A long long time ago… around May of 2020…
Isaac and I had been playing Minecraft, and we each made extensive maps with a story or puzzle woven into it. (Creative mode… this would not have happened in Survival).
Anyway, I recently rediscovered screenshots from the Minecraft map I made for Isaac, based on the Distant Horizon Universe. Just a personal project for us, but I thought you might like to see the results since it was based on the story. 🙂
Screenshots time!
(Also… potential spoilers for the Distant Horizon universe… namely The Glitch Saga and Fractured Skies)
You start in a “beastie plant,” in a tiny, sterile prison cell. There are several cells (which all have a redstone wiring to open the doors), and numerous pillagers (*ahem*Special Forces guards*ahem*) to sneak past.
Keep exploring, and you’ll find beastie tanks and holding cells.
(There was a lever in the control room to open the tanks. But Isaac decided it would be easier to smash the glass.)
Eventually, you could find stairs to lead you to a secret door and up into the Camaraderie Mansion…
Which I accidently made more like a castle because I used stone as the building material.
Note to self: next time use wood.
Inside the castle–I mean mansion–I included a hub…
(Well, best I could make a hub in Minecraft), as well as an interrogation room.
It’s supposed to be a high-backed chair.
No, there aren’t any hidden rooms behind it. Pretend the lights are computer screens.
But my favorite thing to build was the attic, based on Benjamin’s study (from The Glitch Saga). It was a lot of fun to build, with two secret areas (one completely dark and based around Legion), as well as tons of bookshelves, random equipment in the chest, and a sort of random beehive.
In the basement, I also had a “secret door” that led to an underground tunnel that could take you to the nearest security center, and on the other side, if you dug out, you’d find a much (much) longer tunnel that would take you out to a small little house and an island with a giant facility housing a Legion Spore. It was supposed to be reminiscent of the tunnel Jenna goes through in Distant Horizon with the Cuban resistance.
(Isaac pointed out to me later that the facility looked like a giant wedding cake. Um… I can see that now. That was not intentional.)
And then there was the Legion Spore!
I had a lot of fun (and frustration) building the Legion Spore. I used redstone clocks to make blocks go in and out of its side so it would look like it was breathing, and a number of sticky pistons so that its tentacles would move up and down. Plus, the walls around it were rigged with explosives. Depending on which lever (pendant) you pulled, based on clues in books around the map, you got different results. You could blow up the walls (theoretically freeing the Legion Spore), you could blow up the Legion Spore’s inner redstone connections (thus shutting it down in a sort of non-cannonical way), or you could trigger a Wither and have it blow up everything for you while it tries to kill you. (And blocks rain down from the Legion Spore much as debris falls in Fractured Skies…)
(Above is one of the interior levels of the Legion Spore, with a redstone clock running).
It took a while to build everything (and not nearly as long to play through) but I thought you might like to see the images. ☺️
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Curious about the stories that inspired this build? Start with Distant Horizon or Whispers in the Code…
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Happy reading and writing!
