Watchtower Meta
Part 29 ~ 20 January 2026
Played: 12 May 2025
Today I'm checking out a new horror mod called The Leaf Dweller. My buddy coded this for me. It's packed with lore and really captures that old-school feel of alpha Minecraft – plus it nails the psychological horror aspect that so many dweller mods fall short on. According to the story, this abomination was created when the devs were creating the model for a passive mob and got the length and height dimensions mixed up. The resulting monster was left to wobble across the land on its stumpy feet, its face contorted into a permanent frown from the constant misery.
The dweller sought vengeance in the cruelest way it could. It evolved a mottled bright green covering to blend in with the oak trees. It learned to stifle its pained cries and silence its footsteps to avoid being heard. And, most remarkably, it assembled a block of TNT inside its body that it could detonate on command – annihilating itself in the process. All with one purpose in mind: sneak up on the player and kill them.
Okay, okay, that's just the creeper lol. I haven't installed any horror mods! What I HAVE done, though, is watch way too many Minecraft horror mod videos. Shoutout to One Last Time, Vixios, Vivilly, Troubled Boys, and of course TheMightyNebby whose video "Ruining Minecraft with too many Horror Mods" I've watched at least 8 times now. I'M RED EYE BARRY! AUGH!
So, Ela, where the heck are you going with this? Well, there's a running theme through a lot of these videos. How do you keep yourself safe from the horrors, while also giving yourself a great vantage point to watch the world disintegrate in front of your eyes? That's right – you build a watchtower!
For the authentic watchtower experience, we're heading to a spruce forest. The nearest such region starts about 1000m north of Elaville, within a wider woodland that I've dubbed The Sleepy Woods because I find forest biomes boring. Oh, and also becuase it's home to the sleepiest of animals – the adorable fox! :D
Right at the southern end of the spruce lands stands a ruined portal on a peak, with another higher peak just across a small valley. From here, I can see (in hilariously low detail) the spruce village to the northwest and, when the light is favourable, a foggy outline of Movie Mansion to the east. This is the kind of strategic spot that calls for a watchtower. But before we build toward the sky, we've got to do a little groundwork.
Numero uno (I'm trying not to just say "first" every time lol): Fix up this portal and connect it to home base for the 8x nether shortcut. Once again, I got dropped in an enclosed room – what's with this nether generation? At least it's not in the basalt this time. I dug south til I broke through into open nether, spotted my home portal, then bridged the gap with stone slabs. The ghasts tried to harass me while I built, but I have wings now so I effortlessly outmaneuvered them and cut them down. I even struck one just after it launched its fireball, leading to this delightful scene where I got the Return to Sender popup with a faceful of dead ghast!
Partie deux: Build a bridge from the portal to the hill where the watchtower will go. I tried just making a horizontal bridge, then I realised I'd need to mound up a crapton of dirt to make it look convincing. Then I checked the coordinates for each end, did the math, and realised I could make my bridge on a nice 1:4 slope. I switched the spruce slabs to oak for better contrast, built up some supporting beams from the valley floor, and added iron bar handrails for safety. And hey presto, a bridge!
Now for the third act: Actually building the damn tower. I basically made this up as I went based on what I remembered from the videos. My watchtower consists of vertical spruce pillars, a criss-cross scaffold of oak stairs, and a spruce staircase on the front side leading to the guardhouse and deck. To make the structure more visible from afar, I added soul fire lights to the top, using the abundant soul soil from just inside the portal.
Yeah, that's a pretty sweet watchtower. But it's missing a certain... something. Ah yes – PURPLE! A few bands of purple concrete around the scaffold and beneath the torches, and we are surveying in STYLE. To finish up. I stocked up the inside with some amenities – a bed, storage, cooking, music, even tables and seating! If I have to keep watch for the horrors, at least I can do it in comfort!
And so on a rainy night 384, this build is done! I'm calling it the Slumbering Spruce Watchtower. This was a fun one, and considering the geography of this world, there may be more builds like it in the future :)
Leaked transcript from Mojang team meeting:
Okay guys, this is the uhh... Log Dweller. He's like this, uh, crooked tree man. You can't hurt him because, like, his heart is in the forest. He's like the Lorax, you know? So you have to, like, find the log that has his heart in it and break that. Oh, oh, and he only moves when you look away from him. He's like the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. You guys know Doctor Who, right? And when he catches you, he, uhh... he slaps you in the butt.
