table.

The sixth floor was designated the restrooms, and this where I recognized the glass floor/ceiling method of lighting up the building was going to be a problem. As I still had not discovered the existence of lighting blocks, and wouldn't for some time, I was forced to maintain the see-through aesthetic to keep the lower floors illuminated. This, of course, is in direct conflict with the need for privacy in a restroom, but I decided that I would revisit the subject later.

The seventh floor, the observation room, was home to the telescope. At the time, there was only one, and it faced westward. The eighth floor was designated the lounge, but was left empty for now. In fact, out of the nine floors that would be constructed between February 24 and March 2, five were left completely empty for the time being.

The final floor to be built before the lighting issue was fixed was the ninth. This floor was also remodeled later, as the original simply sat atop the eighth and was originally meant to be the boardroom. By this point, I decided to stop expanding any further upwards for the time being and turned my focus towards other things. Two things in particular were of importance to me: first, fixing the lighting situation, and second, figuring out how to install these things called "mods" I had heard about.

First Remodel: March 2, 2013 - March 27, 2013

The Flying Clown House received its first major remodel throughout the month of March. This remodel fixed some problems but also introduced some others, which had to be creatively addressed.

Firstly, I discovered the existence of glowstone, and quickly made an effort to replace all the glass with the block of each floor's respective wall, and added a layer of glowstone immediately beneath it. Desks were added to the second and third floors to furnish them as offices, but the biggest change of all came to the fourth floor, my house.

As my house was large, I saved time by leaving the glass in place if it was above a wall, and simply replaced the glass directly with glowstone rather than placing it a level below and using light blue wool to cover it at the old glass level. However, this new lighting solution created a problem: glowstone did not illuminate the room as well as the sun did, and it was noticeably darker. I decided I would add a second floor by placing a lower glowstone level.

This fixed the lighting problem on the house's first floor, but it added a problem on its new second floor: the bathroom ceiling would not have been tall enough to fit anything if I had tried to add a layer of wool above the glowstone. I decided against moving the entire building upward to fix this because of how much time it would have taken. Instead, I just left the second floor unfinished, but I did add an entrance to it from the elevator landing platform. This new floor did not affect the numbering of the higher floors. I also removed the satellite dish since I eliminated the TV from the back wall when adding the second floor, but the satellite itself was left alone.

After properly illuminating the fifth and sixth floors, I went up to the seventh. After fixing the lighting, I added a vertical telescope alongside the horizontal one. This new vertical spire formed the second 3x3 shaft that can be seen on the higher floors. It also meant that any floor built above it would have the telescope shaft right behind the door when you entered the room, and you'd have to walk around it.

I decided to expand the eighth floor, but while I did fix the ceiling being glass, I did not convert the glass floor over to wool. Along the back wall, I added spruce slabs as a shelf. I also expanded the ninth floor significantly, and it became an office space. This floor was properly illuminated and enclosed.

Next, I decided to add a tenth floor to accommodate the boardroom, or as it was called at the time, the conference room. This floor had a significant gap between the ninth and itself, and to avoid another case of the telescope going through it, I shifted the room back some and created a walkway to it. This floor had a giant oak slab table as well as signs indicating the chair positions of each member Nosiphus had at the time. I extended the elevator shaft even higher, which meant that the headquarters' height actually surpassed that of the satellite dish.

Wyatt Moves Out: March 28, 2013

The time between the backup taken March 27 and the one taken March 28 was significant. During that brief amount of time, I had finally learned to install mods, and the first ones I added were ComputerCraft and Galacticraft.

To accommodate space travel, I constructed a golden launch tower that stood separately from the headquarters. From here, I blasted off to the Moon, and I established a small lunar testing area that would become the precursor to what is now known as Outpost Alpha.

I also took the time to give Wyatt's Lab its own separate building, which I built in the taiga. This building, now known as the second NosLabs, contained a bookshelf, sink, computer, anvil, dispenser, furnace, chest, jukebox, and several ores and foods. Like the first lab, it was still very primitive.

On the headquarters itself, I made the tenth floor's one-block-wide connection between the elevator and door into a full porch. This made it far less dangerous to get to the conference room.

The Final Major Changes: March 28, 2013 - July 17, 2013

After March 28, there is an incomplete record of what called this world save home, but some of the most important things happened during the last few months before the server started on June 24. This world even continued to receive modifications after the server started.

In early April, I had accidentally deleted the world save when clearing out some older, unused world saves. Luckily, I had a few backups saved on an SD card, but I accidentally grabbed the one from March 27, meaning that all the March 28 progress initially disappeared. This means that the timeline of this map split, although they would be reunited years later.

