Dungeon 01

There were two ways I could have gone about creating the world; either in survival mode or using a map editor. When I started work on the first dungeon in survival mode it took me much longer than I had originally anticipated. The amount of time it takes to farm all the dirt, wood, sand and cobblestone probably amounted to over half the time it took to construct the entrance to the dungeon as well as the first room. Not to mention that to obtain the stone you need to invest a significant amount of time forging and gathering coal to run the furnaces. Other problems such as trying to build under sea level and dealing with floods was a major pain to work around. The end result turned out pretty well but could have been done in a quarter of the time using an editor.

Dungeon 1 In Survival Mode

As I was working on the first dungeon I had the idea of recreating the entire world, and trying to accomplish this in survival mode would simply take way too much time. Clearing out mountains and creating a flat surface itself would be quite an accomplishment. The overworld is 128x256 "blocks" in the original game. For my build I increased each block to be about double in size to feel a little less claustrophobic. This would mean the overworld map would end up weighing in at 256x512 blocks. Clearing out this area and creating a flat surface to work from before I could even start creating the game world was unappealing; not to mention the amount of time it would take to farm all of the materials that would be required to build all the landscapes and dungeons. Therefore I decided that it would be much less painful to find a decent map editor and let it do the heavy lifting for me. Finding the tools required to do the job was a pretty frustrating experience in itself, but eventually I was able to find the applications I needed to get the job done. A quick overview of the tools I am using will be covered in the next post.