When Minecraft fans and “The Lord of the Rings” enthusiasts meet, great things happen. Like this recreated world of Middle-earth.
Surely every Minecraft player has at some point thought about wanting to recreate something truly grand in the game world. However, while many projects fizzle out and one gives up after the first week, there are also a few special projects that see it through and grow over months and years. One of them is the “Minecraft Middle-Earth” server, which just celebrated its 10th anniversary.
What kind of server is this? On the “Minecraft Middle-Earth” server, fans attempt to recreate the world of “The Lord of the Rings.” Here you find the vast mines of Moria, the River Anduin, Isengard, Minas Tirith, and the Shire with Hobbiton. A small tour through Middle-earth showcasing all these locations, which also illustrates the sheer scale of the project, is provided in this video:
How big is all of this? The server now covers an area of 30,000 x 29,000 blocks, which corresponds to an area of 870 km² – just slightly smaller than the size of Berlin. Anyone wanting to see everything from this realm should set aside many hours. For just traversing the game world from one location to another can take several hours.
What started as a small project with a few people has developed into a truly large community. Over 300 players are now working on casting more and more locations from Tolkien’s fantasy world into block form. Within the community, there are several ranks and a proper hierarchy. Anyone breaking a rule is an “Oathbreaker” and must walk to a specific location as punishment and wait there for up to a week.
Initial struggles and problems: Even though the current result is quite impressive, not everything on the server went as smoothly and planned as one might imagine now. When the project began in late 2009, many tools that large Minecraft projects rely on today did not exist yet. Rather than starting with a flat map, the LotR team took a normally generated world and then modified it. Mountains were removed block by block, valleys were dug out, and rivers were rerouted.
In normal Minecraft, caves soon become more interesting – you can already play the latest patch now.
What do you think of such a project? A cool achievement to recreate the fantasy world of “The Lord of the Rings” in this way? Or is it just crazy that one can spend so much time recreating something?
