PC Mod: Minecraft Creeper Case Build Log #1

Background and Inspiration

I'm a lucky guy to have an amazing girlfriend, but one of the many things that makes her amazing is that she is a GAMER! How often do you find women into games eh? It’s awesome! One of the many games that she loves to play (and got me into) is Minecraft. The inspiration for this build came from one of the enemies (mobs) in the game called a Creeper:

Minecraft Creeper

Apparently the creeper came from a design of a cow that went wrong! So I want to build a PC for my lovely girlfriend that will be designed to look like a creeper.

Whilst the inspiration for the PC came from Minecraft, the actual “need” for a PC came about with my girlfriend. She has always been a modest gamer, but she uses a Mac. So I've had my heart set on getting her a PC for quite a while. I regularly read the project logs and see some amazing stuff being made, and I read the guides on Bit-Tech and they seem to make it look so easy to make decent looking work. So I thought I'd give it a go. So this is a confession that this is my first ever scratch built PC and mod, so I'm not expecting an amazing result compared to some of the regular modders on here, but hey, it will be a learning experience right?

Sponsorship

There are currently no sponsors at this stage, however this space has been reserved should any come forward.

The Plan ^TM

For now I'm coming up with some initial designs and sketches of how I want the PC to look. An afternoon of sketching whilst watching Toy Story 3 with my little brother has resulted in the following conceptual drawing:

Conceptual Drawing

As you can (or can't) see in the picture above, the idea is that the main body will be fairly square in cross-section and be reasonably tall. In order to make the “legs” of the creeper that you can see in the first picture, my idea is to use water-cooling radiators, one of the front and one on the back. That will give it the “bulk”.

There will be a “window” on the front that will allow you to see inside, the water-cooling piping will be either green, or filled with green coolant to make it look like the guts of the creeper.
There will be two “drives”, one Solid-State “boot drive” and a high capacity storage drive to hold the steam and origin (she likes the Sims too!) libraries.

The eye's of the creeper will have the Power and HDD activity lights (one per eye) and they will be red LED's. I was thinking red because red looks evil and horrible, and after all the creepers are wicked little buggers. Or maybe they should be green? I'm not sure yet. I'm thinking that the widest part of the mouth should be the “optical drive”. Not the type where the tray comes out, I'm thinking the kind where you slot the disc in and the drive “eats the disc”. For a bit of future proofing, I think this should be a Blu-Ray, but at the very least it needs to be a DVD drive. I think that the bottom of the mouth (either side) should be the on/off and reset switches (black to blend in as much as possible).

From the picture below, we can see that the internal anatomy of a creeper contains a significant amount of TNT:

Creeper Anatomy

I'm not sure how I'm going to make something look like TNT.  I've got an OCZ 500W PSU. It's non-modular. But I'm tempted to try and convert it to a modular PSU using the modding guide on Bit-Tech to try and keep the wiring down to a minimum (I do also think I will need to make custom cables for this, primarily due to length to help with the cable routing).

I'm thinking that if I disassemble the PSU, and give the case a good sanding down to get down to bare metal then I could repaint it red and maybe spray paint on the TNT lettering.

Right, that’s me done with conceptions and creativity for now, I’ll try and publish more information as the project progresses (very slowly!)