A Spanish galleon sits in the lush jungle bay whilst its explorer captain plunders the land around it in search for the golden city of El Dorado. If the role of explorer captain appeals to you, then this is a minecraft survival map you simply must play.

I’d say it straddles the border between survival and adventure map really, with exotic locations, impressive builds and a sense of immersion that will set your senses tingling. Or maybe I’ve just been sitting on my senses too long and they’ve started to go numb. Either way, senses are in for a shockingly good time.

There are challenges in the jungle, such as settling a walled village, 40 x 40 blocks wide. You can also convert them to the religion of your choosing if you so desire. There’s also a bridge building challenge, an island fortress building challenge and other similar ‘build a thing’ challenges. People who like building things will enjoy these immensely.

If you’re looking for a large, detailed minecraft survival map where you can roam free and explore your inner settler / heartless conquistador, this is the map for you.

Download Heart of Darkness Minecraft Survival Map!

Boxicated is a very small minecraft survival map that will please a bunch of old school minecraft survival map players. When I say ‘old school’ I mean people who consider Sky Block and Survival Island to be quintessential survival map types. You spawn inside a very small bedrock box. You’re allowed to mine outside the box, but you’re not allowed to mine to the surface outside the box. That’s a rule to remember because it will only take a wooden spade to escape the box if you really want to.

Fortunately the interior of the earth is more interesting than what lies above it. I won’t spoil it too much, but you should watch out for arrows coming out of nowhere, appearing from the void to spear your frail blocky frame. Though this is a small and simple map, it works. I thought it was perhaps too facile to be entertaining, but before I knew what was happening I was hoarding iron and wondering how tto best make use of my tall bedrock box.

Are there challenges? Of course, all the usual challenges, create houses, farms, design farms, generate cobblestone. (You always have to generate cobblestone, even when there’s really no need to on this map because you can mine right into the very depths of the minecraft earth if you want.) There are also other, more interesting challenges, like lake building and secret chest finding.

Download Boxicated Classic Minecraft Survival Map

A truly new type of minecraft survival map, The Jumper places the player in a quandary at the outset. There are several islands floating in a void. This probably sounds derivative and boring at this point, but wait, there’s more. There’s a portal to The End right at the beginning of the map – a sign of greater things to come.

Instead of grinding your way across the islands, trying to survive by building cobblestone generators and that sort of thing, you use Ender Pearls to teleport from island to island, each island acting like a separate level with gradually increasing difficulty – and offering increasingly powerful rewards.

At the end of each island, you have a choice. Do you grab your Ender Pearl, progress to the next island and risk death, and therefore failure, or do you go and fight the Enderdragon with the supplies you have managed to gather thus far?

With eleven islands to play on, there’s quite a lot of scope for extended play, though you can somewhat forget about building a homestead and settling down behind a metaphorical minecraft white picket fence. This map ends with one of two things: death or dragon.

Download The Jumper Minecraft Survival Map

It’s not the height that gets you, or the falling – so much as it is the suddenly hitting the ground. In Extreme Heights Minecraft Survival Map, you must do your level best to ignore the call of the void as you scale tall mountains and precarious slopes to gather the precious resources essential to your continued survival.

The map is fairly large, which doesn’t make it any easier. Those of us accustomed to survival island maps might scoff when faced with terrain that stretches beyond the available view distance.

It’s pretty difficult too, more difficult than you might imagine because the place is filled with monsters because the map demands that you not play on easy. You might want to play on easy anyway because the simple act of finding a tree to craft a simple sword with is not as easy as you might imagine.

For a new kind of survival map paradigm, download Extreme Heights Minecraft Survival map and enjoy the process of accidentally falling off things and desperately punching solid rock with your bare hands.

Download The Extreme Heights Minecraft survival Map!

I’m always on the lookout for simple minecraft survival maps that do something a little different, and this ‘Hell Gate’ style minecraft survival map certainly does that. It comes with one obvious goal – to complete the nether portal and escape into the hell dimension. That means getting diamonds and if one thing comes hard in minecraft, it’s diamond.

You begin the survival map on a small island of bedrock in the middle of a very large lake of lava. It’s the sort of predicament that makes your daemon self feel homesick. (The map maker doesn’t specify that you’re a daemon, that’s my own imaginings kicking in by way of explanation for being marooned in lava whilst trying to make it to the nether. If being a daemon bothers you, you could equally well imagine that you are an angel trapped in the lava lands who must travel through the nether to escape back to the ‘real’ world where people need you. That was probably the plot of ‘Touched by an Angel’ at least once. If you don’t know what ‘Touched by an Angel’ is, let me just say that the 80’s were a special time – you should have been there.

You should also play this survival map, because it’s different, it’s interesting and your skin looks really good in the lava light.

Download Bedrock Survival, Minecraft Survival map!