Well, that's the thing. The inside of the central trunk is hollow, but 28 trees make up all around it. I do that by getting a base and planting saplings all the way around. Now, when the tree grows off of THAT sapling, you get onto the top of the tree, you cut away the leaves and then put a single piece of dirt atop the tree trunk. Then you plant a sapling atop that. After that sapling grows, you knock the dirt block out and place a trunk piece. While I suppose that is technically not growing EVERY piece, it allows you to grow absolutely massive looking oak trees naturally. I did that for all 28 trees around the trunk and grew them to the point I needed them. Once it got to that point, I cut them off to be perfectly level and started on the canopy. The canopy...I think these two screenshots will show best how I did it.

As you can see in the first picture, I had the scaffolding all the way around where the trunk was growing, but placed a massive dirt layer at the top of where the tree trunk would end. This allowed me to use that to run around without the threat of death. Once that was done, I planted the trees like in the second picture. Planting trees on elevated bits of dirt allowed me to ensure a slowly rising canopy that looked far more like an actual tree. The close together growing did the same, allowing for no breaks in the leaf part of the canopy. In the foreground of picture two, you can see one of my spine branches, two wide and laid on their side for the lesser branches to connect to.

All in all, I think it worked pretty well!

Straightforward but time consuming and fairly tense at times. *chuckles* For most of the scaffolding and the dirt laying that turned into the canopy, I had to use the dreaded 'place a block from the block you're standing on' method, which involves creeping to the edge and then placing a block on the side of the block you're standing on without falling off of it. Lots of careful manuveuring required to not fall fifty blocks to your death. You never die in creative, but building things like this in Survival, even without much in your inventory and a nearby bed to spawn at, can still get the heart pumping a bit.

Now I just need to get a Nether portal into the mix and then connect it to my massive Nether rail network for quick travel.

Consider that a tip for anyone on 360 or PC. heh The Nether is dangerous, but extremely convenient for travel purposes between places on the Overworld!

Oh God that way of placing blocks really sucks lol. And you have a Nether rail system? o_0 That seems like it would be quite difficult to make.

It was pretty tricky to make, aye, especially considering the variable heights of different areas within the Nether, but incredibly useful once you do. See, most people don't really understand that the Nether does have some pretty great purposes besides just being the place where you get Glowstone. It's also one of the best transport methods in the game because every 1 step you take in the Nether, you travel 8 steps in the Overworld. Thus, distances in the Nether are 1/8th the distance of Overworld travel.

This is what one piece of my Nether Rail network looks like: http://imgur.com/io8fi

Note the very long rail line that goes to the left. That goes from near my central home to the Tower, a fortress built quite a ways away. To show specifically the distance, the x-coordinate for my main home is 449 while the Tower is at -6192, so the two are approximately 6641 squares apart. That's a hell of a distance to walk. Normal walking is 4.3 squares per second, approximately. Even a boat on flat water, with a running start, does 6.2 squares per second. Doing that calculation, that's 1071 seconds, or 17.8 minutes, assuming it was a straight line of all water with no obstacles. Sadly, 2/3s of the direct path is over land, so that increases things drastically. There's also a mountain range in the way. So, you can imagine that takes a while to deal with.

So, I connected it to the Nether Rail network. This took about 400 iron, a good amount of gold for launcher rails and a couple days worth of work, but I got it all worked out. Using the 1/8th distance between Nether and Overworld and using the rail line with launchers, I cut the time down from between 30 and 40 minutes of travel to 1 minute and 45 seconds. So, 6641 squares in 1 minute 45 seconds.

That's why the Nether is awesome. hehe

Wow I didn't know that about he nether world. I guess I don't really have to worry about it though since the maximum amount of blocks from one end of the map to the other on the 360 version is far less than 1,000 blocks lol. It also sounds like the railways go significantly faster in the PC version.

I'm hoping they'll eventually expand the world size for you guys. 1000 just doesn't seem like enough. *chuckles*

The rails go pretty fast if you set them up right. If you place a Powered Rail every 38 blocks, you maintain a constant speed of 8 squares per second, the fastest you can go in the game without flying around in Creative mode.

Gods though, for me, the Nether Rails were necessary. The map that I export through JourneyMap, the map mod I use, is actually sitting at 18,416 x 11,760 pixels at present. That would be enough to wallpaper a wall with just my map. heh My two bases that are furthest away from each other right now are x=2972 (A Snow Fortress) and x=-6192 (The Tower). So about 9100 squares from each other. It's getting so big that it just became a necessity if I didn't want to just be traveling everywhere instead of actually playing. hehe