My biggest build is a LOT higher than 5 floors without any cheating. It took over a month!
The biggest thing cheaters do are bypassing stability and allowing unusual rotation of parts. There are other things, but those two are the main ones as I understand it (?).

here is my biggest castle. Its unlivable -- too much stairs up and down to access single purpose rooms like kitchen, bath, crafting, storage, resting, trophies, ... way too many rooms some are empty but it was fun to build and I use it as a remote base. What you are seeing is +- 8 (that is, I dug a flat area down to bedrock, and started there with a terrain ring. The terrain ring goes through the inside of the outer walls on the lower levels where it is fatter. That gives me multiple stories of basement. Then above the neutral level, where it gets narrower, its good old fashioned iron supported normal (pre marble) rock, with a wooden top. Several rooms have high ceilings because why not, but if you sliced it at 3m tall rooms it would have closer to 15 floors than 5. You can clearly see 15 2m blocks, so that is 30m, and 8 m down is 38 m total wall height inside. At 3m per floor, with wood floors (thin!), that is a potential 12 'stories' tall. Using very high ceilings and stone floors, though, I think it actually only has like 8.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2799499750

Pretty sure I've seen builds of the month which were creative or even modded, so I don't think that even the devs care.

Originally posted by Casca the Eternal Mercenary:

Buildings that are 5 stories or higher look great but rarely can that be accomplished with using some type of cheat or mod.

... what?

What activities constitute "cheating", in your eyes?

I can see an argument against moving ore through other worlds to avoid the portal restriction, even though I think it's a ridiculous thing to complain about; the game developers gave us the ability to move from one world to another with our inventory, so it's not even "unintended behavior"... but what line are you drawing in the sand to describe "extensive resource gathering" as "cheating"?

Materials aren't hard to gather; many (if not most) of them can actually be farmed. For example, I have chests and chests full of stone, just from mining copper. The same applies to trees; Chopping them down is mind-numbing, but it's not difficult.

I haven't gotten around to it yet, but once I get a greyling farm set up, I will literally have an endless supply of stone and wood. Trees can be literally farmed, by planting seeds, so wood is even less of a concern, even if it were not dropped by greylings. Is a greyling farm "cheating"?

Is it "cheating" to bring materials from other worlds, even though they were acquired "legitimately" in those other worlds (by mining, clearing forested areas, and killing mobs)?

Is it "cheating" to wander around killing respawning entities for their drops?

Is it "cheating" to pick raspberries off a bush that you picked the raspberries from a week ago?

Is it "cheating" to mine copper, or iron, or silver? "Tedious", I could grant you, but "cheating"?

Are you upset that the metals didn't come from the island the build is on, but was instead brought by boat from another region?

The world is huge; there's plenty of resources to create massive, sprawling structures with... especially if you consolidate it all into one place.

"Creativity" is not "cheating", nor is "being able to focus on resource gathering for long periods of time"; please adjust your mindset.

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Originally posted by Casca the Eternal Mercenary:

Buildings that are 5 stories or higher look great but rarely can that be accomplished with using some type of cheat or mod.

... what?

What activities constitute "cheating", in your eyes?
I

There are a short number of things you simply cannot do without radical changes to the game engine/interface. The main two of them, I already listed:
- negation of the support system to go infinitely tall
- additional rotation angles of parts.

I think the OP is concerned about timesaver stuff like summoning 1000000 rocks etc, but that is just time, anything seen can still be produced with enough effort. It takes far less time than people think to gather and haul rocks and wood. All that is left is how much iron support you are going to use -- that does take time. That may be why he gave the weird 5 story thing ... it takes a couple of crypts to go tall with loads of support.

How tall exactly is a single "story" or "floor"? Height of a regular wooden wall piece?

Originally posted by jonnin:

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

... what?

What activities constitute "cheating", in your eyes?
I

There are a short number of things you simply cannot do without radical changes to the game engine/interface. The main two of them, I already listed:
- negation of the support system to go infinitely tall
- additional rotation angles of parts.

... but I was asking the OP, not you.

Besides, there are "vanilla" ways to increase the maximum height, such as using iron gates inside stone walls as "rebar". Do those also count as "cheating"?

