I actually built this a few months ago on my servers Minecraft 1.0/1.1 map, but only got around to taking pictures of it the other day. It was raining on Minecraft at the time so I cut the empty sky out and put in a nice background by ~nighthawk101stock.

I've never named my creations before so this is a bit new for me - it's called Castle Avaris, after an ancient Egyptian city. The name means "Great House" and denotes the "capital of an administrative division of the land", basically a place where a lot of important stuff happens, which is particularly suitable as I'm the single server owner. The inhabitants of the ancient city were known to worship the god Set, who was god of the desert and thunderstorms (along with a lot of other things depending on whether or not he was liked at the time and place), which is relevant because the castle takes up half a desert, and while it was being built there were an extortionate amount of thunderstorms.
The whole structure, including flattening a large section of desert, was completed single handedly on mod-free Minecraft survival hard mode with no cheats - I sold a lot of enchanted tools, arrows and sand for diamonds, slime balls, etc. to fellow players on the server.

If anyone want's to know what the buildings are: (In the top, front view picture) In the bottom left is an underground passageway to a skeleton spawner XP/bonemeal/arrow farm, and to my old house. The bottom right structure is a 96-piece ...