It's dangerous to go alone!

So after the first disaster  of my collapsing world I fired up MCEdit with the foolproof plan of building a world on solid ground. I start off by filling a large area of blocks with stone. 4.4 million blocks later and I have a pretty good area to start working with. The first task is to partition a 32x20 patch of ground to represent the very first area I'm going to reproduce. In the overworld map the ground looks like sand throughout the whole map, but I figured I would go with grass for the green areas of the overworld map and sand in the desert and mountain regions. After we have our partition out it's time to build some walls. For now the walls are going to be completely vertical but after things are all said and done I'm considering tapering the walls to give a better overall style. After a couple of strategically paced rectangles we have something similar to the spawning zone.

Spawning Zone

The Original

Now that we have the main layout for the starting zone done it's time to implement the first cave. This is where another tool comes in handy when editing maps; MineEdit. MineEdit will allow me to edit the inventory of my character so I can have diamond tools and materials that can be used to shape my landscape in game rather than doing everything through the editor. After I've made a change in game I simple save and exit in Minecraft and then reload the map in MCEdit. I found this useful for making the entrance to the save since it helped to see how the entrance and stairs down would jive rather than making it in the editor and hoping for the best. After hollowing out the entrance I jumped back in the editor and added the empty space for the cave and then saved and loaded in Minecraft to add a chest with a very special item inside.

After a little more tinkering I'm able to get the second section of the game world complete. I ran into a couple of issues here. I tried to make the green blocks out of cactus at first but I guess 2x2 cactus blocks are unstable because they would explode after a couple of seconds (hence all the cactus in my inventory). Also in the original design I had the rocks set up as the "dirt" block but it looked pretty fugly for the grass area so I changed it to mossy cobblestone using the replace tool in MCEdit.

Things are looking good so far.