How Minecraft’s Custom Maps Are Evolving

Everyone has their own personal memories of their first experience playing Minecraft which is usually filled with the same warm nostalgia of a child who woke up early on Christmas morning. Minecraft is a warm blanket for the soul. The hand-warming cup of hot chocolate that completes this image are the community-made maps. These maps have been evolving with Minecraft for the past decade, ranging from simple adventure maps to fully-fledged game modes.

Many consider the 2009-2012 golden time of Minecraft maps to have been 2009. Minecraft was simpler in the past with the simplest tools and mechanics (except for Minecraft mods) that creators could explore. This didn’t stop Minecraft creators from creating a variety of well-known maps, such as Skyblock and The Walls. They have been downloaded by millions of times and watched by millions of users through YouTube Let’s Plays. While simple in terms of structure, both offer distinct variations on Minecraft’s primary gameplay. Skyblock is one example. It starts on a tiny, isolated island in the sky, with just water, a tree and lava to live and a myriad of difficult challenges to complete. Chit chat chit chat The Walls is a battle royale inspired by the Hunger Games where each team has time to prepare before the walls that separate them crumble and a free for all begins.

If we talk about the most pivotal members of the Minecraft map community, you would be hard-pressed to find a more influential person than Vechs who has made several influential maps – such as Super Hostile and Race for the Wool which set the bar for what a great Minecraft minigame should offer. Vechs says, “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 received lots of attention from influencers and community members alike. There are numerous Super Hostile Let’s Plays that have more than a million views on YouTube.

“It’s not every day you invent a genre. It’s pretty good,” reflects Vechs. “My old map-making process was to create a world open in MCedit, then remove everything. “I prefer to start completely from scratch.” Although he sticks to his original method, the incredible leap in quality is awe-inspiring to witness for experienced map makers.

“Minecraft maps are changing for the better and it’s a given. What was on offer were a number of worlds that people let Minecraft generate, then they discovered a great location in the world and created a kind of challenge there by putting up signs. Low-effort maps were popular at the time. Today, such a thing will get you ridiculed. The quality of the products available has increased dramatically.”

Lucian Tash, also known as Chopper2112, is the founder of the Minecraft-affiliated map-making team Yeggs. The group was formed in 2015 and has produced 23 maps. At the time, the creation of maps was just an enjoyable hobby for Tash and his friends. “Yeggs was originally created as a server on a busted laptop where some real-life friends would play after school. Tash states that we started creating maps of a small scale from the beginning until 2019 when we joined the Realms Program.

Mojang created the Realms content creator program in 2014. It functions as an online library that is curated for community-made maps.

Yeggs takes quality control extremely seriously. “A important goal of ours is to make accessible games and this – together with the limitations of the Realms service itself – frequently requires us to come up with innovative solutions to tackle lag-related problems,” Tash says. Sometimes, you might come up with an idea that would require lots of resources. Many of the technical aspects of the Minecraft map tend to be built around static entities in the game. It can be quite challenging on hardware.”

Yeggs has used command blocks to create many maps. These blocks are used to execute lines of code. One of their most recent maps, Road Runners, is inspired by the Frogger-style humor of the popular mobile game Crossy Road. The map uses command blocks to turn Minecraft into a 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 allowed ideas to come to life that couldn’t have been done in the pre-1.13 version of the game. The method by which custom maps are created has been greatly changed by the introduction of datapacks. Not just does it give easier access to commands than command blocks had in the past however, it also allows an Minecraft map developer to invoke a large number of commands to run simultaneously, or even use recursion in order to make a function call to itself.”

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 points out. “The most important skill for map creation is empathy. It is essential to build an imaginary model of what the player will see, how they will feel, and what they will think. Empathy allows you to design challenging curves and to know when to break the curve or include scenic vistas to give the player an impression of wonder.