Japanese kitbash designs on my long-term island world

[EnbyKaiju]

After about 400 or so hours working on this survival island world (~0% landmass) I think I'm about done with this until the new update drops and we've some more tools to play with. But I've really enjoyed using the islands as a limitation to try out designs I really want to work into a forever world with larger landmasses.

The castle is a bit of a mash-up between Matsumoto-jo and Himeji-jo, with a little bit of Osaka-jo outbuildings for balance, which I really liked playing with and helped me work out the kind of resources I needed for a project of this scale (i.e. a LOT, and I'll need a lot more than that if I want to go full scale), and the sort of balance between landscape & building to make it feel authentic. The internals were something I was never too happy with (mainly because there's not a lot of good traditional Japanese design availability in core VS (pls VS team, let us place stuff on half slabs one day), but this was a wonderful place to live.

Yes, I'm an utter nerd for Japanese architecture & design, I've a half-dozen trips worth of photos that I'm using for inspiration. Getting decent tiered farming is still pretty difficult without infinite source blocks (I like the challenge), but I don't think it came out too bad. But the long term plan once the next update comes out is to do much larger islands so I can do at least a decent sized Japanese castle town. Waterwheels will be the gamechanger there because there's a lot more instances of waterwheels in feudal era Japan than windmills.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with how all these came out, it's the same world as my Granny Weatherwax house and after sinking about 400 hours in when I really needed the safe space to exist, I might call this run to a close 

[xXx_Ape_xXx]

This looks awesome! 

 

Have you had a look at the mods Japanese Architecture and More Lanterns?
There's some great Japanese inspired building pieces and stone lanterns that might catch your interest 

[EnbyKaiju]

Yeah, I've seen those mods and think they are pretty hecking cool, but I try to keep my runs as vanilla as possible. I think it's more of a fun challenge trying to make the affects I want via chiselling (without any chiselling mods) and working those into the build as best I can. It gives me something to do during the long winter nights, haha. That being said I'm almost tempted to mod up just for sliding doors, which is the only thing I can't do without mods.

I'm hoping the VS crew expand things to be a little more East-Asian friendly, but we'll have to see how they take things in the long run or if they just stick to a Eurocentric perspective.

[lawn]

Is that a little archery practice area on the walkway? I've been meaning to test how well that would work with a chiseled blk.

[EnbyKaiju]

On 12/9/2025 at 4:00 AM, lawn said:

Is that a little archery practice area on the walkway? I've been meaning to test how well that would work with a chiseled blk.

Yus! It's a mix of chiselled basalt & chalk, the closest I could do at the time to replicate a proper Kyūdō setup. They are really great for practicing archery when you've got a little down time or want to do archery competitions with friends. 

Next run I do, when I've got more space & time is to do a full archery range, but this'll do for now