My VS castle restoration project continues bit by bit.
The three largest challenges with restoring the castle, by far, are:
Using the remaining structure to determine what the original must have looked like
Figuring out what each of the original buildings might have been used for, then deciding what I want to use them for, and
Sourcing all the materials necessary for rebuilding
Difficulty 1 will be ongoing for the entire project, but that's most of the fun. Plenty of areas are crumbled but imply what the structure is supposed to look like when whole by the height of their walls and surrounding architecture:
Old roof slopes are especially useful.
This is coming along well in some areas of the castle, such as the walls and some of the more actively used buildings. Compare the collapsed outer wall in the foreground to the mostly reconstructed one in the background:
Trying to figure out what sorts of structures and rooms are actually inside of a castle has been a fun rabbit hole. Mapping them onto the ruins I have? Somewhat more frustrating. Despite being a fairly classic looking castle, there's nowhere in here that seems big enough to be a great hall. But it feels against the spirit of the thing to start knocking walls down.
It's less of a great hall and more of a great hallway.
Even more frustrating is figuring out which of these rooms make sense to have with a castle population of exactly one. Real castles may have had apartments, barracks, and servants' quarters, but it's not as though I'm designing this space with a yeoman of the buttery in mind. This is still a survival world, and the castle has to meet those needs. For example, both the kitchen and bakehouse will be combined into a single building, and grain will be stored in the cellars with the rest of my food instead of in a separate granary building.
Beyond that, however, much of the castle's layout is an ongoing puzzle.
For now, though, every building is basically overflow storage.
This is even further complicated by how many buildings feel like they should be outside of the castle walls. Plenty of castles have stables and barns inside the walls, but no existing buildings have dimensions that make sense for animal husbandry. And if the barns are outside the walls, it would make no sense to put an abattoir (assuming I download that animal butchering mod eventually) or leather working inside, either.
Farming, as well, poses a bit of a challenge. The castles themselves fall inside an area of rare rainfall, which is less than ideal for large-scale farming. I've placed the main fields further outside of the walls, where rainfall is common:
I went through all the effort of placing cob around the edges for aesthetic reasons thinking grass wouldn't grow on it. Fool behavior.
This leaves a great open swath of land for animal pastures and low-effort food production like fruit orchards and berry fields. The exact layout is TBD. The animals need more frequent attention than the orchards, but I'm considering placing them further away for roleplay reasons (stinky).
Beyond the castle and the fields, even more work needs to be done to create infrastructure, namely roads and canals. The castles are just far enough inland to be a bit of a pain in the ass, and just tantalizingly close enough to water sources to make a canal network possible:
So many shovels have been harmed in the making of what's already there.
So much left to do, and much of that progress is hard to see and measure. But I'm determined to keep at it!
