Welcome to Minecraft Ventnor!

We were going to make the downloads available next week, but they are going live now due to a shameful shortage of memory sticks to give out at Ventnor Minecraft Club. In our defence, we thought 25 would be enough and had over 50 people show up!

Images on this website may be used on this site under a CC-BY-NC license. Press may use the images for the purposes of describing the project, Ventnor Fringe or Undecided Art Collective. You may not use images I created for making money or advertising your business without my permission.

These downloads are Minecraft maps for use with the PC or OSX or Linux version of Minecraft. They won't work on Playstation, XBox or tablets, sorry.

Each of these downloads is a ZIP file which you will need to unzip. The resulting folder should be moved to your Minecraft "saves" directory. They you will have the option to play that would when you choose "single player". If you need more help see this guide to installing new Minecraft maps.

If you have any trouble, drop me an email, and when I next read my email I'll try to help.

So, this section goes into the details of how I put it all together. What it can't and doesn't do is explain why.

The whole model of Ventnor seafront was build (almost all by my) on our minecraft server Agnomen. This is a "survival" server hosted at the University of Southampton. Building this is survival mode means that I had to mine the stone & sand, chop down the trees, and remove a very large mountain where the Spyglass needed to go. It also means there were nighttime zombie attacks and occasional reparis required due to creeper damage. Why did I do it like this? Because I was having fun.

I cheated a tiny little bit by using "fly" mode to take a few screenshots like this while I was building the model.

Later, I exported just that bit of our server to a separate file so people could download it and I did a teeny tiny amount of fixes in creative mode (in the interests of full disclosure).

Here you can see the footprints of some of the buildings mapped out using carpet tiles.

Digging up sand, and sheep farming, were surprisingly time consuming parts to this project. The roads are all dark-grey carpet, which is made from dark-grey wool, which is harvested from sheeps. This takes time.

This picture shows the ugly underbelly of the model, and an exhausted sand quarry, plus farms to produce food to stop my starving while building everything. This made it more fun, honest.

What you can't see here, but could if you explore the model's nooks, is the secret rooms I built as stores and work rooms... try looking under the bandstand, the Gaiety and behind the Ale & Oyster...

The last step was to have the best of the rendered images professional printed onto stretched canvas.

Actually, the last step was to get them to the Island, and with one canvas 210cm long that required the help of a friend with access to a large vehicle (thanks Josh!)

To make it more interesting I then ran it over Southampton, using LIDAR data from Hampshire Hub (Hampshire country-council open data service). This data gave a reading of how high the ground was on a 20m grid of all of Hampshire and was open data (thanks!). LIDAR is a distance-measuring laser that is waved around from a aeroplane, usually at the same time as doing aerial photography.

I also set buildings to be 10 blocks high. It looks a bit weird that the tops of the buildings follow the slopes, but generally it worked nicely. The data didn't quite line up and I had to apply a fiddle factor -- I suspect that I have an error in my geometric conversions somewhere. Ah well, works OK warts and all...

This picture is Highfield Campus at the University of Southampton

Where it came out really cool is along the cliffs and coast. It's a bit gutting to see the cascade and cliffs rendered automatically after spending night after night pouring over reference photos trying to build it by hand!