I just post them to Facebook and then yank them off there to share elsewhere
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I just upload them to Twitter, hence why my twitter timeline was just yakuza screens for awhile.
I can fight the Golem now in chapter 1. I tried once and managed to damage him one time but he killed me twice so I’m going back through each area and gathering more resources to make enough Cantlin Shields to surround my entire base and a shit ton of those bomb things that aren’t called bombs for Dragon Quest reasons.
I thought I had done all the quests but apparently that was just all the quests at my base there are still some out in the wild I missed. I’m currently looking for a way to repair a cemetary and I found a blueprint for a Hammerhood themed Diner building. Kind of wishing I hadn’t sat this one out for so long. Dragon Quest and Minecraft go really well together. Might be a while before I focus on the free mode but I’m already planning out my first castle and surrounding villages for when I do.
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Since it’ll be a while before I do the real Dragon Quest Building in Terra Incognita and the thread title doth command me I’ll go ahead and share pictures of what I’ve done for chapter 1 so far.
Here’s the base prior to my first attempt at the Golem.
I only had half the buildings roofed after I decided I wasn’t going to seriously invest in building the place up (at least not at the moment).
I’m proud of my tower though. It’s got stone stairs that go up around the inner walls and the thinner part on top has a ladder that goes up to a little landing area. The ground floor is where I currently keep my furnace. I’m currently renovating my base for the Golem but I’ll keep the tower.
Speaking of which here is the start of my upgrading. I’m replacing the outer most brick wall, which was built along the very edge of the lighted area, with Cantlin shields and putting stone wall behind those.
And another view showing a bit more progress. During my first Golem attempt I just had the one Cantlin shield and I was picking it up and plopping it down in front of his attacks. Surrounding my base with them is really pretty unnecessary (if you’re quick enough and don’t mind your town getting a little damaged you can manage the fight with just one shield and 10-20 wrecking balls) but I think it’s going to look really sweet having the whole area surrounded. I’ll probably build the stone wall up above it a little bit and do it like I have the brick with the little spaces.
Also I made a slime friend so now I have a little blue slime hopping around my town that I sadly did not take any pictures of. His is name is Splatrick 
and I also found a cave that had some bones and a note to bury them, and when I did a spirit appeared and gave me a pair of shoes that let me double jump. I had previously been wearing the pair that negates fall damage but now that I can double jump I think I can handle a little fall damage.
Will probably start chapter 2 tomorrow. Looking forward to starting all over again now that I’m familiar with how things work.
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I finished making the upgrades to my base so you all get another update.
Here’s the entrance:
Come at me Dragonlord, you punk ass.
I took all the roofs off for the sake of consistency and had to move the walls in on a few of the rooms to make way for the stone wall behind the Cantlin shields. And I used flagstone scaffolding to change all the dirt blocks on the ground to flagstone flooring which I think looks a lot nicer.
A view of the northeast corner:
A slightly off-skew overhead shot:
As you can see some of the flagstone scaffolding caught the dirt outside the base but I can clean that up later. Also I just about completely rebuilt my tower and I had to move the furnace outside (not that I need the points anymore since I got to max level for the base) but I will probably come back later on and expand that whole studio room to include the stonemason’s workshop, the smelter and the furnace into one big builder’s building.
The entrance to the tower used to be near the entrance to the base but now it’s tucked away to the side of the workshop building. Like so:
And a corner view of the whole tower:
It has that indention in the back because I was trying to preserve the original structure as much as possible but now that I look at it I think it’s ugly and I need to bring it out so that whole wall is flush. And probably expand one side so the front and back have the same number of spaces as the sides (it’s currently off by one block).
I took some pics of the interior this time. Here’s the view when you enter the door on the ground level:
Here’s what you see from the landing at level 2:
View from the landing at level 3:
The ladder to the top is to the right and this time it has a fireplace because why not. I didn’t build a chimney though so there’s nowhere for the smoke and fumes to go.
Finally here’s the money shot from the top:
The crate in the corner is for supplies, the breadbasket is so the soldier on watch doesn’t get distracted by hunger and the fire to stay warm. The stone round table drops off of stone golems in the second area. I ended up with a few after farming up golemite for the shields.
I guess I’ll fight the golem now so I can continue my education in building stuff Dragon Quest style. Kind of wish I didn’t have to actually play the game to get all the building options and stuff unlocked but it’s pretty breezy like Dragon Quest usually is so I don’t really mind it.
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Thanks for the lovely tour! I’m going to work on my 2nd chapter base so it looks as secure and comfy as this
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My base in chapter 2 is coming along (though it’s all built out of dirt right now). I just got the first teleporter.
