I entered a small mapping competition with the theme “one room”. I had recently seen the trailer for Maquette, a game about a room inside of itself. I was later disappointed by Maquette when I found out the entire game did not in fact take place inside one room, but it had a couple distinct levels. For my map, I wanted it to take place in one room. I didn’t want to implement a bunch of new puzzle mechanics, so I went with the classic “escape” adventure map formula. This usually consists of finding some pickaxe with the “can break: cracked stone bricks” tag, breaking some cracked stone bricks, and then doing some minigame, or parkour, or whatever. I usually find these kind of maps pretty boring and railroad-y, but they were good for showing off a spectacle. And I filled this with a lot of spectacles, including new features in the Minecraft 1.17 snapshots: moss and a higher building limit.

A couple times in the map, you could place or break a block in the small room This would also change the big rooms, since the illusion is they are the same room

Since the scale for rooms was 1:7, I realized I could use the rarely seen giant entity to represent the player in the bigger room.

A lot of the work was creating 49x49x49 versions of single minecraft blocks. Since I can’t perfectly scale objects like in Maquette, a lot of the small things in the big scale have no equivalent in the small scale. Some blocks aren’t nicely recreated in 7x7, but are nicely recreated in 49x49. Some 49x49 areas focus more on recreating the 7x7 area than the original 1x1 block. The whole map is inconsistent in this way, but if you squint, its just goofy fun.

Every action is totally scripted. Functions wait for a specific action to happen, and then /clone parts from underneath the stage. It’s a decently convincing illusion.

Most of the map follows a loop of

1. Find a chest with an item in the large scale room
2. Go to the small scale room
3. Use the item
4. New area is unlocked in the large scale room
5. Explore the area

but there are a couple exceptions, and those exceptions are my favorite parts.

There is plenty of clunkyness. There are a few parts that are possible to soft lock yourself (burning all your bamboo before “growing” more), and its never clear what you are supposed to do, other than try to use the most recent key item you’ve found. Its an “escape” style adventure map made in a week, so I don’t have high standards for innovative puzzles or anything.

Ignoring the generic gameplay, the map as a standalone static build is still one of my favorite builds I’ve done in minecraft.

Walkthrough

Spoilers, obviously

planetminecraft download page

download link