I want to build something big, but I want to do it all by hand. If I do it in a server, then I get tempted to cheat and ask for or spawn items myself. But If I do it in single player, nobody else ever sees it, and there's still fall damage and no /sethome.
I built a 35*107*15 block greenhouse, housing 180 trees, 3 layers of catwalks, and all glass walls and ceilings.
I all the incredibly hard work, which included but was not limited to, flattening 2 mountains, terracing the remainders, grading the rest of the land, mining the materials (I used stone and not cobblestone, so I needed smelters to convert them back), and put up about a third of the glass. All said and told, about 4000-5000 blocks of glass were needed.
Then Krakn gave me the oh so sexy mod powers, and I went from having approximately 2-3 more weeks of work (especially since I opted to switch the two existing catwalks from wood to iron, and added a third) to about 2-3 days. Even with the fact that I could just give myself anything I wanted, it still took quite a bit of time to lay it out and make sure it was symmetrical and appealing.
I was starting on a 1:1 (ish, I fudged the numbers a little to work with solid blocks) Los Angeles Class submarine to sit in the lake next to the greenhouse. That would have been 110*11*11 (actual numbers, 110*10*10)
