ArdaCraft: A Tour of Middle-earth in Minecraft!

f1 and f11 all right guys sorry about the uh snafu there with the the frame rate and everything i think we've got it fixed it's looking much better on my end now um so welcome back we are ready to rock once again um so now we're taking a look around rivendell yes uh rivendell so this again is uh well one of the projects that's gonna um for people who are fans of the films will come as i wouldn't say a shock but maybe it's a slightly new experience so rivendell in the films as i'm sure everyone remembers uh several houses kind of set quite high up in the valley with these enormous waterfalls going through it very pretty um but a little impractical so uh basically tolkien's drawing of it that he did that what kind of watercolor that he did showed that it was just a single house uh in this kind of alpine sheer sided valley and that's the inspiration that we went with um for this uh house so we kind of took a sort of elven architecture but there was some inspiration from kind of swiss chalets um tolkien was inspired um by lauterbrunnen which is a valley in switzerland um during his travels there when he was 19 and uh we tried to bring elements of that kind of alpine look uh to to rivendell when we did the terraforming here so um yeah speaks for itself really it's uh it's one of the best products on the server oh yeah it's absolutely gorgeous yeah and this is a good um good example you know uh there's some some uh architecture and things um that people might if you've only ever watch the movies you might be a little thrown off because this is a book accurate uh rendition of these locations so you'll notice places like helms deep look a little different than they do in the films so it's it's kind of a cool way to experience it especially if you've read the books you're getting the most true to the books um rendition of these that you'll see in a game or a film yeah absolutely and and i think doing it based on the books as well is is uh really good because essentially it's uh it allows us to be more creative i think than just copying you know the films because the films obviously have a fantastic artistic vision but when you are um you know creating uh something yourself and trying to be artistic in yourself you want to um create something new and something different and so this is a version of rimdel we've never really seen before in any other medium this i think it's quite cool um and we do that with every location as well we try to make it you know unique and uh something people haven't seen before well that's fantastic and it looks like is that a a piece of ted naismith art that i spot there it is indeed yes so we do incorporate art from lots of different tolkien artists uh using our paintings and you can see that throughout written down in front of you you go to the museum uh bit that rivendell's got um that would be awesome unfortunately i'm not familiar with that because i haven't um if you go if you go down the other end of the corridor and turn left literally all the way to the end turn left um all the way to the end yeah yeah um yeah so so we do we have like a little um i wouldn't call it yeah that's that's in there at the end um i wouldn't call it a museum necessarily but it's more of a place where relics are stored and and there are certain images from the first and second ages in here you've got gondolin you've got austin airfield there um you know you've got turin there um these kind of things uh like a flag of um what the banner i should say of kings of gondor and that kind of thing and just kind of and then rimdale really was a place of kind of memory and of kind of learning and we tried to emphasize that in the build and kind of bring these elements of lore into it um good question have they got a broken sword yeah well we don't because aragorn carried that with him that is an addition from the film he they did not have the brokens but they kept thought occasionally written down but at this time when the service that aragorn carried the shards of nelson with him they weren't on the plinth there's a few other details in the room now that we won't maybe have time to look at we can kind of maybe take a quick glance but there's uh some elements from the books that are in here that you know you wouldn't think about if you had just seen the movies for example it wasn't arwen that saved frodo it was gorf and dylan yes he's got his own uh luxury suite up here oh nice i think it's this one if i were to uh it is that one yeah he is befitting of elven lord of the first stage you should really have the the the pimped out spu of course absolutely yeah if there's anyone who deserves it it's glorfendell that guy that guy's been through a lot yeah absolutely so we had a question is uh have you are you guys building valerian under the water not quite no so we we in fact do have on the map the remnants of valerian because by by the third age and indeed in the second age there were some island remnants of valerian that remained above the water so you have uh when yeah absolutely so we can go to tomorrow now out in the middle of the ocean um uh it is the most isolated place on the map um and uh you would literally never find this if you're exploring because it is so far out but we do have it fantastic yeah we have to we have um queen as well which is yeah you got the stone of the hapless there that marks the grave yeah oh man this is like christmas yeah so these are the remnants of the mountains around gondolin are just those oh yes ah that are underwater and yeah so we do this is this is the kind of valerian references that we have on the server and then we have toll free uh we have um our handling or him ring i can't remember which one is um which is uh where the fortress of i think the fortress of my frost was at one point um yes and that's also here but now it's got beaches because it's an island um but uh indeed yes as janaka said the map is set in 1306 of the third age uh five years after gilbert's birthday party and 12 years before frodo sets out on the quest so there is very much noble area and uh present on the map other than lyndon of course and shall we we'll show a little later all right so we've uh taken a decent look at uh rivendell i believe uh next on the list