Tower of Nerd power

Not enough people make use of coloured glass in their builds: luckily, Sofia is here to show us all how it’s done with her entry in nerd.nu’s competition to design their new server lobby. This beautiful undulating tower snagged first place - but you should check out the server to have a look at the massively impressive second and third place builds which will also end up in the rotation for the server’s lobby.

“My first inspiration was Elven,” says Sofia, “but our current lobby is a giant tree and so I didn’t want to go the nature route, because that’d be too repetitive. Instead, I had the idea to make a floating island palace. The whole build would be centered around the tall spire in the middle which would hold the actual lobby portals.

“I started on the spire, building up each side at a time. But I decided I didn't like the all white and incorporated in the coloured clays. Then I joined each side up to give the building its curves.”

While building up the tower, Sofia decided to switch out some of the solid blocks for coloured glass, to make the structure a little less uniform and repetitive. “This also solved the problem of having to figure out lighting options because natural lighting would filter through,” Sofia says. “The rest of the build just kinda happened: I like to go with the flow and make things up as I go!”

Not able to ditch the nature theme altogether, the spire is surrounded by some rather lovely gardens - including a building enclosed by giant glass leaves. Very neat indeed.

Sofia describes nerd.nu as “a semi-vanilla server with a strong sense of community.” It's free to play on, and there are three servers running survival mode, creative mode and a variety of minigames. They have a community on Reddit too!

You can check out some videos about Sofia's creative process on Youtube!