Staying in 2013, my first decision was to build a new lab, but instead of opting for the taiga, the next version of Wyatt's Lab, now called the third NosLabs, was built in a swamp biome. The land here was flatter, and the lab added one key feature: the Creeper Observation Room. This lab is the only one to have this room. However, this lab has the unfortunate distinction of being the only version of NosLabs of which nothing survives other than memories.

Why? Well, at some point during the procedure, there was world corruption due to modding data changes between 1.4.7 and 1.5.1, and I had to revert to another backup, likely the same backup from March 27, which is the latest backup of this map that has no modding data in it. The world that was home to the third NosLabs was never backed up, so it's gone. Thankfully, it was so simple that I remember what it looked like, so it has been restored on the current server in roughly the same position it was in.

Additionally, throughout April and May, my list of installed mods began to grow exponentially, but my underpowered laptop began lagging too much when attempting to play the game, so that likely contributed to the loss of the third NosLabs. In any case, when I finally settled on a permanent set of mods in early June, I converted the ninth floor into Wyatt's Lab, which kept with the Classic Design's documentation. This established what is now the fourth NosLabs. It had a test subject chamber, a wall of uranium ore, and was sealed in bedrock to contain explosion damage. I also emptied the fifth floor and changed it into a simple office, effectively removing the first NosLabs from the building.

I extended my house ever so slightly with guest rooms, and during this time, I converted the building from using vanilla blocks to represent furniture to using the Jammy Furniture Mod to have actual furniture available to use. While experimenting with the cheat mode from Not Enough Items, I also added a nether portal and a hacked-in single end portal. I also decided to add a logo to the roof of the lobby, which the building did not have before this point.

Also during this time, I finally gave the eighth floor, the lounge, a proper floor and began to decorate it. Wyatt and I had read that the Googleplex, the corporate headquarters of Google, had sleeping pods for staff members, so we incorporated this idea by covering the entire back wall with a row of beds. I also added a table in the middle of the room, as well as a window on the right wall. It also had a crafting table, furnace, jukebox, and enchantment table on the front wall.

At some point, I also came to the recognition that the building had a distinct lack of survival playability. I decided to install a ladder in the elevator shaft so you could actually climb up instead of having to fly. I also tried to enclose walkways that were high-up and dangerous.

June 14, 2013 is a day that I will always remember. I had anticipation that soon, there would be a multiplayer server, and in accordance with that, I began to make alterations to the world. I decided to do to the lobby what I had done to my house, and add an extra floor inside it. I didn't feel like adjusting the signs for each floor, so it became the 1.5th Floor. This floor contained all the rules. I added signs indicating how to get from my house to this floor, mistakenly believing that players would spawn at my bed instead of the world spawnpoint. I added a sign advertising this website, and stated the server was available from the following day: June 15, 2013. Of course, the server would not launch for nine days after that, but it took some time before I learned to port forward properly.

After June 24, this world's use declined significantly as I was on the Nosiphus Modded Server. This world wasn't transferred to the server because Wyatt and I did not realize we needed the config folder as well as the mods for it to work, so we decided to start over from vanilla. This ended up being a good decision, because it led to the creation of the N Tower, which still serves as our headquarters today.

There were, however, a couple final overhauls on this building before its final backup. Outside the lounge, I added an outdoor pool, some changing rooms, as well as a dance floor and disco ball courtesy of DiscoCraft. I also remodeled the first floor to have separate rooms, including a small foyer, an office for the secretary, a welcome room for visitors, and restrooms. Additionally, the vault was expanded to have chests filled with diamonds, emeralds, and gold ingots.

From this point on, the Flying Clown House has remained generally unchanged, as newer worlds and better-designed headquarters superseded it, but it towers over all of them in terms of uniqueness and legacy, and although Wyatt hates the building for its appearance, even he doesn't deny that.

Post-Retirement Changes: July 17, 2013 - Present

The Flying Clown House has received only slight changes throughout the years since its retirement as our primary headquarters. It briefly resumed service as our main world from July 31 to August 22, 2013, and had a slightly expanded pool area and a covered walkway to the door.

Years later, in 2016, I loaded the world up in NosPack and attempted to start a survival map with it, placing a nuclear reactor from the Big Reactors mod in what was the kitchen. I also attempted to update the logo, replacing the early 2013 circular lowercase N with the then-current capital N. None of these post-July 17, 2013 changes have survived except in screenshots.

After 2016, however, the Flying Clown House has really only been copied to whatever the current server is with little to no modifications from its July 17 appearance. It serves as the current world save on the Nosiphus Pack o' Fun server, which runs 1.4.7, and is located in the Aether on the current Telkit V server.