Revisiting My Old Minecraft Maps pt. 3

I've written and published two blog posts about my old Minecraft maps without ever mentioning the true reason I got into Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition, that being my cousins. One of my cousins in particular had a big impact on my Minecraft experience because he taught me how to build. Specifically, he taught me the art of the medieval building style. Mostly, he taught me how to build a specific style of house, big trees, and a few other small things. All of this training culminated in perhaps my first ever Minecraft map, Trunk Town, a hunger games map. It was originally called "Forest Hunger Games", but I thought that generic, so I renamed it.

In order to start a match of Hunger Games, each player has to get into the piston operated "pods". Back when I actually played this map with my Xbox Live friends, we would start matches by counting down, then I would release everyone from their pods from within my own "Host Pod" using a lever. Like any good hunger games map, the players are positioned around a bunch of chests with loot inside of them. Due to the fact that I built this map on the Xbox 360 Edition of Minecraft, I had to manually randomize the loot of the chests, which means that every time I played this map with others, I had a significant advantage. Besides the pods and chests, there's also a house, that house being the first example of the medieval house building style passed down to me by my cousin. The house is, of course, equipped with a poorly made balcony.

As the players exit spawn, since the map isn't very big, most will end up here. Probably the most memorable part of this map is the statue with the big candle in its hand and halo over its head, which unfortunately wasn't even built by me, but was built by my cousin. Aside from the statue, this area also has a bunch of little shops with differently covered wool rooves. These shops used to have villagers in them, as well as item frames with items to indicate which shop was which, but that was erased somewhere in the process of porting my Xbox 360 Edition world to modern Java edition Minecraft. There's also a tree, which I believe my cousin also built. It seems to be pretty light on leaves so I don't know if the tree was unfinished or that was just an aesthetic choice.

Near the guardian angel statue, players may also explore this cluster of houses. In this area, I built houses of different shapes and sizes in order to hone my building skills. All of the houses here have chimneys with smoke blowing out of them. There are probably a lot of different blocks that you can use to get a better looking chimney with actual smoke, like a campfire, but this was built before any of that and uses a classic medieval building style. I also didn't put any fireplaces inside the houses, which was an unfortunate missed opportunity. While the houses exteriors look nice, I regret not doing more for the interiors of the houses. Most of them are pretty empty inside, except for maybe some parkour that leads to a chest if you're lucky.

I can't remember why I made a fenced-in wheat farm littered with chests, but I sure did. Hopefully some of the chests were empty or had awful loot, because it seems like a bit much to have so many chests so close together. Knowing me, I probably filled those chests with diamond gear and ran to loot the chests every game I played. The house near the farm has some of that previously-mentioned indoors parkour that leads to a chest.

This area is not actually part of the playable map, but just a practice area where my cousin showed me a few things, there's an unfinished wooden frame of a house, little grass hills which were supposed to be my practice at "terraforming" the superflat world, a few trees, a few shops, and giant stone spikes which I would eventually use a lot for my second medieval map, but I'll save that for a future blog post. If you look closely, you can see a village in the distance because my toddler self didn't realize he could turn off structures.

Finally, here's a picture of just about the entirety of the original map. There's quite a few instances of just random parkour throughout the map, and while the random slime blocks and floating blocks may take away from the medieval aesthetic, I think it makes exploring more fun. There's also an unfinished house and a few other things that I never ended up finishing on this map.

I've made a lot of Minecraft world during my time on Xbox. So many that it can be hard to keep track of all of them. I also have multiple saves of each of my worlds, at different stages of completion. This is why when I decided to continue building the map, I accidentally used a much earlier, incomplete save, which resulted in a second map being created. Or maybe I made this map from scratch as a remake, it's been so long that I can't remember. I also think this map may have been made on Xbox One edition instead of Xbox 360.

Here we have the spawn of the remade Trunk Town map, which also shows why I now call the map "Trunk Town". Besides the fact that there are trees throughout the map, spawn is a giant tree trunk. A marked improvement over the original spawn. Not only does it look much cooler, but it's actually in the middle of the map. Like most good things, though, I didn't build this, at least not the bulk of it. One of my Xbox Live friends helped me with spawn, but I can't remember who.

So here is where I attempted to rebuild the statue and shops from the original save. There are many differences with this version, though. The guardian angel statue has been replaced with my Minecraft skin's head. It doesn't fit the aesthetic of the map in the slightest, but it was the closest thing to a statue that I knew how to build at the time. Also, I am a narcissist. Around the statue, there's a bunch of little shops. While the number of shops in this version exceeds the original, this area was unfinished and the shops were meant to circle all the way around the statue.

Beside some minor improvements, the houses in this version of the map are pretty similar to the original ones. I don't remember when exactly I started the second version of Trunk Town, but by this time I must've had plenty experience building these houses, because they seem to vary slightly more in shape and size.

I wanted to add more variety to the map, so I built this "dark" area of the map. In this area, there are stone spikes sticking out of the ground, redstone torches, dark oak trees and a variation of the medieval house made from dark oak, stone bricks and a spruce roof. I like what I was going for with this, since the original version of this map is a bit boring and some variation would've been good. However, I'm not very happy with how this area turned out. Even if the map was finished, I doubt this part of the map would look that great.

The layout of this version of the map is very different from the original, although at least the shop area is in a similar location. Whereas the "terraforming" in the original map basically consisted of building small hills here and there, the terraforming in this version looks a lot better. Although it's not much, the small pond I made and especially the large hill look pretty good in my opinion.

Since this map has two versions that are radically different, I've decided to get rid of all the confusion by just combining the two and creating a definitive edition of Trunk Town Hunger Games. As of the time of writing, I am working on the definitive version of this map at my own sluggish pace. In the meantime, You can check out the two maps I uploaded to Planet Minecraft. The first is a world download of my old survival server, mc.concon.soy:25600. The second is Slime Run, my parkour map and the subject of my previous blog post. Thanks for reading.