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.
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.
Want a minecraft PvP survival map that pits your PvP and survival skills against those of three other players? The Walls is a brilliant map with a fifteen minute buffer at the start counted down by the giant redstone clock in the sky. Each player has just fifteen minutes to prepare for the battle ahead. Gather resources, craft weapons and armor, place traps and fortify your defenses. When the fifteen minutes are up, the great sand walls fall and players are free to attack one another. There can be only one!
This map is brilliant because it gives each player a ‘territory’ to control at the outset. How you set up your defenses and whether you spend more time preparing for an attack or to defend yourself with your very life is up to you. This map will only grow more interesting with the upcoming minecraft update that includes trip wires and other trap setting mechanisms which will make minecraft PvP a true art.
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.
