Minecraft Maps / Environment & Landscaping

Landmark City - A Minecraft Project by TheBattleRifle

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TheBattleRifle's Avatar TheBattleRifle
Level 18 : Journeyman Princess
4
Welcome to my latest project, Landmark City.

The project started in 2016. It started with a few smaller buildings, nothing too huge, and then eventually I began to build bigger and expand more. On this page I will post more updates over time, including new screenshots and videos of the project's progression.

This project will go at it's own pace. Currently there are 2 people working on the city, myself and my friend Martin (Wheats). What usually happens is that we discuss what's missing or what would be a good idea to include in the city, then we plan it and then eventually add it to the city.

As you can see from the images, a lot of the existing buildings are based on buildings from New York City. This is because I have always been fascinated with the architecture used in buildings in the city, and I will probably be adding more in the future. I am not following a rule as such; the buildings that I am making will not all be from New York City, because I have added custom/ fictional builds, and I have started working on buildings from other US cities such as Chicago, and also places outside of the US with the construction of the Taipei 101 and Great Pyramid of Giza.

DISCORD SERVER!!! - We now have a Discord server dedicated to this project, join to see regular updates and discuss ideas.
DRIVE DOCUMENT! - This gets updated more often than what we post on this site, and has more details about all the landmarks dotted around the city
3D RENDERS - View some of the builds from the city in 3D on your web browser, courtesy of Sketchfab!

Where do you think this project will go?

Currently, I don't have any intended limit to the end of the project, so the percentage probably inaccurate. I'm just going to add to the project over time, adding whatever I feel inspired to build in the process. Since my friend Martin started working on this project with me things have really taken off, and the cool thing about having multiple people working on a project is that each person brings different ideas to the table; I prefer working on highrise buildings, while Martin is happy to make a lot of filler office/ apartment buildings and other structures I'm not that keen on making.

What famous landmarks are included in the city?

You might recognise some of these:

-Empire State Building
-Great Pyramid of Giza
-Chrysler Building
-Willis Tower
-Taipei 101
-Golden Gate Bridge
-World Trade Center
-MetLife Building
-432 Park Avenue
-John Hancock Center
-AON Center

Things I eventually want to add to this project:

-A local farm, to make it fit more into the Minecraft world
-Apartment blocks
-Shops
-Emergency Service buildings

-Big Ben
-Eiffel Tower
-The Shard
-Petronas Twin Towers
-Shanghai World Financial Center

If you have any suggestions as to what you'd like to see added, hit me up on any of my social media platforms and let me know! (Links are below)

Problems I had to overcome

Firstly, there were many problems I had to overcome before I could build these massive structures. One of these problems was the height limit of vanilla Minecraft, which is 256 blocks from bedrock, meaning that I could only build towers so high. Ultimately the building's scale had to be changed for buildings that would've exceeded the height limit, and as a result the World Trade Center towers stand at about 45% the height that the actual buildings stood (Had to leave room for the North Tower's antenna). Since the North Tower was the first highrise building I made in this city, I scaled other highrise buildings to the North Tower, for example the Freedom Tower is slightly taller, and the Empire State Building is shorter. This isn't too bad though, because even with this downscale, some of these buildings took a very long time to make.

Another specific problem I faced was the World Trade Center. The actual complex was spread out across land with different ground levels, whereas I made mine all on a flat map, so in some parts of the complex I had to improvise. The overpass just outside of the 7 World Trade Center is a perfect example of this, if you look at this part compared to actual pictures of how it looked.

The major problem with having water in this world is that it was spawned in a super flat customised world, which meant any water/ river/ lake that I wanted to include meant that I had to add it all manually. I didn't want to use mods, so I had to figure out a fast way to do this. Firstly, I had to get rid of large chunks of land, usually using a lot of TNT. This leaves behind exposed bedrock and allowing for 3 blocks of water high. The first method I devised for filling an area was to fill the area's 2nd block up, and then place water sources on top of those blocks, then after that remove all of the 2nd level blocks to leave the water source. While this was effective, it was very time consuming, so I abandoned this method altogether and didn't revisit the problem until quite some time later.

I recently realised that if you have an area and you cover an entire wall of that area with water sources (top to bottom) and the wall perpendicular to it, it will fill that whole region with water all the way from the bottom to the top in a diagonal pattern. I tried it with a 4x4 grid, and then eventually figured it would work on larger areas where water filling was required. Currently the largest area I have ever filled in one go is approximately a 500x1000 block area which took me over 6 hours to go from grassland to completely full of water. This was the fasted method of doing this without using mods that I was aware of, and although it still is time consuming, it's way faster than the previously mentioned method, so I used it for a short period of time. It wasn't until I realised that they introduced a Fill feature into the game, which was when clearing large areas of land and filling with water became much faster. Progress with the lake skyrocketed since then, and the entire project has as a result of this also.

