Pigs. Pigs and bacon everywhere. The internet perks its ears up and takes a sniff. Suddenly, pigmen!

Rise of the Pigmen is the first minecraft adventure map I’ve played that takes advantage of the new minecraft writeable books, a feature I’ve personally been dreaming of for many moons, and with an eighteen page prologue to start the map off, I think we’re going to see some literary hunts in the future that will blow our minds. From the moment you spawn in the branches of a tree like the proverbial rock a bye baby, things start getting very intense and very real.

No time to read eighteen pages of pixellated text? Want to know what you’re getting  yourself into? The TL,DR of the Prologue is that after a bloody war and subsequent period of peace, a voice emerged into the minds of the kingdom’s mages instructing them to build a portal to another realm. You see where this is going, don’t you?

You, the player, henceforth referred to in the game as ‘Magnificent Stallion’ (No, I’m not kidding) must undo the evil done by the foolish mages who listened to the voices in their heads.

Thus begins your adventure as you are directed to a small nearby village where you can do jobs for villagers, earn pay, trade using both the default minecraft villager trading system and an honor system built in by the map maker.

Much like Skyrim and similar games, you can buy homes in villages if you either gather sufficient resources or simply take the key from the right chest. The ‘proper’ adventure update mode has been pushed back to 1.4, so there’s still a lot of honor involved in these maps. The fun thing about buying your home is that you are then able to decorate it with blocks allocated in the home. This, along with the extensive world map creates a sense of immersion not found in many minecraft maps these days.

Oh, did I mention that this game world is large? It’s massive. How massive? This massive:

With a great many RPG elements, including side quests, explorable dungeons and places of interest marked with blue wool balloons,  (plus a place named Winterhold),Rise of the Pigmen really goes deep. This is no shallow map to be dispensed with in a few hours, this is a deep adventure game that will draw you into a whole new world. Aladdin style.

Download Rise of the Pigmen Minecraft Adventure Map!

Do you love smashing your minecraft face into objects at high speed? If so, Revenge of the Aliens, a minecraft Parkour / Adventure map that pulls no punches and gives no second tries is the map for you. It’s merciless, which is good, because you don’t deserve mercy. You deserve the pain of progress, the crunching sound of bones and the respawn button to nowhere. Also, Aliens.

This is the third of a three part series in which you play ‘Edward James’ British protagonist and alien slayer extraordinaire. You have already defeated alien threats twice before, but it is a big universe out there and sometimes the aliens aren’t even aliens. With your sidekick and super close friend Tom, you will uncover the mysteries of the ‘aliens’ and leap your way into the history books.

Download Revenge of the Aliens, Minecraft Parkour Adventure Map!

Curse of the Lost Souls is a minecraft survival island map played under the rules and conditions of a minecraft adventure island map. In just a couple days (or perhaps right now if you’re reading this in a couple days time) you won’t have to use your self control to impose adventure conditions on yourself – those adventure conditions being not breaking or placing blocks, but simply using the available materials provided by the map itself.

So what makes Curse of the Lost Souls special? It certainly has that ‘x’ factor, which for me means the moment I load the map I am intrigued and invited into the world. The landscape is not only beautiful, but staged in a way a REMAX agent could be proud of. When you step ashore into a Tiki bar gone awfully silent and deserted you feel as if the adventure is just beginning, and indeed it is.

What makes Curse of the Lost Souls a little tedious? ‘Adventure’ mode in this map basically means ‘find the chests and read the notes in the file’, which is fine if you like reading notes and looking for chests, but it means that you’re probably going to break the rules at some point and I don’t know, perhaps punch a tree for the hell of it. Don’t feel guilty if you find yourself, I don’t know, crafting a workbench and building a purple sheep farm. You gotta get whimsical with it.

Download Curse of the Lost Souls Adventure Survival Island Map

Minecraft Adventure Mode is a new map type being rolled out in the Minecraft 1.3 update. In Adventure Mode, the player will not be able to break or place blocks including water and lava. The player will be able to use pressure plates and switches and will be able to trade with villager NPCs, but no other interactions with the environment are possible. Whilst explosions will result in blocks that can be picked up, they still can’t be placed. Adventure mode maps may at some point contain explosion controls, so that creepers won’t destroy maps as they currently do.

Minecraft adventure maps have been popular since minecraft map sharing began, but in the past the maps have functioned entirely on an honor system, requiring the player to promise not to place or break blocks. There was a separate Minecraft Adventure Mod called AdventureCraft which once provided the same features as Minecraft Adventure mode. This mod will be obsolete once the Minecraft 1.3 update is released on or around the 1st of August 2012.

Saw is a minecraft map based on the Saw movies. there aren’t a whole lot of minecraft maps that impart what I would call a deep sense of psychological tension, perhaps even terror, but this is one of them. From portal skipping trips through time and space to strange rooms where the lights flicker on and off at unsettlingly random intervals, Saw is a minecraft survival adventure map that will not only test your minecraft skills to their very limits, but scare the heck out of you along the way.

This map is not content with tormenting you by inflicting suffering on you alone, at various stages your actions will bode ill for innocents around you. Jigsaw has little mercy for anyone, least of all you, Steve.

Most minecraft maps can be overcome by quick thinking, quick acting and a decent working knowledge of the sprint button, but this Saw minecraft map often puts you in apparently impossible situations, which quickly turn out to be actual impossible situations. Luck and the ability to restart the map from scratch are the only things that will save you. Seriously, if you die, don’t even bother respawning, just delete and re-extract the map. Keep the .zip file around, you’re going to need it.

Download Saw, Minecraft Survival Adventure Map!