Without a definition of what the OP considers "cheating", there can be no discussion of whether a particular build is a "True Blood Build", whatever that means.

Originally posted by Rhapsody:

How tall exactly is a single "story" or "floor"? Height of a regular wooden wall piece?

a viking can function in a 2m tall room. But not all the furniture or crafting stuff fits that low. 3m is more standard, as 2m is almost head bumping and just too tight and funky camera behaviors. for stone floors, that means 3.5m to account for the thick floors.

Think I once got a tower to like, 13 floors before it decided it didnt wanna work anymore. Let me tell you, even from sea level, where Id raised the island, the top was so high up I was seeing snowflakes. Much higher and I bet I would have started freezing at the top!

I think cheating is the wrong word, unmodded and not debugged. I also agree with op. Yeah it's great seeing builds that are crazy but doesn't make it special if you just ignored all the building mechanics and modded new building items in.

World hopping imo will never be considered cheating, it is a gameplay mechanic for better or for worse that is a choice to use

What it comes down to, in my eyes, is that wood iron poles can go 50m high before breaking due to vanilla build restrictions. Add in 8m down and 8m up for foundations created with pick and hoe, and you're looking at 66m of build height in the vanilla game... that's at least 22 3m "floors", or ~ 16 4m "floors"; well above the "5 stories" the OP claimed as the maximum height without obviously cheating.

For that matter, one can easily have "5 stories" completely below "ground level" (assuming 3m per floor, and using wood floors... because stone floors are much taller), never mind moving up from there.

In fact, I hadn't even considered mods to "ignore build height" or "add new pieces"; it looked to me like the OP was simply saying that "large builds are cheated" because of materials costs. The only thing I could think of that might necessitate "cheating", therefore, was the OP's mention of "actually gathering the material"... which seems like a silly thing to call "cheating".

I'm merely seeking a definition of terms, here; what does the OP consider "cheating" in this context?

The hardest part of any build is conceptualizing it, and that can't be cheated. If you're impressed with the artistry, be impressed with the artistry. You don't have to know how the sausage was made to enjoy eating it.

If somebody adds on 'yeah, and I gathered all the mats by hand and didn't spawn them in!!!' (I gather my mats by hand, and used to get laughed at for it when I played with other people), you can either be additionally impressed by their patience/grinding/nolifer status, or a little sad for the hours of their life they spent digging up virtual rocks, as you choose.

Originally posted by Sunny:

or a little sad for the hours of their life they spent digging up virtual rocks, as you choose.

To be honest, I often find "tedious, repetitive tasks" (such as mining or treechopping in this game) to be relaxing. I can't count the number of times I have dug a huge hole in Minecraft just for the sake of doing so; any materials acquisition was often merely a side-effect.

When building, change "cheat" to "Create". Enjoy what people make or be silent and move on.

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Originally posted by Sunny:

or a little sad for the hours of their life they spent digging up virtual rocks, as you choose.

To be honest, I often find "tedious, repetitive tasks" (such as mining or treechopping in this game) to be relaxing. I can't count the number of times I have dug a huge hole in Minecraft just for the sake of doing so; any materials acquisition was often merely a side-effect.

Oh!! Me too. But I acknowledge that the people who spawn stuff in think I'm a total word I'm not allowed to use on the forums for doing it. =) My son gives me a TERRIBLE time about the holes I dig in Minecraft.

But when it took me less than an hour to go through a whole week's worth of mining rocks...man, I have never been so tempted in my life to log out and add -devconsole or w/e it is. So I TOTALLY get it.

I multi-task. When I'm mining copper or silver I don't just pitch the rocks. I build a temp portal and take the rocks and gray dwarf bits back to the base and stash the ore in a chest. When I'm done mining I carry the ore back home (boat, cart, or walking) and start smelting. Then I go back through the portal, dismantle it and the work bench, and continue exploring. When night falls or my rested bonus wears off I set up the portal and go back home, set up the next batch of ore and sleep.

Some times I'll mine an entire island out and store the ore in chests near the closest shore and just sail from stash to stash.

I get why people that don't have a lot of free time like to skip the repetitive stuff but you can make efficient use of your time.