Planning a Mega Build – WDW’s Magic Kingdom in Survival Minecraft
I’ve been playing Minecraft since the first few months of its existence. I’ve built a LOT of things, but many of them were just machines, contraptions, farms, and simple structures. I’m better at living underground than designing something that looks really great. And a lot of time, when I start a large design project, I get frustrated and never finish it. BUT, one of my favorite builds recently (which I should really finish someday soon…) was recreating London’s Kings Cross Station. And from that I realized that maybe what I am best at in Minecraft isn’t being original and creative, but in rebuilding things that exist in the world! It’s essentially the same as recreating redstone machines/farms all the time, so why not other buildings and locations?
Well, enter MrsMonkey and her throwaway comment that “You should build Walt Disney World,” and me laughing it off as a ridiculous idea… until I thought about it more, and realized that yes…yes it is a ridiculous idea… but is it possible?? Is this something that I can do? So it’s off to the interwebs!! I start looking for pictures of the castle (cause obviously that’s where you start) and I managed to find floor plans, footprints, and even blueprints!
I spent a whole lot of time on Google for both images and information on the parks in general. And after looking at a lot of Google Maps images, I realized just how big of a project this was going to be.
So before really doing a lot of planning, I had impulsively picked a jungle biome on Monkey Mines that I thought would be great because jungles really do have the best grass color, and started clearing and leveling a giant area. And in doing so, I rediscovered how much I hate clearing jungles. Give me any giant digging/leveling project and I will happily do it for months (End project anyone?), but those trees…. *shudder*
Fast forward about two weeks, and with some more research under my belt with the maps and the plans (more on that in the next post), I realized I had made two rather large and embarrassing mistakes…
The first mistake, and one that is so common to Minecrafters everywhere, was that I severely underestimated the scale of the project. This was going to take up a lot more space than I thought. The second mistake was that the island I had impulsively chosen, and started clear-cutting and leveling was not, in fact, unoccupied (Sorry RrustyBell!).
Well, now that I have more actual planning done, I have decided that this island is not where I should be building, and I did what I could to fix the mess I had made out of the jungle. Monkey Mines is not as 100% vanilla as I like to say it is, but really there are only two (non-datapack) plugins on the Paper-modded server: Dynmap (the reason we’re a modded server in the first place), and Core Protect.
I have Core Protect so that I can roll-back and restore any problems we may have in the future, as we really do keep the server a bit more unmonitored than perhaps we should… But I like having friends to play with, dangit!
Anyway, on my main account, I spent an hour or so moving all the chests of materials we had dug up into the Nether right next to the portal we had created, and then restored the area using M0nkeyCam in creative mode.
Unfortunately, it didn’t quite restore all the leaf blocks? I suspect this has something to do with the fast leaf decay datapack that made clearing the jungle such an easy time, but who knows.
Anyway, now that I realized that the first thing I really needed to do is find the right scale, I am working with maps, pictures and the Monkey Mines Creative server to mostly “start over,” so that when I really begin on Monkey Mines, I’ll be in a better overall place!
Thanks for following along on my journey so far. Turns out I already lied about not writing too much… Shocker, right?
As always, you can follow along on my Twitch channel as this project progresses: twitch.tv/monkeydks
Up Next: Finding the Right Scale Part 1: Using Google Maps to Create a High Resolution Map of Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom (With Varying Degrees of Success…)
