You1 can now explore the St. Kilda archipelago, a tiny collection of islands 40 miles off the Scottish coast, in Minecraft. This is great because it rains less in Minecraft, and the wind won't shear your face off.
The last islanders left the main island of Hirta in 1930 after life there became unsustainable.
People only now live on Hirta on a temporary basis to work at the military site, or on wildlife conservation projects. …
The map is available for public download to allow gamers all over the world to explore the archipelago's history, heritage, stories, people and landscapes.
St. Kilda really is perfectly-sized to be a Minecraft map: a main island about 2km long and some smaller outlying ones. I hope they made it so the Minecraft version is fully playable, and not just a vast block of stone under the surface.
1. Can anyone actually find the download? Am I going crazy?
At the end of last year, the Fallout Mash-Up Pack was only available for console versions of Minecraft. However, developer Mojang has just announced that the post-apocalyptic pack will soon be available to play on the Windows 10 and Pocket Edition versions of the game. A small preview of what to expect can be seen in the teaser trailer for the console release of the pack, below:
This is a very interesting combination, as the RPG survival experience offered by Fallout meets the sandbox, block-dominated world of Minecraft.
Many of the characters and visual quirks of the nuclear wasteland game seem to be available, as the pack boasts 44 different skins, and several “mutated” mobs. In addition, it looks like all of the previous Fallout landscapes have been combined into one, so you can hop from Diamond City to elements of the Capitol, for example, something which is not possible in the normal Fallout titles.
As if the latest Fallout game was not already customizable enough, the wasteland is now completely subject to your own imagination and the freedom offered to you by Minecraft's blocky world.
If you want to buy this pack, you will have to do so via the in-game store. It is priced the same as its console equivalent, at $5.99.
The famed hedge maze created by John B. McLemore and prominently featured in S-Town — the internet’s latest podcast obsession from the creators of Serial and This American Life — has officially been given the Minecraft treatment. That’s right, one dedicated fan of both podcasts and video games scouted out the IRL maze and rebuilt it one pixelated bush at a time.
While less visually astounding than, say, recreating Game of Thrones’s King’s Landing in its entirety, rebuilding the maze from aerial footage is not just impressive, but it’s crucial to John B.’s legacy. From the photos that have surfaced showing the sad after-effects of the abandoned hedge maze, it doesn’t seem possible that anyone will see the maze reach maturity. This Minecraft creation give us a chance to experience the 64-solution (one is rumored to be unsolvable) puzzle.
YouTuber Coty Batemon claims to live not far from the land in which McLemore creation is rooted. Using the exact coordinates, Batemon captured footage via an aerial drone. Batemon then supposedly rebuilt the maze in Minecraft. In the below video, he proceeds to get a little lost himself for a bit before finding a chest at the center. Fast-forward to the end if you want to see the slow zoom out.
And, for an easy visual comparison, here’s the real maze and an aerial view of the Minecraft counterpart:
Curves don't hold up well in pixels, but the recreations seems fairly accurate.
Scotland's remote St Kilda archipelago has been digitally recreated in video game Minecraft.
Games company ImmersiveMinds spent more than 125 hours and used more than three million virtual bricks on the 1:1 scale map of the islands.
St Kilda lies about 40 miles (64km) west of North Uist, the nearest inhabited place to the archipelago.
The last islanders left the main island of Hirta in 1930 after life there became unsustainable.
People only now live on Hirta on a temporary basis to work at the military site, or on wildlife conservation projects.
The Minecraft version of St Kilda has been made to help mark Tuesday's World Heritage Day.
The map is available for public download to allow gamers all over the world to explore the archipelago's history, heritage, stories, people and landscapes.
Nick Smith, heritage manager at Western Isles' local authority Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, said: “This is a really exciting way to use technology so that people can discover a remote and difficult to access place.”
The team from ImmersiveMinds worked closely with Jonathan Wordsworth, the St Kilda archaeologist with The National Trust for Scotland, to ensure that this digital world is as accurate as possible.
The virtual build features abandoned blackhouses, boats and underground structures called souterrains.
As has been well-documented, Minecraft is a sort of breeding ground for Pokémon fan recreations. Somebody made a working Game Boy Advance capable of playing Pokémon Fire Red last summer, while another fan created an entirely new 3D Pokémon adventure, all in Minecraft. If you’ve been reading the site for a while, you might also remember the fan who was working on a fully functional recreation of Pokémon Red. He was off to a strong start in 2015, and now, the project is finally finished (via Polygon).
When we last checked in on Mr. Squishy, who went by Magib1 at the time, he had the Pokédex, basic game mechanics, and the world map done. Now, he’s finally finished, and the game is a true port, meaning that he didn’t just make a Game Boy emulator in Minecraft and load the Pokémon Red ROM into it: He recreated the entire game from scratch.
In the above video interview with Polygon, Mr. Squishy explains how that process worked and why it was necessary:
Minecraft has command blocks, which allow you to write code in-game. There’s no easy way to just take the ROM for one of these old games and dump it into Minecraft. To get all of the functionality in the game, you basically need to re-code everything from the ground up inside the game, so that’s what I’ve done here.
Mr. Squishy also documented the process on Reddit and answered some questions there, revealing that so much effort went into this endeavor: He walked over 1,760 in-game miles and used 357,000 command blocks over the 21 months it took to finish the project. Even all of the game’s original glitches have been recreated. Now that’s dedication.
Of course, this Minecraft-based Pokémon game is a totally different beast from the other aforementioned efforts…
The Pokémon Fire Red remake is more graphically intensive since it’s a GBA game, but movement is a bit choppy and it’s still very much a work in progress (although the latest version of the game has made great strides and it looks fairly accurate at this point).
Then there’s Pokémon Cobalt and Amethyst, which is in a completely different league. Instead of recreating an existing game, this one is a completely new adventure in 3D. It copies the original game mechanics, and it’s sort of like a merge of Pokémon Stadium and Pokémon Sun and Moon, so it’s very robust. It has an original plot and even a bunch of brand new Pokémon, so the game definitely goes beyond the call of duty.
Each of these fan projects are special in their own way, and a testament to how versatile of a creation environment Minecraft can be to people with good ideas and ambition.
Feel free to download the Pokémon Red remake for yourself and give it a go, right here. Are you going to try this out, or are you going to stick to your emulators, or perhaps an original cartridge? Hit up the comments below and let us know what you think!
Nintendo announced today that Minecraft will come to Nintendo Switch on May 11 digitally, with a physical version to hit stores at a later date.
Minecraft will include multiplayer for eight players online or four players locally on Switch, offering split-screen as well as support for the Switch Pro Controller.
The Switch version will also include the Super Mario Mash-Up Pack that previously came to Wii U, which offers Mario-themed skins, textures, music, and much more from previous Mario games.
On Nintendo Switch
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