How Minecraft's Custom Maps Are Changing

Everyone has their own fond memories of their first experience playing Minecraft, usually loaded with the same warm reminiscence of a child waking up early on Christmas morning. Minecraft is a heated blanket for the soul, and the warm hand-warming cup of hot chocolate that completes the image are the custom maps created by its community. These maps have developed with Minecraft for the past decade, from basic adventure maps to full-blown game modes.

Many consider the 2009-2012 golden time of Minecraft maps to be 2009. life At the time, Minecraft was a much simpler game, with fewer tools and mechanics (excluding Minecraft mods) for developers to experiment with. These limitations didn't stop creators creating a variety of well-known maps such as Skyblock and The Walls. They have been downloaded millions upon millions and viewed by millions of people through YouTube Let's Plays. While simple in terms of structure, both are distinct variations on Minecraft's core gameplay. Skyblock is one example. It starts on a tiny, isolated island in the sky, with nothing but water, a tree and lava and a myriad of challenging challenges to conquer. The Walls is a Hunger Games-inspired battle royale where each team gets time to prepare before the walls that separate them fall down and a game of free for all game begins.

When it comes to the pivotal players of the Minecraft map community, you'd be difficult to find someone more influential than Vechs, who has created several influential maps - like Super Hostile and Race for the Wool - that set the bar for what a good Minecraft minigame should offer. Vechs declares, "I've been creating custom content for games since Duke Nukem 3D," and his Super Hostile series has more than two million downloads. Super Hostile has attracted plenty of attention from both community members as well as influencers - there are many Super Hostile let's plays with more than 1 million views on YouTube.

"It's not every single day that you come up with a new genre. It's pretty satisfying," reflects Vechs. "My old map-making process was to make a world and then open it in MCedit, and erase everything. "I prefer to start from scratch." Although he still adheres to his original methods, the incredible improvement in quality is incredible to see for veteran map makers.

"Minecraft maps are changing in a positive way It is a fact. There were a variety of worlds that Minecraft had created and then people found an area in the world to display signs. Low-effort maps were quite common at the time. You would be ridiculed for doing such a thing today. The quality of what is offered has dramatically increased."

Lucian Tash, better known in the Minecraft community as Chopper2112, runs the Minecraft-partnered map making group Yeggs. The group started in 2015 and has produced 23 maps. Tash and his buddies began making maps as a pastime. "Yeggs was originally created to serve as a server on a broken laptop, where a few of his real-life friends would play games after school. 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 launched by Mojang in 2014 and functions as a curated library of maps created by the community, including minigames, world template-style maps, and adventure maps.

Quality control is a thing that Yeggs takes seriously. Tash says that the main objective of Yeggs is to make games more accessible. This, along with the limitations of Realms' service, often requires us to come up with innovative solutions to problems related to lag. "Sometimes you'll have an idea that requires lots of resources. Many of the technical aspects of the Minecraft map are built around static entities in the game. It can get quite intense on hardware."

Several of the maps made by Yeggs make use of command blocks, which can be used to execute lines of code. One of their most recent maps, Road Runners, is inspired by the Frogger-style gameplay of the popular mobile game Crossy Road. The map uses command blocks to transform Minecraft into a top-down race against the clock in which you must avoid mobs of deadly hordes.

Tash says that some of the new commands have enabled ideas to come to life that couldn't have been done in the pre-1.13 version of the game. "The introduction of datapacks also has changed the way maps that are custom made are created. It gives easier access to commands than the command blocks were able to provide in the past. A Minecraft map creator can invoke multiple commands at once, or use recursion for a function call.

Minecraft remains a dynamic project that doesn't rest on its laurels. However, the foundation for Minecraft's unstoppable community will stay the same, as Vechs states. "The most useful skill for map making is empathy. It is essential to build a mental model of what the player's vision is and feels and what they think. Empathy is what allows you to create challenging curves and be aware of when breaks are needed and when to include scenic vistas that give the player a sense of wonder.