Notes

How Minecraft's Custom Maps Are Evolving

Every person has their own unique memory of their first time playing Minecraft which is usually filled with the same warm reminiscence of a child awakening early on Christmas morning. Minecraft is a warm blanket for the soul, and the warm hand-warming cup of hot chocolate that completes the image are its community-made custom maps. These maps have evolved alongside Minecraft for a decade, from basic adventure maps to fully-fledged game modes.



Many consider the golden age of Minecraft maps to have been 2009. Minecraft was simpler back then, with the simplest tools and mechanics (except for Minecraft mods) available for developers to explore. These limitations didn't stop creators making a range of well-known maps like Skyblock and The Walls. They have been downloaded millions upon millions and viewed by millions of people through YouTube Let's Plays. While they're simple in structure, both offer distinct variations on Minecraft's primary gameplay. Skyblock for instance, starts on a tiny island in the sky, with nothing but a tree, water, and lava to survive, plus a ton of challenging challenges to conquer. The Walls is an action-packed battle royale based on the Hunger Games where each team has time to prepare before the walls that separate them fall and a free for all game begins.



When talking about pivotal members of the Minecraft map community, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone more influential than Vechs who has developed numerous influential maps - such as Super Hostile and Race for the Wool - that set the standard for what a top Minecraft minigame should be able to offer. Vechs declares, "I've been creating custom games since Duke Nukem 3D," and his Super Hostile series has more than two million downloads. Super Hostile has received an enormous amount of attention from both influencers and community members alike. There are a lot of Super Hostile Let's Plays, with more than a million views on YouTube.



"It's not every day that you come up with a new genre. Vechs says it feels good. "My old map-making process was to create a world open in MCedit and then erase everything. "I like to start completely from scratch." While he sticks to his old methods, the incredible improvement in quality is incredible to witness for experienced map makers.



"Minecraft maps are changing for the better, surely. What was offered were a bunch of worlds that people let Minecraft create, and then discovered a nice spot in that world and made some kind of challenge by posting signs. Low-effort maps were quite common at the time. You would be ridiculed when you did the same thing today. The quality of the products available has dramatically increased."



Lucian Tash, better known in the Minecraft community as Chopper2112, runs the Minecraft-affiliated map making group Yeggs. The group was formed in 2015 and has created 23 maps. Tash and his fellow team members began creating maps as a hobby. "Yeggs was originally created as a server for an old laptop that some real-life friends would play during the break. Tash explains that we started creating maps of a small scale from the beginning until 2019, when we joined the Realms Program.



The Realms content creator program was developed by Mojang in 2014 and serves as a curated library of community-made maps, including minigames and world template-style maps and adventure maps.



Quality control is a thing that Yeggs is very serious about. "A big objective of ours is to create games that are accessible to everyone and this - together with the limitations of the Realms service itself - frequently requires us to think of innovative solutions to tackle issues with lag," Tash says. "Sometimes you'll come up with an idea that will require many resources. A lot of the technical aspects of the Minecraft map tend to be built around static entities in the game and it can be quite challenging on hardware."



Yeggs has utilized command blocks to create many maps. These blocks can be used for executing lines of code. MINECRAFT SERVERS Road Runners is their latest map. It was inspired by the frogger-style adolescent antics in popular mobile game Crossy Road. The map uses commands blocks to transform Minecraft into an all-top-down race against time where you have to carefully avoid a plethora of dangerous mobs.



Tash says that some of the new commands have enabled ideas to take shape that couldn't have been done in the pre-1.13 version of the game. "The introduction of datapacks also has altered the way that maps that are custom made are created. Not just does it give easier access to commands than command blocks have in the past, but it also allows an Minecraft map developer to invoke a large number of commands to run simultaneously or even recursion to have a function call on itself."



Minecraft remains an amorphous project that never rests on its laurels. However, the foundation for Minecraft's unstoppable community remains the same, as Vechs points out. "The most valuable skill to use for map creation is empathy. You must run through a mental model of what the player's vision is and feels and what they think. Empathy lets you design difficult curves and also to know when you should give breaks or add scenic vistas to provide the player with a sense if wonder.


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