Minecraft - Noob Venture: The Leaning Tower of Pisa

I admit it's probably a bit late to say "Hey, I'm playing Minecraft!". The game has been around for almost two years. Being a mid-core gamer, I have known about it for quite some time. Yet, I didn't start playing it until recently. It happened to be one of those things that you know will be pretty good, but you keep putting it off because you still haven't felt like playing it. But after coming across various images of Minecraft constructions, some good ones like this:

and some awesome ones like this:

Wow.

I finally started playing Minecraft. And by that, I mean playing in Creative Mode, not Survival Mode. I usually enjoy a game for its story, gameplay, graphics and art, and not so much for the competitiveness, so needless to say, the moment I entered Creative Mode I was hooked.

As a test run, to find out about all the blocks, the first thing I tried constructing was this house:

I actually wanted to do something creative. I even felt like I was doing something impressive all through the construction, but it ended up like this:

But then, I ventured on my first actual project. I wanted to work on something not too big, as it was going to be entirely handcrafted. But I still wanted to do something iconic. After doing some research on some famous buildings, I finally decided upon The Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The tower was a tricky one from the start. For one, it was too small to be properly detailed in Minecraft. After all, Minecraft blocks are a cubic meter in size and the tower was just 58 m high. And an even bigger problem was the slant. The blocks were too big to achieve an accurate 4 degree slant. So, the solution? Construct the whole structure at 2X. While it still didn't give the exact accuracy, it was better than the 1X construction.

The material used, after numerous trials and substitutions, was quartz. There should have been no speculation, but I have never before seen the Tower in person and rather got confused by the lighting in various photos.

After clicking away my mouse for five days, much to the annoyance of my housemates (how would you like to listen to a constant click-click sound all day, all night long?), I finally was able to complete it:

Truth be told, I don't think it's much accurate. I didn't know of WorldEdit when I was building this and I had to entirely hand-craft it. That too, twice - as I realized near completion that I had made a major scaling mistake and had to build the whole thing again. It was so exhausting that I probably made some errors. But still, I would say it is a pretty good construction for a hand-crafted structure? No?

From another angle

From the balcony of that house