Nibirum in Minecraft

Monsen

Anyone out there playing Minecraft?

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Just for fun, I decided to implement the world of Nibirum from the community atlas into Minecraft. It is now available on the atlas download page.

This Minecraft world was made using a height map generated by the original Fractal Terrains file for the community atlas. The resulting world is a very good representation of the FT world. Note that it is exported using a equirectangular projection, so shapes are distorted in the same way as you can see on the atlas world map. This is particularly noticeable for Peredur and Ezrute

Now, the CC3+ atlas maps do not follow the FT3 map faithfully, it is more used as a loose guideline, and to provide the continent shapes, but many mappers ignore things like altitude from FT3. Unfortunately, generating a proper height map from the CC3+ maps is not an easy task, because they do not contain height data, so I had to go to the FT3 source. This unfortunately means that while the Minecraft map is a very good representation of the FT3 world, it will deviate from the CC3+ maps a bit, but there is no helping that.
Additionally, terrain does not carry over when using a height map, so I did some manual biome painting. I did a rough paint job trying to paint biomes roughly matching the CC3+ continent maps. In the end I did find the result quite interesting, although it can certainly be made better but that would take much manual work. Except for the heightmap data for the continents, the rest of the features are generated by Minecraft as per a normal Minecraft map so don't expect to find villages that match up with the location on the atlas maps, I don't have any control over where Minecraft places villages, temples and other structures.

I do think this map does a nice job in allowing you to explore Nibirum "in person" instead of just looking at a map.

Minecraft Technical Information

This map is for the Minecraft Java edition. I have no idea if it can even be imported into any other version.
The map itself is about 30000 by 15000 blocks, where each block roughly represents 1 square mile on Nibirum.
This map was made for Minecraft version 1.12.2. It was made for this version for technical reasons. 1.13 introduces a new map format, and tools to create custom maps does not support this version properly yet. Additionally, while Minecraft itself are supposed to be able to convert maps to the new format, it seems to fail hugely on this one, seriously messing it up when loaded in 1.13. Things seems to look fine at first, but exploring a bit quickly reveals that a lot of the chunks from the map has been replaced with normal randomly generated chunks creating a checkerboard of new and old chunks. So stick to 1.12.2 when using this map, which should be easy to set up a profile for in the Minecraft launcher (At this point this is also the best supported version for mods if you are into that)
The map itself was generated with a few mods in place to make a more interesting map, but the map itself is purely vanilla Minecraft, and do not require any mods to use. It should be fine to use with modded Minecraft too though (but if your mod adds things to the world, like more ore types, you need to look up the term retrogen)
This map is populated with normal Minecraft resources and structures, so it is a fully playable survival world.
The software I used to accomplish this was World Painter to import the height map and generate a minecraft map from it and then I used the Chunk Pregenerator to force Minecraft to populate all the chunks on the map with the various features (caves, mineshafts, runins, villages, trees, etc) without visiting everywhere. Additional structures where also added at this stage by Recurrent Complex.

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots I took while in game. Note that this map is so huge that it is impossible to take screenshots of larger features like landmasses.
You can click any of the screenshots for a higher resolution version (There is also a 30K resolution version of the world map from above, but beware, it is 200MB).


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A view from the continent of Alarius.


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Snowy Hills on Ezrute


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A village on Kentoria


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Maelstrom Bay on Malajuri


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A handy teleporter I set up at spawn that can quickly get you to another continents.

Loopysue

A very interesting explanation, and an equally interesting result

I still have my hands full of other stuff, or I might be tempted to dabble a bit.

Loopysue

I've just noticed something.

The background glaciers or icebergs (or whatever they are) look the same in each image. Is that some kind of a general backdrop that stays the same wherever you look?

Monsen

Yes, that's just the skybox. They're not related to the map itself.

Loopysue

Ooooh, I see now.

How strange.

Can you switch it off if you get tired of the background view?

Monsen

It is part of the texture pack I was using, so I guess it is just a matter of changing texture packs. Default Minecraft without a texture pack just has a plain blue sky instead (and a black starry sky at night)

Skyboxes are a common concept in games. Rendering the world out to infinity is a very expensive operation, so all games will only render the part of the game world somewhat near to the player, and then use a skybox to give the illusion that there is still more out there. Normally you wouldn't see so much of it, but I took most of those screenshots hovering a bit over the ground, so you can actually see where the world stops rendering in the distance, but when walking normally in game, that point is normally always hidden from view, unless you stand on top of something tall that gives you a similar view.

Lorelei

This is pretty neat. Not into Minecraft, at all (i'm more of an RPG video game player), but i really like the visuals we can see of our wonderful world!

Monsen

I don't play it too much myself (although I love doing a heavily modded version every now and then, or a custom adventure map with friends, but just "plain" Minecraft bores me). But it does have a unique kind of flexibility, which makes it the ideal target for projects such as this. Honestly not sure if I ever will play this map myself, making it was the most interesting part for me.

JimP

Nope,not me, but my sister's kids play it.