what was that again uh karen amarov karen amroff we're going to go see the hungarian and have a look so karen amroth um yeah it's la florian is a very special location it's my personal favorite uh location um in uh in middle earth and it's my favorite chapter in in the book as well um and what we try to evoke with with lorien is the kind of it being otherworldly yeah i think there's a description in the book of of of uh you know rivendell was a place where things were remembered uh are you both there but in laurie and they still you know the the kind of sense of the first stage almost existing in some form or some way being preserved in lorien and that's what we try to emphasize with with the builds here to make it sort of ethereal and otherworldly so i'm just trying to get rid of this fog it doesn't i don't know if i'm going to be able to without messing something up so i just want to go with it any plans to do uh valinor or the undying lands no ask a question now probably not uh only because uh it is going to take us so many more years to finish just the third age map um to be honest if if i was going to do anything after this it would probably be valerian rather than vinyl i almost feel like you would struggle to represent valinor in any kind of uh a way that would do it justice really um you know middle earth you can you can do you know valerian possibly but but valenor i don't think even we are good enough to uh to represent that place of course and valerian has a little bit more detail so there might be some exciting aspects to that so i've i've gotten some questions here about specific locations so we will be getting to moria uh eventually here on the stream dolgodur has not been completed correct right correct yes it hasn't been touched yet yeah and at the very end guys if you stick around to the end we will be showing uh kind of the overall map that fournot has been working on uh for a very long time but he's got kind of the whole middle earth mapped out for us so we can kind of see the road map that they've got going ahead um i will say if if you guys here in the chat if you could please leave a like that kind of tells youtube like hey people are enjoying this chat we can get more people in here um especially since we had to switch over streams i know that that kind of messed things up a little bit so be sure to leave leave some likes leave some comments for us um i am pulling some random questions from uh the chat um if it's something we've covered earlier we'll try to we'll try to uh mention it real quick but here's one that that is not directly connected to uh the build but as obviously i assume you guys are pretty big tolkien fans spending eight years of your lives building the world um so what are your thoughts on the new amazon series are you guys excited about it uh well well i was gonna say before we asked that question if we just jump to the argonaut which is quite relevant to the second age in some ways um so uh here we are famous one of my favorites yeah absolutely um so the amazon series yeah i mean from our perspective um outside of our own kind of personal opinions about like the show or whatever from our perspective as artists and as creators it is going to be fantastic to see new um artistic interpretations of middle earth to see these new places that we've never really seen before um kind of come to life and we've already had that image of tyrion which looked absolutely fantastic in my opinion that it's going to be awesome to see you know numenor it's in its might uh to see um you know moria when it was still inhabited i think that seems very likely you're going to get that you know see all these places kind of come to life probably towards the end of the series hopefully we'll start to see places like minnesota australia starting to be built you know in the foundation of gondor and all that stuff so from purely from a visual perspective i'm very excited you know quite apart from everything else it's going to be fantastic to see these locations i'm not getting too choppy with my video footage here am i riggering and stuff can kind of yeah it's it's doing much better than our earlier stream for sure um so airborne lake town again those are those are uh places to be created they're not not quite that far yet um but in the future for sure yes absolutely yeah we're now we're now going south along the river and past the argonne up and into um uh i think it was called the the lake uh in uh the ambient wheel uh so um you know we've got these these forested shorelines and we're coming up now to amon hen and rauros where the fellowship was broken yes and a special shout out as well to the i know there's uh guys here in the chat that um work on articraft with you guys and helping answer some of these technical questions and progress questions so uh special shout out to those guys all all of you i know heartseeker and fournot are uh here in person so to speak but um you guys are all heroes of middle earth doing you're doing the lord's work here let me tell you because this is amazing thank you yeah well we're coming up now to the it's a path gallon and the little lawn there by the by the lake um where the fellowship drew up their boats um and uh kind of had the debate about where to go uh and then frodo sort of goes off into his own into the trees uh and past the ruins of gondor and up uh to amon hen um so yeah this is again another sort of um key location in the uh in the in the story and uh again slightly different visually to the films um although the film's got it pretty much right it's very similar yeah it is it is very similar yeah the films were not far off when it came to getting to these locations and yeah there are a few places where they where they absolutely nailed in it's indistinguishable from talking to work so they're in the middle toll brand here oh yes so what is uh one of those locations what of the locations you guys have built so far what would you say the films got most right where you changed very little um in building it i well i'll i'll give my pick and then i'm sure half has a different one um in my in my view apart from the complete lack of farms around it which we've fixed enras is is really good uh i think the the you know the aesthetic they went for there the kind of