I like that there are optional challenges after you finish a chapter. I had completed two of them for chapter 1 already by the time I finished. Beat the chapter within 20 days is going to be the challenging one, seeing as I spent over 70 days in chapter 1 and am already at 14 in chapter 2. I read that the Switch version has a different challenge in place of this one so instead of having to complete the whole chapter as quickly as possible you just have to discover 150 items.
I like how this whole chapter is themed around healing sickness and the people you bring to your base are all people who need some kind of treatment.
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Almost done with Chapter 2, I’ll post pictures of my town soon. It’s not as nice on the inside as my other one was, but the outside looks pretty good. And all my buildings are two stories too, which is cool.
The final version of my act 2 town. I gave the front a huge makeover right before the final boss. Boss fight spoiler: turns out all those ballistae were useless though, as the Hades Condor was only ever in range in the direct opposite direction, at the back of my castle. Luckily I had 3 ballistae back there as well so that worked out fine. I ended up moving an additional one to the center to do more damage.
I like that you can prep a lot for the bosses in this game but they’ll still defy expectations and force you to improvise, at least a little.
View from a height - you can see the front is a bit of a facade, as the Northeast Tower is actually smaller than the Southeast Tower. I built them on top of existing structures and didn’t want to radically change their shape, but I made the front symmetrical anyway.
You can also see my guard wall with a walkway, that ended up being very useful in the fight. It’s hard to tell but you can walk all the way around the edge of the castle without jumping thanks to the stone stairs. I had a stairway in the back to provide quick access but I demolished that to make room for the graveyard after the fight.
The Southest and Northeast towers respectively. They’re pretty barebones but I at least put a fire up there for interest. I was mostly concerned with the ability to move quickly from one tower to the other.
A view of the Southeast Tower from the ground. The top door leads to the sewing room and the kitchen, the bottom door leads to an inn. It’s ugly on the inside so don’t go in there.
The red door barely visible on the left leads to an odd leftover feature that I just added a door to
a tiny stairway leading to the top of the tower. It’s yet another way to access it, I used it during building but then just left it in, since I like odd pointless details.
I didn’t take a picture of the other tower from the ground, so you’ll just have to live with these interiors:
Elle in the infirmary. I put some slime balloons in here, but they hover oddly over the table. I guess they’re supposed to go on a full block. Oh well! At least nobody is sick anymore.
It’s real hard to tell what is going on in here, but this is my treasure room. It’s got the big chest, plus as many treasure chests as I could fit (minus one spot). It’s worth a lot of points!!!
I’m most proud of my freshwater room. I built it out of chalk to give it a different look, and made it into a kind of spa with the bathtubs my villagers built. It’s my favorite room here.
I built this after the fight - Nosh had been requesting a banquet hall so I made this. It doesn’t seem to quite fit the description though, as I couldn’t find a big enough table. But it has beer!
Also, I couldn’t find enough limegrass to cover all the ground so it’s sort of spotty. I didn’t feel like grinding zombies for it, that was way too tedious.
My farm. I planted things just to take this picture. It obviously would not work in the shade, but I put it there before building the walkway and didn’t feel like moving it, so there it stays.
I failed to take a picture of the graveyard, oops. It was the last thing I built anyway, based on a blueprint I found in a very sad circumstance. This chapter in particular has a very mournful quality to it, and I’m surprised by the depths it ends up going to in that respect.
I’m pretty proud of this town, honestly. I spent a lot of time on it, even though there’s no real mechanical benefit to it. It just made me happy to build a fortress for these poor, beleaguered people. I’m also excited to get the hell out of poisontown, I’m sick of this gross shit.
My final score:
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How on earth are you making those perfectly straight dirt towers you’re standing on to take these photos?
More DQ Builders thoughts:
I like the ties to DQ1, particularly how you move through the towns in roughly reverse order of how you would encounter them in the original game. It’s a neat inversion of the first game’s quest, and an interesting way of demonstrating how the land has become corrupted in such a way that it is unfamiliar to someone who was alive before the catastrophe.
I also like that you can look at a map of DQ1:
And see that they reproduced it very closely for this game. That’s Cantlin, and you can actually use this map to (roughly) navigate the starting area. Of course there are changes, such that you can’t just walk to the rest of the world, but it’s a real nice touch. And of course there’s more stuff on these separate islands as well, so they didn’t have to stick with just using the original map. It’s smart.
It’s incredible to me that the monster designs have changed hardly at all in 32 (!) years, down to the exact poses that they have in their original sprites.
