This underwater minecraft survival map, correctly titled ‘Drown’ carries with it the imminent risk of dying by, you guessed it, drowning.

The twist in this survival map is the fact that the little sphere you find yourself spawned into is not the only sphere under the sea. There are others clearly visible in the distance and if you wish to survive you must make your way over to them through the crushing pressure of the water bearing down on you at all times, threatening to take your breath away.

Knowledge of cobblestone grinders is immensely useful in this map. Pro Tip: If your lava turns into obsidian, you’ve done something wrong.

The challenge of making one’s way through the watery depths of an unknown world is a great one. The additional spheres of glass provide goals to strive for and your basic minecraft survival skills will be constantly tested as you struggle to complete the challenges and eventually spawn new life under the sea.

Download Drown, Minecraft Underwater Survival Map!

It’s just under a month before the Minecraft 1.3 release comes out – a release that will be a game changer with features like Ender Chests, Writeable Books, Tripwires and others. So, with things in a holding pattern until the new release is here, I thought I’d go back and look at the most popular Minecraft Survival Maps to this point in a ten post series. We start today with the tenth most popular minecraft survival map of all time: Ant Farm Survival

There had been gimmicky ‘oh look I’m in an oversized box’ minecraft survival maps before of course, but Ant Farm Survival was different. Not only were you trapped inside a massive minecraft room built to painstaking scale, but the Ant Farm itself was inescapable. The walls, although they appeared to be made of glass are actually retextured bedrock. That means for better or worse, you have to make a go of it inside your narrow but deep ant farm world, which is only nine blocks wide, but hundreds of blocks deep.

The mechanics of surviving in a map that was considerably deeper than it was wide are challenging. Multistory building is a must and the usual ‘free, free as a bird’ feeling that minecraft imparts is completely lost between those unyielding walls where you must face danger and carve out a survival niche of your own. The original Ant Farm Survival has been updated all the way to version four now, so even if you played it once before, you might want to sample the delights of this map that really defined a sub-genre of minecraft survival maps once more.

A small island minecraft survival map, Edge of the World uses many of the basic staples of the minectaft survival genre and puts them in a very small sea. There are several challenges in this map, circumnavigating the ocean being one of them. But the real challenge comes from the nature of the map itself. Animals don’t spawn here, so survival depends on the sea. Fishing is your best chance of keeping yourself nourished before you manage to build a farm. Which brings me to the second set of natural challenges in this minecraft survival island map – the soul sand. Most of the island is made of soul sand, so you have to retrieve dirt from the innards of the map and bring it up to the surface where it can be useful.

This is a simple minecraft map that relies on the mechanics of the game and limited resources to make things interesting. Though it might not be the longest survival map you ever play, taming the wild soul sands and subduing them to the useful and the good will be quite a challenge – and with the scope of the map being small, you’ll really be able to stamp your individual mark on the terrain, which is half the fun of survival island style maps.

Click here to download Edge of the World Minecraft Survival Island Map

A fun survival map with not one, but two innovative goals, this survival island style minecraft map requires you to first rejuvenate the barren dirt and sand landscape and then to populate it by building a village and breeding sufficient villagers that the island runneth over with life.

This map doesn’t have a bunch of superfluous silly ‘achievements’ or ‘challenges’ or whatever we’re calling them these days.* It has two painfully slow long term goals which is quite reminiscent of real life, where doing anything worthwhile takes at least a decade – and only at the end of that decade does one realize it was all sort of a waste of time.

There are no naturally spawning animals at first – or ever, because this void island is technically an ‘ocean’ biome and there are no ores to mine either. The ores are hidden in a hole somewhere and you’ll find them eventually after a sufficient amount of smashing the ground with your face.

Download Rejuvenate and Restore Minecraft Villager Breeding Survival Map!

*Actually it does, but I chose to ignore them for the purposes of keeping my brain intact.

A single mountain towering to a sharp peak is the setting for this minecraft survival map. You spawn in a small boat just off the shore of the mountainous island with no supplies save a single tree and the bones of your less fortunate crewmen, which will certainly come in handy as fertilizer on your upcoming adventure.

But you are not alone on the high seas, there are several other ships. Not ships that will offer any hope of rescue however, these are the legendary monster ridden ships of yore. Each ship contains a different hoard of blood thirsty monsters who must be slain if you wish to capture their supplies.

Though this is a simple map at heart, it has all the ingredients of a fun survival experience, challenging terrain, limited resources, the impending doom of outside threats and of course, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are also additional challenges, like building cactus farms and going fishing and all that sort of thing.

Oh, and there’s more than one surprise waiting in this map, so don’t be too quick to judge a book by its cover. It may appear to be simple, but your expectations could very well be subverted in this cone of rock and dirt which turns out to have, without being too spoilerish about it – Tardis like qualities. You have been warned.

Download Mountain Island Minecraft Survival Map!