viking norse long haul they went for was it matched perfectly tolkien's imagination of kind of the beowulf um inspiration he had uh when it came to the anglo-saxon inspiration when he uh created uh rohan so in my view is pretty much spot on maybe a little small but i mean overall very good i'll all have to take the films uh overall well it's one of those things with the fields again we're going to be fixing that um but ministerif is another one that the films weren't too terribly far off from i mean it sounds pretty difficult to get that wrong uh you know there's a few details like the blackstone wall for example and eleanor fields should be a lot greener a whole lot more lush more farmlands etc but um i i always get so excited every time i hear the minister of theme and see gandalf riding up to it i mean it's just amazing the way that looked uh especially for the time and speaking of epic amazingness here yes now this is this is something that kind of boggles my mind as we're looking at like the steam so you have like transparent blocks basically here for i don't know if there's better terminology in terms of uh minecraft terminology but it looks like kind of transparent blocks for the steam and it's a matter of you know layering them until you feel like they look right that is correct and this took uh several times to get this right uh this uh both the argonauth and uh juarez were mainly two of our players uh really johnson theater and they were both just amazing artists and uh you know this took a lot of iteration uh to get this final look and we're quite happy with it god that looks fantastic yeah and even the shape of even the shape of tol brandi there is based off a sketch that tolkien did where he there is multiple peaks that it has that that is something that he specified and how it's kind of set back as well from the waterfall something in the movies that's slightly wrong is that toll branding is actually right up against the waterfall but in the book fredo and sam actually go around at southern edge when they um when they take that oh yes which wouldn't work they would be dead so you know it's one of those things where the layout is a little different in the book so we've uh we're bound to get some repeats on questions uh how many people they said uh somewhere around 15 to 20 people um building this world yeah at any one time but but over the course of the years i mean it's it's probably up to a hundred people who've got you know come and gone yeah yeah yes so our next one is going to be uh eisengarde oh yes uh i believe so yeah yes uh kind of following uh the two towers at this point uh narratively speaking we're skipping over uh for example fangorn um the edges aren't too terribly far away but uh you know we we're actually uh with with our next update we're going to be completely redoing the trees so we expect that's going to look a lot better in the future than it does even now and even now we just don't look too bad so uh oh it's exciting really so this would obviously you know going back to talking about the timeline this uh falls quite a few years before the events of fellowship of the ring so obviously um saruman has not decimated the trees of isengard yet no he hasn't he hasn't decimated the trees but he has fallen uh into darkness already so so what so what we're doing here is this is kind of similar to the scene right near the beginning of touch of the ring my gandalf comes to eisengarden everything's still sort of green and it looks all fine on the surface um but kind of underneath as we'll show in a little bit things are already going on so we have tunnels underneath eisenguard where the industry is beginning to happen we have uh uh barracks and so on in the walls where sauron's armies are beginning to sort of um uh you know become accommodated and all this stuff so it's it's kind of hidden there under the surface if you look around eisenguard you'll begin to find out but on the surface it looks you know as it always has done quite green quite verdant and the other thing of course about is authentic which this is the tower in the middle which again is quite different to the look in the films in the films it looked based on allen's allen lee's drawing i believe it looked quite carved quite built but in the book tolkien described it as almost looking like a natural spire of rock which the numenoreans infused together right four spikes and that's kind of what we went for this kind of more natural looking tower wow and as much as i love flying around climbing up this entire thing i think it'll get frustrating real quick we get sick easily for me to fly up to the top now that i've decided on that but i just want to quickly show like this could be like gandalf flying to the top of the to the tower like in the film right here we don't have a clear way to the top like it did in the movies so i'm just gonna fly out here real quick and briefly come up to the top and then we'll show some other details so let's see now uh one thing that was important to us was uh obviously our height scale is limited uh by what minecraft has so this could potentially be a bit taller but to fit our scale um we we've kind of fit it within the environment that it's in uh but that's going to be helpful because whenever we go by our door we want this to look tiny in comparison so yeah so that that just made me think of an interesting question for you guys so obviously working on this for so long i take it you know the uh technology within minecraft even you know we think of it as a pretty simple game but obviously there's some complex mechanics at work here so how is the advances that have been made in minecraft affected as uh affected your guys's build as you've gone over these years well i think i can take this one so um yes you absolutely are absolutely correct um when it comes to minecraft minecraft has changed over the years and not only has minecraft changed but the mod that we use has changed and improved over the years as well so we've had we now have more building options than we did when we started um and not only that but we've just become better at building um so for example the shire when we first built it all of the stuff that you see it now in the shire did not exist when we first built it back in 2014 we