This Minecraft map was made solely by me, over the course of two and a half years. Originally tailor made for a paying customer, after our arrangement fell through I took it upon myself to finish the project and make it accessible for all for free instead!
Expansive Fantasy Survival was built in world painter, with many custom brushes, structures, and iteration to shape this unique world. About half of the custom structures are schematics I made personally, and I made a variety of custom trees as well. Once landscaping was complete, I used the world edit plugin to tweak a few things, and add a few more structures by hand throughout the map.
This world is 15k x 15k Minecraft blocks wide, which translates to roughly 86 square miles of terrain!
I have been making Minecraft maps like this for around ten years now, and this map is the culmination of all my world painter, building, map making knowledge, and game design principles, and all tied together with a cohesive theme. See some of the world in the trailer below:
Expansive Fantasy Survival was a solo project where I set out to make a massive fantasy themed Minecraft map, for anybody to use and explore!
The development pipeline looked like:
- Ideation & top down planning.
- What are all the biomes I want to include?
- How will they geographically tie together? Rivers? Canyons? Old forgotten highways?
- What is the scope? How do I reasonably make a world of this proportion feel populated, and not like an empty canvas?
- Creating the basic world layout in WorldPainter.
- World painter is a top down software that allows you to use brushes to sculpt terrain, import schematics, and generally create the shape and vibe of your world!
- Outlining each biome was chunked over many weeks, as I wanted to give each section equal attention and effort.
- Testing and iterating ad nauseum.
- When a section of the map was at a decent enough point, I would export it into Minecraft, fly around, take notes on problematic areas, what worked, and what could be improved upon further edits.
- This was done hundreds of times, across each area of the game, to ensure overall quality and presentation was cohesive, in every corner of the world!
- Taking some time away, and coming back for final polish.
- I took a number of months off of working on this project, and when I did come back to it, I felt reinvigorated and motivated to push it across the finish line.
- Some of the final polish included:
- Implementing environmental storytelling. This includes adding structures to the map. Old buildings, ancient ruins, pathways, bustling villages, all tell a story and give previously empty spaces more meaning and purpose. What happened here? What can the user discover and derive their own meaning from?
- Place more meaningful landmarks. An empty ocean? Let’s make it frigid with icebergs, it’s more fun to sail across that way anyhow! Empty canyon floors? Lets add old highways that lead the player directly to new areas and landmarks to survey. This makes horse travel a viable option across.
- Knowing when to call it quits.
- Art is never finished, only abandoned. knowing when to finally leave your work behind (especially when it is self paced) can be very difficult. Which is why the project took numerous years to finish in the first place.
- That being said, once each area was polished and meaningfully improved upon, it was a great relief to take my hands off of it, and publish my world for anybody to experience!
- One of the last steps here was to brand the world, and upload it to one of the most popular Minecraft map hosting sites, Planet Minecraft. This project had an unofficial name throughout development, so I had to settle on a final title for the world. What would describe the whimsical, large scale, and survival mode friendly aspects of this world? So after some deliberation, Expansive Fantasy Survival was given it’s identity.
Here is the official site where Expansive Fantasy Survival can be downloaded:
https://www.planetminecraft.com/project/expansive-fantasy-survival-15k-x-15k-adventure-survival-map
Explore some of the final renders of the world below:
Carter Hoke 