A little background about myself which helps to explain why I am doing this. I am a graduate student focusing on Mesoamerican archaeology. As with others in my field I have been fascinated by ancient cities and especially the unique characteristics of Teotihuacan. After doing a series of papers about the city I decided to try my hand at making it. My main source of information is Rene Millon's fantastically huge survey The Teotihuacan Map. I have been going off of his interpretations of what was there based on surface collections and his survey rather than building what is actually there right now (a whole lot of nothing besides the main monuments).

I decided that the main focus of the entire thing would be the area surrounding the Street of the Dead from the Pyramid of the Moon to the Ciudadela which is in the middle of the Street of the Dead (it extends another 2 kilometers to the south). This translates to 10, 500m by 500m grids from Millon's map. When this is all done I will expand outward from there, but that is far down the road. Right now I want to be able to give people a kind of virtual tour of what the city may have looked like based off of Millon's interpretations and my own in how to construct things within Minecraft.

The city itself was aligned on a grid system that is 15° 28o ± 2o East of North. The original settlement, referred to Millon as "Old Teotihuacan", was located north west of the Pyramid of the Moon and was used as as staging ground to build the rest of the city. Even this part of the city was in a grid-like fashion that conformed to the grid or later was renovated to conform to the grid. Most of the buildings you see today lost their plaster coating, which would made most of the city look white with a few select buildings being painted red due to their importance such as the Pyramid of the Sun. Due to the constraints of Minecraft I have settled on stone bricks for the basic structures and Netherrack Bricks to make the Pyramid of the Sun look red.

My initial construction will be to build the most definite structures known and leave the possible foundations as just foundations. When the ten grids are completed I will go back and try to interpret what the buildings may have looked like based on known reconstructions. Many of Millon's interpretations of apartment compounds, common to the city to house its inhabitants, are merely large rectangles based on concentrated findings on the surface known to appear in apartment compounds. One compound I know of for sure, La Ventilla, was be the basis of building future compounds and adapting its dimensions and style to fit the varying sizes of the compounds.

I chose a custom made Painterly Pack that gives the buildings a whiter look to go with the formerly plastered over style the buildings originally were like. I decided to make the grass and trees dying to fit in with the dry season that Teotihuacan experiences every year since it is in a semi-arid zone. Added some decorations like dead shrubs, pools of water, more trees, and gravel paths connecting platforms together.