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Description
Bird's eye view of the whole thing

I didn't mark all the towers because most of them are just generic lookout towers with nothing much interesting in them.

1) The mage tower has an enchanting room at the very top. I recently got the bright idea to put an end crystal up there as well, because it looks like something you could easily see in a mage's workroom, and then I realized I can't remove it without it blowing the top of the tower to smithereens, so it's there to stay. oh well...

It also has a living quarters floor below the enchanting room and a storage area below the living quarters. On most castles the donjon (tallest room) would be located on the main keep, but in this setup the mage tower is the tallest.

The mage tower has a staircase that is far longer than what would realistically be enjoyable to walk, and it extends quite a ways below ground as well, where, in the depth of the blocky earth, a nether portal is located.

There are two simple piston doors at the entrance floor of the mage tower, one for the way up, the other for the way down. you must close each of the doors behind yourself or else the doors stop working. that's why I leave them open at all times

The walls around the staircase in the mage tower are large plain surfaces of stone, I could eventually decorate them with "pixel art" of minecraft mob heads, but that is definitely not on the "to do" list for the forseeable future.

2) the shooting range is self-explanatory, you get your bow and shoot at red wool placed in item frames

3) The addition of armor stands made it really easy to create dummies wearing leather armor to hone in your skills in swordsmanship.

4) In case of a siege, the castle has a meat reserve in the form of livestock, albeit very limited in number. Still, I wanted to make the effort to fill in every free space with something and this seemed like a good idea at the time. It is also nicely hidden away and you won't find it unless you're specifically looking for it (which is the case with most of the things in this castle to be honest.)

5) having an in-house blacksmith has its benefits. His workshop has a lit forge and the house has a modest interior plus a basement area for storage

6) Stables to keep your mighty steed sheltered in a cosy area in case of rain or thunder. speaking of thunder, exercase caution, flammable material (A reference to the haybales in the accessible storage area above the horse quarters

7) Jousting strip. This castle has it all. Just saying. For knights who feel the need to measure the strength and length of their pole... Ehrm... Moving on, nothing to see here...

8) The cathedral, pointlessly and needlessly located inside the castle walls. It would make a great centre piece for the town below, but it's gonna stay where it is. Besides the illogical placement, it is also by far the largest structure in the castle area, which is maybe a good thing, it'll definitely make you feel puny and insignifficant.

9) Not strictly a necessity, but here it is. a simple water fountain.

10) Close by there is a well as well. Unlike many minecraft wells I have seen, this one actually doesn't have water reaching all the way to the top. That means you can't grab water from it, but it looks realistic

11) Main keep - the most complex and most heavily-detailed part of the entire build. It has two separate bedrooms for servants, a kitchen, a dining room, a library with a secret passage, two studies, two art display rooms, a hallway with trophies and suits of armor, two upscale bedrooms, a throne room (which still needs some extra interior detail) and it has a central "penthouse" on the top with balconies and four lookout turrets in the corners. below all of these rooms is a massive storage area. I've learned a lot about interor decorating while I was working on it:

Banners look cool if you place them in such a way that their back side is the one you are looking at. empty armor stands are great for adding general clutter. I have used the general mixture of chests, noteblocks and crafting tables for the bulk of the crates in combination with trapdoors, item frames and signs, but i have also added some furnaces (with the front face hidden from view) and also put some cauldrons and I think even pistons in the mix to add variety, There may even be a broken anvil somewhere in there. The only thing missing from it are spiderwebs, I'll try if they look good. They'd certainly fit the theme. There is not only clutter on the ground of the storage room, it even has shelves with stuff on top. I also learned that daylight sensors are a great stand in for a small box tucked away on top of other stuff, it has a different height and texture than any other "slab" in the game, and when it's high up you don't see the top from where you're standing. Out of all the rooms in the castle, this storage room is probably my favourite, because it looks exactly how i imagined.

12) The castle entrance gatehouse has two sets of iron bars and arrow slits in the walls to trap and rain death upon unwanted guests.

13) A more modest sibling to the gatehouse on the other side of the river, the town exit gatehouse also sports two sets of iron bars to trap enemies, but because it is too small to realistically fit arrow slits into it, it has a dispenser in the ceiling which serves as a murder hole. Bring your boiling oil or tar and feathers! i gues you could load it with arrows as well...

14) The tower on the city wall was originally meant to be a gatehouse as well, there used to be a narrow path leading fron the fishing shack to a narrow door in the city wall, however it didn't make much sense to have so many gatehouses so close to each other, so I filled the door in and tore one half of the gatehouse down, leaving only one of the towers in place.

15) The above mentioned fishing shack. It has a rotting dock attached to it, but the small crop field around it and the sizeable oak tree give it a quaint atmosphere.

16) The newest addition to the build is the Town entrance gatehouse. A much proper way to give a good first impression than a puny hole in the wall. Not to mention it is 3 wide, so it can easily fit horse-pulled carriages with supplies. Not to mention the bridge that leads into it has four viewing platforms to make it more inviting. one of them could even be occupied by a customs officer's stall without taking up space on the bridge itself, where you'd stop to pay the entrance fee.

17) This circular tower was supposed to be a "dress to impress" area and it also is the oldest part of the build, it was originally intended as the main keep, but it didn't work out that way in the end. When i started working on this castle, I made up a story where this large tower (originally just a watchtower) would eventually be built up on and around, while still being the most lived in part of the castle, but for many reasons, the first being that having the main keep so close to the entrance would completely defeat the purpose of building a large castle grounds in the first place, so it turned into a passage area at best over time. It is still an important "knot" in the mess of hallways that snake through the rest of the castle. It suffers from overdetailing. Too many chandeliers and beams in the ceiling. i have learned a lot since then.