I think it speaks to the strength of the designs, plus the DQ dedication to nostalgia and not straying too far from the established norms. It’s sort of incredible that this game manages to be very different from any other DQ game but still strikes all of the same chords. They are experts at this.
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Hold R, then jump and hit X to place a block. You’ll place it directly beneath your feet. Rinse and repeat.
Another thing they don’t tell you: If you hold L and R at the same time, you will place a block exactly in front of you, but not on top of that block, so you can build one block high instead of the default of two.
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Oh wow! I’ve spent the entire game thus far getting pissed that there was no way to strafe while placing blocks on my level. They should have been more clear about that. Thanks for the tips!
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I meant to say this earlier: I love how overboard you went with the cantlin shields. That’s awesome.
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Alright, I finally got my Switch screenshot uploading set up, so here’s my first village, plus a bonus surprise!
The view from above. It’s mostly utilitarian, but there were a few important projects I had to take care of. Chiefly, I had to oppress the vile libertarian Larouche as much as the game allowed. I ended up becoming kind of a virtual slumlord!
On the left you’ll see Larouche’s private bedroom, and on the right you’ll see mine. I wanted to put them close together so he would have to pass my opulent quarters on the way to his squalid & carcinogenic hellmouth of a room. My girlfriend was very distressed by all this!
Pulling out a little, you can see my idiot villagers clambering up the walls and going wild. You can also see my dining room / employee lounge.
Here’s my workshop, Pippa’s room, and the walk-in closet. I put a bathtub in Pippa’s room because I didn’t know where else to put it. She’s the only one with access to personal hygiene and fresh water I guess. It’s constantly steaming, which can’t be good for her skin.
Here’s a nice isometric view where you can see most of the town.
And now, the bonus I hinted at earlier!
Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Mario”
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whoa whoa whoa
where did that sofa come from
EDIT: Also Larouche isn’t that bad!!! He’s just scared and he’s defensive because of that. Also he’s entirely right: building the town up makes the golem attack! He just didn’t believe in people’s ability to actually defend themselves from it.
But I do like his tiny gloomy prison room
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The sofa is dropped by one of the three dragons hidden around chapter 1. I didn’t expect “kill dragon, receive sofa”, but I can roll with it.
And yeah, I felt a little bad when the end of chapter one happened and Larouche turned out to be not such a bad guy. But I was already very committed to tormenting him.
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Oh shit, I must have found it then and promptly forgot about it.
I just got completely lost carrying around some dude who was paralyzed by flowers. I went way far out, rescued him from a prison, tunneled out into an area I’d never seen before, and got separated from my teleporter home by a vast ocean. I carried this guy around for like 45 minutes, setting him down to do side quests and solve puzzles. Along the way I built him a few rooms and put him in bed, but I wasn’t able to heal him. I finally ran out of food and had to leave him in a bed in the middle of nowhere and teleport home. Time to kit up for a serious rescue mission.
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All my Cantlin shields made the golem fight really easy lol. I just had to place an extra one in front of my gate and he literally could not damage a thing. I was able to safely ignore him while dealing with his minions.
I love y’alls bases!
I blew through chapter 2 yesterday and started chapter 3. I did not put any love into my base but I’m going to go back and build it up better later on. The Condor’s minions totally wrecked it during the fight. I didn’t take any pictures but I will in a little bit and show you the damage. I did tweak my chapter 1 base a little bit more, combining my forge and colossal chest into that small building by my tower they were formerly sitting outside of and making it two stories. I also fixed my tower so it doesn’t have that indention anymore.
Yes! I was thinking about this yesterday while marathoning chapter 2. I got a wild idea to try and eventually recreate the original DQ1 overworld in this game. I even popped into Terra Incognita for a bit to get a sense of how big that island is (not big enough to do justice to the overworld but big enough to reproduce a chunk of it).
But (once I complete the main game) I’ll have the other four islands to play with as well (though I would probably use them to farm materials since you can reset them) so I figure if I actually attempt such a task I will just build up the islands in each chapter to more closely resemble the original locations they’re based on.
I wish this game had been more popular because it’s hard to find solid information on it. I did some digging and according to people on gamefaqs there are some pretty sharp limitations (likely due to the game also being on PS3 and thus that system being the lowest common denominator they had to design around) but I couldn’t figure out what the exact limitations were. Apparently 30 blocks is as high as you can build (but starting from where?) and some people ran into an error message after they placed their 1000th roofing tile (on a single structure or across the whole map?) but then someone else said they managed to place 1800. And so on, it’s like a big mystery.
I was not discouraged to learn about the games limitations though but rather more determined to find some way to work within them. In good time, that is.
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