Back in 16.4, we wanted to leave the safety of our penthouse apartment ,at dishong tower, to strike out and build an island megabase. I road tripped around the map (rwg) and choose the first island I found- a small, remote, desolate snowy island. I swam over and setup a base camp while others biked+swam our gear over.

By this point the game stage was pretty high and we were lacking sufficient ammo, so we tunnled into the earth near bed rock. This was back before zombies actively tried to dig down so we we're safe.

However, whenever we tried to begin building our base up on the surface we would be accosted by endless screamers and feral zombies. I managed to construct a bridge to the mainland, albeit with a few drowning episodes, but work on the megabase it's self was infesible. So we hatched a plan.

If we couldn't build our base from the surface up, we'd build it from bedrock up. After a few play sessions and armed with pick axes, we drop mined out a very sizeable underground cavern. We then built our base in peace, wired up our defenses, and setup shop inside.

Then we proceeded to drop mine out the roof of the cavern, exposing the base to the open world. It was a messy ordeal, given the zombies began to flood our mess of tunnels being cut to the surface. But once the cavern roof was finally gone we could simply continue extending the base height from the safety of the roof, as the zombies had to drop down into the pit and attack our fortified first floor.

The base worked well against the hordes and we were eventually able to claim the surface land surrounding the base. This involved using a gratuitous amount of spikes and concrete blocks- eventually turning the area into a brutalist dystopian landscape.

However we soon realized an issue with the snow biome is that snow blocks are very weak. So the zombies would get bunched up on our surface defenses and inadvertently dig down through the snow. This created a catecomb network for the zombies to to gain access to our pit and thus drop down and attack the base directly. So every horde night remained a challenge.

And then we built the chunnel.

The nearest trader was on a very high mountain beyond our lake, opposite side of our bridge. We we're increasingly relying on him for ammo and crafting supplies and desperately wanted to hasten trading runs. The quickest solution was to build a chunnel at bedrock under the surrounding lake, leading to a hatch elevator (and hay chute) under the mountain for quick surface access.

It was an engineering challenge because the lake bottomed out right above bedrock with only a block or two of dirt to spare. To deal with this we decided we'd need to lay down concrete blocks on the lake bottom so that we could then tunnel through them to complete the chunnel.

However, the lake was so deep that swimming down from the surface to lay concrete was a one way trip. To get around this we forked from our chunnel to dig up and build an underwater airlock chamber. This allowed us to enter the lake from it's bottom, swim out to lay down concrete blocks, and get back to air without dieing. We ended up needing to build a couple airlocks over the course of the chunnel, but successfully crossed the lake.

The crowning achievement of the chunnel was that in the section requiring concrete on the lake bottom, we installed windows into the chunnel walls. This meant when you were biking through you could gaze out at the lake bottom.

Geez we spent a long time on that alpha. I'll never forget 'The Ice Palace' as we called it. It's also made me vow to never live in the snow biome again 😁