Description
Bird's eye view of the whole thing

I didn't mark all the towers because most of them are just generic lookout towers with nothing much interesting in them.

1) The mage tower has an enchanting room at the very top. I recently got the bright idea to put an end crystal up there as well, because it looks like something you could easily see in a mage's workroom, and then I realized I can't remove it without it blowing the top of the tower to smithereens, so it's there to stay. oh well...

It also has a living quarters floor below the enchanting room and a storage area below the living quarters. On most castles the donjon (tallest room) would be located on the main keep, but in this setup the mage tower is the tallest.

The mage tower has a staircase that is far longer than what would realistically be enjoyable to walk, and it extends quite a ways below ground as well, where, in the depth of the blocky earth, a nether portal is located.

There are two simple piston doors at the entrance floor of the mage tower, one for the way up, the other for the way down. you must close each of the doors behind yourself or else the doors stop working. that's why I leave them open at all times

The walls around the staircase in the mage tower are large plain surfaces of stone, I could eventually decorate them with "pixel art" of minecraft mob heads, but that is definitely not on the "to do" list for the forseeable future.

2) the shooting range is self-explanatory, you get your bow and shoot at red wool placed in item frames

3) The addition of armor stands made it really easy to create dummies wearing leather armor to hone in your skills in swordsmanship.

4) In case of a siege, the castle has a meat reserve in the form of livestock, albeit very limited in number. Still, I wanted to make the effort to fill in every free space with something and this seemed like a good idea at the time. It is also nicely hidden away and you won't find it unless you're specifically looking for it (which is the case with most of the things in this castle to be honest.)

5) having an in-house blacksmith has its benefits. His workshop has a lit forge and the house has a modest interior plus a basement area for storage

6) Stables to keep your mighty steed sheltered in a cosy area in case of rain or thunder. speaking of thunder, exercase caution, flammable material (A reference to the haybales in the accessible storage area above the horse quarters

7) Jousting strip. This castle has it all. Just saying. For knights who feel the need to measure the strength and length of their pole... Ehrm... Moving on, nothing to see here...

8) The cathedral, pointlessly and needlessly located inside the castle walls. It would make a great centre piece for the town below, but it's gonna stay where it is. Besides the illogical placement, it is also by far the largest structure in the castle area, which is maybe a good thing, it'll definitely make you feel puny and insignifficant.

9) Not strictly a necessity, but here it is. a simple water fountain.

10) Close by there is a well as well. Unlike many minecraft wells I have seen, this one actually doesn't have water reaching all the way to the top. That means you can't grab water from it, but it looks realistic

11) Main keep - the most complex and most heavily-detailed part of the entire build. It has two separate bedrooms for servants, a kitchen, a dining room, a library with a secret passage, two studies, two art display rooms, a hallway with trophies and suits of armor, two upscale bedrooms, a throne room (which still needs some extra interior detail) and it has a central "penthouse" on the top with balconies and four lookout turrets in the corners. below all of these rooms is a massive storage area. I've learned a lot about interor decorating while I was working on it:

Banners look cool if you place them in such a way that their back side is the one you are looking at. empty armor stands are great for adding general clutter. I have used the general mixture of chests, noteblocks and crafting tables for the bulk of the crates in combination with trapdoors, item frames and signs, but i have also added some furnaces (with the front face hidden from view) and also put some cauldrons and I think even pistons in the mix to add variety, There may even be a broken anvil somewhere in there. The only thing missing from it are spiderwebs, I'll try if they look good. They'd certainly fit the theme. There is not only clutter on the ground of the storage room, it even has shelves with stuff on top. I also learned that daylight sensors are a great stand in for a small box tucked away on top of other stuff, it has a different height and texture than any other "slab" in the game, and when it's high up you don't see the top from where you're standing. Out of all the rooms in the castle, this storage room is probably my favourite, because it looks exactly how i imagined.

12) The castle entrance gatehouse has two sets of iron bars and arrow slits in the walls to trap and rain death upon unwanted guests.

13) A more modest sibling to the gatehouse on the other side of the river, the town exit gatehouse also sports two sets of iron bars to trap enemies, but because it is too small to realistically fit arrow slits into it, it has a dispenser in the ceiling which serves as a murder hole. Bring your boiling oil or tar and feathers! i gues you could load it with arrows as well...

14) The tower on the city wall was originally meant to be a gatehouse as well, there used to be a narrow path leading fron the fishing shack to a narrow door in the city wall, however it didn't make much sense to have so many gatehouses so close to each other, so I filled the door in and tore one half of the gatehouse down, leaving only one of the towers in place.

15) The above mentioned fishing shack. It has a rotting dock attached to it, but the small crop field around it and the sizeable oak tree give it a quaint atmosphere.

16) The newest addition to the build is the Town entrance gatehouse. A much proper way to give a good first impression than a puny hole in the wall. Not to mention it is 3 wide, so it can easily fit horse-pulled carriages with supplies. Not to mention the bridge that leads into it has four viewing platforms to make it more inviting. one of them could even be occupied by a customs officer's stall without taking up space on the bridge itself, where you'd stop to pay the entrance fee.

17) This circular tower was supposed to be a "dress to impress" area and it also is the oldest part of the build, it was originally intended as the main keep, but it didn't work out that way in the end. When i started working on this castle, I made up a story where this large tower (originally just a watchtower) would eventually be built up on and around, while still being the most lived in part of the castle, but for many reasons, the first being that having the main keep so close to the entrance would completely defeat the purpose of building a large castle grounds in the first place, so it turned into a passage area at best over time. It is still an important "knot" in the mess of hallways that snake through the rest of the castle. It suffers from overdetailing. Too many chandeliers and beams in the ceiling. i have learned a lot since then.