✩ zvaigžņu ceļš ✩

< Part 1 ||

In my last post, I talked about the difficulty of figuring out the layout of the castle based on ruins. It turns out, some of this is a solved problem. @noneedtofearorhope (thank you again!) directed me to the Better Ruins mod wiki, where the creator of this ruin lists Visborg as the main inspiration for the design.

There are some fantastic resources out there for learning about the castle's history, including its layout. However, not many of these are in English, and the amount of Swedish I know could best be described as "fuck all."

With a couple online dictionaries and a lot of double-checking my work, I gave translating a map my best shot:

It's far from perfect -- I'd put my confidence in it at 60% at best -- but it's definitely better than what Google Translate's image translation feature put out for this and other maps.

It's important to know the difference between a chest watch, a chest advisory, and a chest warning.

Even if it's not perfect, it's more information than I was working with before. For one, the clock tower was a complete surprise. I hadn't seen mention of them when looking up parts of a castle, so I hadn't included them in my list of possible structures. Mechanical clocks were invented in the 14th century, and construction on Visborg began in the 15th century. It stands to reason that there could have been a mechanical clock in the tower.

It's also possible that it was called the clock tower but did not contain a clock. The page I linked earlier says that the tower contained two metal bells, but it does not mention specific details about a clock mechanism. I will be including a clock for the fun of it and because gorgeous, elaborate clocks existed within Sweden during that time period.

when you compare the map to the layout of the ruins in game, something immediately stands out: the wedge-shaped section I translated as "outer bailey" is completely missing. The ruins are a perfect rectangle. There's nowhere the forge is "supposed" to go.

Rather than tear down several walls and build the missing wedge, I decided to keep the forge where I'd already placed it ("food storage" on the map). The ruins in game are inspired by the castle, not beholden to its exact specifications. Therefore, I am not beholden, either.

My idea of the layout is clearer than before, but it will likely go through many more rounds of changes before I'm satisfied. As of now, the plan looks like this:

I'm not committed to the idea of adding more gates, but walking all the way around the walls to get inside each time is starting to get annoying.

I decided to move the kitchens from the north courtyard to the south courtyard. Initially, I wanted to reduce the distance between the kitchen and the keep so that food for the theoretical monarch wouldn't get cold on the trip to the hall. However, the space felt too large for a kitchen and bakery, and walking all the way across the grounds to shove more stew into my mouth was not an appealing prospect.

While digging out cellar basement for the new kitchen, I realized that the kitchen cellar is right next to the existing underground storage area accessed from the keep:

I found this out by digging straight into it.

Why worry about placing the kitchen near the keep when I could dig a tunnel between the two? I made a note of the start and end coordinates and got digging.

A little rough around the edges for now, but lots of potential.

Castles are full of secret tunnels. Who knows? Maybe I'll put a few more in for fun.

Learning the layout of Visborg was a great help, but having references for what the castle looked like in its prime has been an even bigger asset. Over time, wood and plaster rot away, leaving only the stone walls behind. The designer of the ruins followed this principle and included wood in the build only in the cellar area where it would be somewhat preserved. There's no hints as to what the roof or floors were made of, what shape they may have had, and whether any wooden structures may have been built on the grounds.

Since Visborg was a real, notable place, however, visual reference of it survives in art:

A painting from 1618. Check out the cool animal in the front.

As well as exhibits like this model at the Gotland Museum:

The roof shapes line up well with what the in-game ruins suggested, with the exception of the multi-tiered turrets on the clock tower and keep tower. I love the visual interest they add to the skyline. The orange and black roof tiles are non-negotiable, in my opinion. They appear in every painting of the castle with color, and also, they just look cool.

Once I repaired the building walls, I set about putting up roof frames to get a sense of what the completed buildings would look like and to check their scale against sketches and models of Visborg.

Not pictured: the industrial scale tree farm needed to supply enough wood for the roofs and floors.

I also dug out the middle of the outer castle walls to salvage the dry stone and aged ashlar bricks. I replaced the infill with cobblestone. Castle walls were often filled with rubble and mortar, so cobblestone is close enough to historically accurate in my book.

In the process of putting up the roofs, I learned that, if this castle makes me queen of anything, it's the queen of taking fall damage.

I have my HP set pretty high so that I don't die every time it happens. You don't even want to know how many times I would have died if not.