p>Every person has their own unique memories of their first experience playing Minecraft which is usually filled with the same warm reminiscence of a child who woke up early on Christmas morning. Minecraft is a cozy blanket for the soul. The warm cup of hot chocolate that is the perfect complement to this image are the community-made maps. These maps have developed with Minecraft over the past decade, from simple adventure maps to full-blown game modes.
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p>Many consider the golden age of Minecraft maps to run from 2009 until 2012. At the time, Minecraft was a much simpler game with fewer mechanics and tools (excluding Minecraft mods) for creators to play around with. The limitations didn't stop developers from releasing a number of famous maps, like Skyblock and The Walls, which have been downloaded hundreds of times and played by millions of people via YouTube Let's Plays. While they're simple in design, both provide distinct variations of Minecraft's core gameplay. Skyblock, for instance, places you on an island in the sky, with only lava, water, and a tree for you to survive. There are also a lot of difficult challenges to conquer. The Walls is a Hunger Games-inspired battle royale in which each team has time to prepare before the walls that divide them fall and a free for all begins.
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p>When it comes to the pivotal players of the Minecraft map community, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone more influential than Vechs who has made several highly influential maps - like Super Hostile and Race for the Wool which set the bar for what a good Minecraft minigame should offer. Vechs states, "I've been creating custom content for games ever since Duke Nukem 3D," and his Super Hostile series has more than two million downloads. https://jho88.com/ Super Hostile has received a lot of attention from influencers and community members alike - there are many Super Hostile Let's Plays, with more than 1 million views on YouTube.
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p>"It's not every single day that you create an entirely new genre. Vechs says it feels very good. "My old method of making maps was to create a globe, open it up in MCedit and then remove everything. "I like to start completely from scratch." Although he still adheres to his original methods however, the leap in quality is awe-inspiring to watch for veteran map makers.
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p>"Minecraft maps are changing for the better, it is certain. There were a variety of worlds that Minecraft had generated and then people found a spot in that world to put up signs. Back then, low-effort maps that used generated worlds were the standard. Today, such a thing will get you laughed at. The quality of the products on offer has risen dramatically."
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p>Lucian Tash, better known in the Minecraft community as Chopper2112, runs the Minecraft-owned map-making group Yeggs. The group started in 2015 and has created 23 maps. Tash and his fellow team members began making maps as a pastime. "Yeggs was originally created as a server for the laptop that was broken down, where some real-life friends would play games after school. Tash states that we started making small maps from there until 2019, when we joined the Realms Program.
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p>The Realms content creator program was developed by Mojang in 2014 and functions as a curated library of maps that are created by community members, such as minigames and world template-style maps and adventure maps.
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p>Yeggs takes quality control very seriously. Tash states that Yeggs' main goal is to make games accessible. This, in conjunction with the limitations of Realms' service, often requires us to come up with innovative solutions to the lag issue. "Sometimes you'll have an idea that will require lots of resources. A lot of technical aspects of a Minecraft map are based around static entities in the game. It can be quite challenging on hardware."
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p>Several of the maps made by Yeggs make use of command blocks that can be used to execute lines of code. One their most recent maps, Road Runners, is inspired by the Frogger-style gameplay of the popular mobile game Crossy Road. The map makes use of command blocks to make Minecraft an all-top-down race against time where you must carefully dodge deadly mobs.
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p>"Some of the new commands have brought ideas to life that would never have been done in pre-1.13 versions of the game," Tash explains. The way that custom maps are built has been greatly changed by the introduction of datapacks. It gives easier access to commands than the command blocks had in the past. A Minecraft map designer can call multiple commands at once, or use recursion for a function call.
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p>Minecraft is still a fluid project that doesn't sit on its achievements. Despite this, the foundation for Minecraft's unstoppable community will stay the same, as Vechs explains. "The most valuable skill to use for map making is empathy. You must run an imaginary model of what the player's vision is and feels and what they think. Empathy allows you to create difficult curves and also to know when it is time to give breaks or add scenic vistas to provide the player with a sense if wonder.
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