What shaders/ mods have you used in your pictures/ videos?

The shaders I use is SEUS Renewed 1.0.0 and BSL v7 with OptiFine. When I build I use vanilla Minecraft for performance, but for images and videos these mods are great.

Will we get a download link?

I will release a download link for this in the future, when the city is a bit more complete. We want the city to be mostly complete and "usable", not really "missing" anything essential before we release a download link. At least let us finish the airport and fill in all the gaps on the main island and we'll see =)


Thanks for reading and thanks for the interest, here is where you can follow me for updates on this project.

Twitter
Twitch
YouTube

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5 Update Logs

Progress update 5 - 5th September 2019 : by TheBattleRifle 09/05/2019 6:56:56 amSep 5th, 2019

We've finally added enough new stuff to the city to warrant an update on planetminecraft! The city is really starting to take shape, however there's still a LOT more that needs to be done.

Before I go into everything, I'd like to once again plug the Google Drive document as it gets regularly updated (More often than we update on this site), with pictures showing progression and also more specific details about each build. Alongside this, I also upload 3D renders of landmarks from the city to Sketchfab, all of which you can find here.

Here is the latest progress update video from 5th September 2019



So, what's new?


For those of you who don't have 30 mins spare, here is a brief overview on what's been added/ changed since the last update in May.

-Constructed Taipei 101
-Constructed Wispy Oak Park
-Construction completed on MetLife Building
-Construction started on Flatiron Building
-Constructed 425 Park Avenue
-Construction started on Landmark City Nether Metro
-Renovated Morgan's Hotel and Convention Centre
-Renovated 432 Park Avenue ground level and surrounding area
-Constructed John Hancock Center
-Constructed AON Center
-Great Lake expanded (Covers wider area)
-Various filler apartment/ office buildings constructed around the city


What can be expected in future updates?


I usually only update the planetminecraft page when a significant amount has been changed since the last update, so the next update you can expect the airport to potentially be finished, a bunch of new landmarks constructed, and an overall more complete city. We're getting closer and closer to our end goal but there's still much we need to add. Some of these include emergency services (A large hospital, police station/ prison and fire department), a bunch more apartment buildings, more complete roads and access to all areas of the city, etc. We're going at our own pace and building whatever we feel like, in our spare time.

What version(s) of Minecraft is this world compatible with? Are you going to use mods at all?

As of the May update for Landmark City, the world has been optimised for 1.14 or later, mainly to fix a lighting bug that was present and only getting worse. The optimisation sorted out all the lighting issues. As for mods, we don't plan on using them any time soon, and plan to make the world usable for vanilla Minecraft users upon the release of the download link at the very least. Various people have suggested world edit to help speed up the process, but we prefer working in the way we do and we make do with the tools we have at our disposal; the "fill" command alone has helped us out soooo much.

If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment here, on my YouTube video or hit me up on twitter @TheBattleRifle, for example if you have any requests for certain landmarks you'd like to see, or you have any recommendations for how we should build certain things.

Thanks for reading! =)
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_MrFib
12/03/2019 7:49 pm
Level 27 : Expert Architect
_MrFib's Avatar
Seems a bit scattered, it would be best to include some lowrises in between tall buildings to keep things looking nice
1
TheBattleRifle
01/24/2020 7:27 pm
Level 18 : Journeyman Princess
TheBattleRifle's Avatar
I agree with you, but we're nowhere near finished yet :P

Our goal was to create all the landmarks first spread out nicely around the city, and then add "filler" lowrise buildings/ apartments inbetween to complete the city. Better to get the important stuff done first, then do finishing touches later on, save having to relocate everything.
1
Idraw
09/08/2019 7:36 pm
Level 31 : Artisan Architect
Idraw's Avatar
A south Korean landmark could be the little world tower.
The Burj Kalifa in Dubai.
Stone henge
2
TheBattleRifle
09/11/2019 2:54 pm
Level 18 : Journeyman Princess
TheBattleRifle's Avatar
Hey! Stone henge is very doable and is actually very close to where I live lol, dunno why I haven't thought of this before XD

Burj Khalifa and Lotte World Tower are unfortunately too tall for scale compared to the rest of the builds in the city; the current tallest buildings in the city are all the way to the world height limit, and if I were to build those towers it would look weird as they're not scaled with all the other buildings. I'd quite like to keep builds to scale at least for the skyscrapers. Thanks for the suggestion though!

If we ever decide to use mods (We don't plan to atm) then we will definitely add all of the world's tallest structures though :)
1

Welcome