Acropolis... in Minecraft
Posted by brilokuloj on Jul 23, 2024
In between playing on Oldbat with my girlfriend and grappling with difficult personal emotions, I had set aside some time to play around in singleplayer. This may have been the first warning sign that the grip that Minecraft had on my brain was more than even the person who had gotten me into the game could handle.
Here is my loving recreation of Acropolis, one of Furcadia’s default maps.
The effective death of Furcadia in 2010 had filled me with a grief the likes of which I had no means to grapple with. This was a mere 2 years after the death of my grandmother, and subsequently, the dissolution of my parents’ ability to tolerate each other. My teenage hormones and developing untreated mental disorders were making it difficult for me to hold onto friendships, let alone coherent trains of thought.
It felt like a cavernous rift had opened up in my life. Minecraft sat at the bottom, the only distraction left I had to keep me from just gnawing my fingers off. And, most importantly, it filled the vacancy in my life that craved placing furniture.
In Fall 2011, with Beta 1.8 and the release of Creative Mode, my interest only increased. Around this point was when I had the idea: what if I take Acropolis, one of my favorite maps, and put it into Minecraft?
The task sounded super easy. Furcadia and Minecraft are both tile-based, right? And a character in both games takes up a single tile, so it wouldn’t even have scale issues. I started by putting down all the floors first, thinking that it would give me a sense of perspective.
I put quite a lot of effort into this. It’s really frankly embarrassing. The worst part was that this was months before the release of WorldEdit, a plugin that would make mass-replacing blocks much easier; I was placing all of these meticulously by hand.
It was only once I was done with the floors and ready to move on to the walls that I realized I had been doomed from the start. Walls in Furcadia do not take up a full tile, oh no, they operate on their own twisted logic. Walls take up the space between tiles, so a piece of furniture and a wall piece could co-exist in the same XY coordinates. I would effectively have to make the map at least 1.5x bigger to compensate, or worse, eyeball it.
Nowadays I’m aware of how ridiculously trivial this all is. But this was way too much for a traumatized teenager who just wanted a fun weekend project. I had no idea how I was going to fix it, and being up against a situation where I could not have my comforts back the way I remembered them was sending me to some sort of existential turbo-hell.
I put it down for a bit. For an exercise that I hoped would bring me closer to some sort of peace, my grief now felt abyssal.
At some point, I found it in me to finally re-open the map, perhaps to give it a fair shake. Little did I know that with the spectacular release of Minecraft 1.0.0, weather events had been reimplemented and the area I was building in had been (reassigned?) a Taiga biome.
I watched in horror as the snow came down, covering my entire build.
I did not play on this file again.
Categories: gaming
On this day...
- The Rat-Ron-Ratings (Jul 23, 2018)