Inspired to Build in Late Game

[Hipnos]

I imagine that, for most of us, the inspiration to spend time creating aesthetically pleasing buildings (as opposed to carving out rectangles underground) comes from the many and varied automation abilities BTW provides; how many of us builds a one-by-one, oak-plank tower with a windmill on top and how many build a classic, eighteenth century, Dutch windmill?
The windmill, for me, is always the first building I really take time on, after all, it's going to be around for the rest of the game and I'll want to watch the sun setting behind it every now and then. The next building that should require some thought would be for the nether portal but the materials aren't available for me to create the ancient ruin/magnificent, shiny temple I think it deserves so I stick it in a cobble-box on top of a hill (behind a bigger hill, so I don't have to see its right angled, cobble stoned naffness) until I'm further up the tech-tree and can do it proud.
I have nearly finished my conversion from large, outdoor, live-stock farms surrounded by fence (or, animal dispenser on a one-day-timer) to a slightly-less-large complex of automated breeding/slaughter houses all fed by a pump-tower/aqueduct and all with the same white-stone and spruce wood finish. It looks like a serene little hamlet, somewhere in the English countryside but it sounds like a corporate slaughter house, somewhere in Kentucky.
Anyway... is anyone else at the same stage as me; opened up all the tech tree but have held off dealing with villagers (other than wheat-scrumping) until FlowerChild finishes chewing up their stringy code and spits them out as shiny, new village people? If so, what are your big, late-game projects? I'm at the point where I would be building a nearby village and populating it (my "end-game" project, usually) but I love this world I've settled and I would like it be the one I see the completion of BTW on, so the village will have to wait. I've built nearly everything else I wanted to build.
So, without update-hassling or predictions - how are you coping in your pre-V4.90*, late-game worlds? Are you building those giant, vanity projects you always wanted? Or are you seeing how many firecharges you need to burn down a jungle?

* Or V4.Kevin or what ever FC names it ;)

[TheGatesofLogic]

* Or V4.Kevin

I SECOND THIS MOTION!

[Daisjun]

* Or V4.Kevin

I SECOND THIS MOTION!

Thirded :)

Most of our worlds tend to stagnate once we've been to the end, I think everyone on our server enjoys the journey there, but once it's done we kind of get over it and leave it for a while.

That's not to say in a few months we won't start a whole new world like we did last time, just that for most of us the game is basically 'over' once we're sitting cozy in our base with our SFS beacon.

The incentive to build any big projects isn't really there once everyone's lost interest, I think we all find it much more entertaining just to start over.

Thus I think we like to incorporate most of major projects as we're heading up the tree, we actually have a pretty big drive to making things look pretty, even if it means sacrificing a lot of resources.

Obviously that's not how everyone feels though :) I'd really love to work out a fully automated SFS factory one day, I've built all the components at various stages on various worlds, just never put them all together.

[DiamondArms]

"Post-Game" builds are mostly determined by what you want out of BTW life. Automating some of the trickier things like farming and such usually happen there. I'm pretty decent at figuring out how to automate production, but I'm an incredibly "slothy" person, being to lazy to dig/build the really big resource intensive machines like mobfarms.

Things I've made since the End was cleared on PK_420's server:

Fully Automated Chicken Farm(Laying Eggs to raw eggs/Dead Chickens)(Temporarily Broke when HCNTWA came out);
Elevators!(Top and bottom floors only);
Flower Farm(128 Planters is too much);
Obsidian Maker(Using RS dust);

Most of these were really easy and relatively cheap to make, and I wanted the resources.

Suggestions to build:

Water Pump Towers(Big ones. Reach for the skies! Conquer the Skyline!)
Factories(SFS, Gunpowder, Wooden Anything, Something Packing Related)
Nether Fort Mobfarms(Make All the Beacons! More Blaze Rods than you know what to do with!)
Ninja Mansions(SMP or self-amusement. For Advanced RS users)
Enderman Farm(Drops collected, sorted and with EXP Filters!)

Well, things tend to get built as you need them. Aesthetic builds are always an option. Just because it doesn't have a particular purpose doesn't mean it's pointless. Make Factories for the materials and start building!
My current line of work is Shipwright commissions. Making a place look interesting is fun too.

[magikeh]

On edolas we have pretty much gone wayy past endgame and are living comfortably with our imaginations. Its always fun (I found) to go out and start a huge massive build, then stop and start something else. I think that we currently have 4 or 5 projects on the go, and it's great because you can just switch between them at will. Also it seems that the further into late game I get the faster I want to make everything. Hopefully one day the base will be at a point where we can just... summon things from the abyss (yenno, super speed on all the things) Its hard as hell, but the process is really fun! :)

[Hipnos]

Maybe I need to play on a server. Can't find the inspiration to build for myself at the moment.
And I love showing off my creations...

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[TheAnarchitect]

Well, that depends greatly on why you're playing to begin with.

Me, I've never been to the end of the tech tree. Not once. Not because I die or get bored or anything. Rather, I only advance my tech level when it seems necessary to do so to complete a project I'm working on already. In my longest held world (abandoned solely because my home base was on a jungle island in the middle of a large ocean), my Magnum Opus project was a giant Japanese-style Castle. While I've seen plenty of these done before, mine had the distinction of being built entirely in survival instead of in creative. I build several automated resource generators, including a cobble gen, auto-hemp, auto-cane, and a tree farm, just to have the material I needed to build with in sufficient quantity. The castle wound up housing several of those machines, but they were built for the sake of the castle, and not the other way around.I did eventually build a giant auto-pottery machine capable of creating truly absurd amounts of soulsteel. But only because someone had issued a challenge, I didn't actually need the steel and didn't do anything with it. When I was playing on the anarchy server, I built the Colossus before I even build a base.

It's awesome how FC creates a cohesive whole, where you need to build and advance technologically to survive, where you need to survive and build to advance technologically, and you need to advance technologically and survive in order to build. But in the end, the desire to build comes from YOU. That's why you're playing minecraft after all. When you finally reach the point of mastering your environment and having all possible resources at your disposal in quantity, that's when you get to go crazy and build like it's creative mode. You're a GOD, now. Remake the world in your image.

Or if you're like me, you won't wait that long. You'll get started immediately.

[Hipnos]

I guess I miss cooperating with people on big projects. I might check out Joshua's Anarchy server.