With the introduction of the desert biome, I was quite charmed by the giant statue of a rabbit you could see in the background. I decided to give my hand at attempting to recreate the statue in the game. Behold, the lord of the bunnies!:
It’s not quite as large as the one in the painting, but it’s about as good as you can manage in the game without starting to cheat in resources or finishing structures. But this is 100% legit made in the game, hand carved by my faithful villagers. It was made over the course of a few days, starting with me finding the a good seed with a large mountain to work with.
Here’s a screenshot I grabbed early in construction to show how it looked before I really got to work: It was originally just a solid cliff face, and I carved the whole mountain in layer by layer to reach the upper plateau area.
This is what it looked like after a bit more work. You can see the process of cutting out the head, layer by layer down from the top to bottom. I decided that as part of the challenge I would avoid using constructions as much as possible, only using them when absolutely necessary. Everything else would be carved out of the stone itself. In the end, the only constructions in the building was right around the neck, since the 2 block tall area was too short for the hearthlings to reach and dig out without other work. I cut out more space around the neck for them to reach, and then filled it back in with a few rows of built blocks.
The neck was probably one of the tricker parts of the build (It was probably what took me the longest to figure out how to do. I really wanted to try and figure out how to avoid using blocks, but no luck.). After that, it was mostly just smooth sailing, with the hearthlings digging things out a chunk at a time.I used the 4x4 dig tool for most of the build, and went in layer by layer to cut out around the hands and belly, as you can see here.
I wasn’t playing on peaceful mode, so work was frequently interrupted by pesky goblins and wolves. I even had the goblin chief build his camp right next to the bunny statue midway through construction!
When all was said and done, I think it took me roughly three or four days of work to get the whole thing cut out. At that point, I had 19 or 20 hearthlings in my village, and unfortunately the game was becoming so laggy that I wasn’t able to finish cutting out more stone and decorating the area.
Here’s some pictures of the final state of the statue:
A closeup of the bunny’s head and ears. I placed the torches on his eyes and hands to help them stand out (I often had issues with the lighting making one plane of stone indistinguishable from another). The hearthlings never got around to collecting all that ore, so I eventually marked a bit for deletion.
I decided that the bunny lord needed some proper tribtues. I placed a stockpile at his feet set to just hold gold and treasure, and placed a bunch of decorative pots and bunny dolls around. The pots, pretend that they’re full of more treasure or fine food as tribute (In reality they’re all full of clay and ore ;P). The bunny dolls were all captured from defeated goblins.
And finally, the bunny statue at night, where I think it looked best. I tried to cut more of the stone to the sides of it away and make it look more natural, but there was too much work with ladders, and at the point where these pictures were taken the game had become so laggy I had to constantly pause it to place or remove orders. I decided that the lag was becoming too difficult to manage, and so I decided to call the bunny statue quits for now. I hope you enjoy what I managed to accomplish with it so far!
If I were to make something like this again, I’d want to try to make it even BIGGER, but I’d probably do it on peaceful mode and use the console to auto build most of it. Making my hearthlings fiddle around with ladders and goblins was painful. I think the biggest stumbling block was all the lag generated from items though. My framerate just went to hell whenever I was in the middle of my little town where I had all my stockpiles, and the bunny was getting covered in so many ores it was having a similar problem after a while