Heroes of Might & Magic III (HoMM3) will always hold a special place in my heart: other than Lord of the Rings, it was basically my imprinting when it comes to fantasy. This is how I imagine a "standard fantasy setting" to look like; and the Rampart faction in particular has always felt like a cozy home to me: the kind of place you'd love to retreat to for some peace of mind. Sadly, the 1999 game - for all its gorgeous artwork - only provided 2D backgrounds for its town screens. Now that it's 2022, I can wander the streets of, say, Novigrad or Orgrimmar... so why not Castle or Rampart?

Naturally, when I discovered Minecraft and saw that its builds often lean heavily into the fantasy/medieval style, I started drawing parallels and taking some inspiration from HoMM. I guess it was only a matter of time till I tried to fully recreate some of the buildings - and Rampart was my first choice. There were several reasons for that: other than it being my favourite faction, the shapes & palette seemed pretty simple for a first attempt at a larger carbon-copy build (compared to, say, Tower), and on top of that it's the best-documented faction in terms of artwork. Most town screens are microscopic by today's standards (and the "remaster" was just upscaled with a crappy AI), but thanks to the artbook, most Rampart dwellings have great hi-res references which proved instrumental in figuring out how everything looks up close. I've seen other attempts at recreating this town, but most were made back when block palettes and known building techniques were rather limited, so the only one that conveyed the magical ambience of the original used heavy texture packs. I just had to try.

I started around Christmas, and designing the buildings took me about a month. But then came the hard part: combining everything together and bringing the actual town screen to life. I was able to throw together the basic landscape layout with WorldPainter and figured out the rough placements of most dwellings thanks to the extensive use of Litematica. Then came the long stage of meticulous pixel measurements, tweaks and landscaping by hand. Almost all of the land you see was manually edited and rebuilt in some way (with little to no WorldEdit which I'm frankly not that confident with). I tried to match the source as closely as possible down to the rock formations, but since HoMM and MC handle perspective differently, some changes were inevitable. Probably my proudest achievement & what took the longest are the Dragon Cliffs, which are a) enormous, clocking at about 90k blocks according to statistics; b) distorted due to being near the edge of the screen; c) partially diagonal because of the camera angle. Trying to measure & recreate such an organic shape in those conditions was quite a challenge!

Well, here we are seven months later (granted, I took a lot of long breaks due to an incredibly tumultous year). Now one of my childhood dreams - and hopefully someone else's too - came true: you can wander the streets (or, rather, glades) of Rampart. As far as I know, the people most likely to enjoy this build are Eastern Europeans in their 30s - that seems to be the core fanbase of Heroes 3, still going strong. To add to the immersion, I've thrown together some basic interiors with quite a few easter eggs, but they are more of a suggestion - my primary goal was to get the main screenshot right (hence the blacked out windows), so there are still many empty rooms to be filled with your own ideas and lots of tweaks you might want to make. This town can become your Survival base if you too want to live among the elves and dwarves of AvLee, or a foundation for an Adventure map if you'd rather take a few quests from the Seer's Hut or hunt down the Grail. Happy exploring - and I'd love to hear back from you after your journey!

Video link
Shader settings (my setup: MC 1.18.2 + Fabric 0.13.3 + Iris 1.2.2 + Complementary shaders 4.3.3, render distance 30, shadow distance 12, brightness 50, time 2000).