completely changed the shire over the course of about two or three years to match our kind of current standards on our current practices um which takes an enormous amount of work so there's a constant kind of tightrope that we have to work with between you know updating and redoing old stuff to make it as good as the current stuff but also pushing forward and continuing to work on uh you know new stuff it's always something that balance that we have to that we have to make now so these are the uh caverns under eisenguard right now that we're looking at correct absolutely yeah so these are the kind of industry beginnings of the industry that someone has you know he's starting to outfit so half just no clicking no clipping through to right now just to show you how extensive these are but yeah he you know he's beginning to work on all this stuff which uh you know to outsiders um was was not initially apparent and then it's only sort of towards the war of the ring where all the freeze cuts got to cut down fully evil um yes so this is this is a good this is good because it uh brings up a common question that people ask is you know how could especially in the books when you find out you know sauron was making his armies for like decades how did nobody notice well you know you've kind of answered that for us here he's got underground caverns where uh his orcs hang out and live absolutely yeah well we've now moved to uh helmum which is a village a village which we made up and this is kind of um uh it's in rohan but it's a village made up and this kind of adds on to the next point which is um you know across middle earth obviously talking detail these these lands in these these places but he didn't give names he didn't you know detail every single individual place in middle earth he just didn't have the time in his life so what we've had to do in rohan for example which is where we are now is say look um clearly tolkien intended for this to be a fairly well populated kingdom with farms with villages with homesteads and everything but you didn't go in and say right you know i'm gonna name every single place here so we've had to um come up with our own names that are appropriate to uh tolkien's inspiration we name all the places in rohan in old english um and um you know create all these villages to match the kind of theme so we see here uh this is just an example of one of the many villages we've built in rohan uh and farms around it and stuff um and which yeah so i i well before we pass over all these um can we go down into one of these houses when when you when you guys and i did kind of a preliminary tour when we were planning this stream um i think you know people should understand each of these houses is fully built on the inside as well it's not just a facade we've actually got stuff going on in every single one of these houses that you're seeing yeah absolutely and not only do we have stuff going on but it's actually stuff that that makes sense so in this town alone you can see there's markets there's leather being cured there's a smithy there's you know there's activity there's professions there's you know as it would be um this someone's just asked this in the west well this is indeed in the west hall of rohan yeah um so this is one of the villages that would have been burned and destroyed by sarah manzani's uh later on um but here's the this is the great hall of the of the village which um uh which every hall every village would have they'd have their own like long house where the community would come and the lord would probably live um but uh yeah so we we did we put research in so you know rihanna's a great example of that we look at uh anglo-saxon houses and how they looked and how the anglo-saxons lived uh and and bring that into the game and so you know there's a lot of work a lot of uh time that we put into this stuff to make sure that it is accurate so not only to talking but also to history where i should be coming up on the valley oh man this render distance is killing me it may not be killing you but it's killing me so i hope this doesn't drop things no we'll give it a shot yeah let's give it a shot it's uh turn left off turn left oh yes indeed yeah it's uh quite easy i'm normally uh running around with a 100 render distance before the stream i'm sitting at 32 so i i'm not recognizing the terrain as well as i normally would so i'm going to fly a bit faster it may cause it to get a bit choppy but i want to get us over to helen's deep now indeed yeah so we're just flying over um the fields now we're coming up to helm's dyke um which is the outer layer of defense for helms deep i'm just here um which the uh the defenders defended i think for a little while but not very long as the armies of eisengard approached and uh and then we moved up to the fortress itself yes also based on tolkien's drawing right yes so so you will notice you know for again fans of the films you will notice there's uh definitely a different aesthetic to this as opposed to the films but this is more in line with tolkien's drawings and his descriptions um both amazing adaptations obviously um but uh for the record we're sticking you guys are have kind of planted that flag you're sticking to the uh tolkien versions for sure absolutely yeah so the main the main difference really here is that the the helms deep in the films or the hornberg i should say is uh is kind of almost sunk in half into the mountain a little bit uh whereas the the version that tolkien had was kind of separate uh or kind of stood out from uh from the mountain itself so here's a an interesting question for you guys uh you can each take turns answering this where's your favorite place in middle earth and where's your favorite place within the minecraft recreation uh well i'll answer first pretty easy one for me uh lofluorian and localia not not too hard yeah i'm a big fan of big fan of that location but sure enough can make it a bit more interesting oh yes of course um well yeah i gotta admit there's a few places that i could easily call my favorites um i i'm generally a huge fan of the mountains so rivendell might would be my favorite terrain wise but as far as uh where i would settle down in middle earth or where i would settle down on our server and live would be the uh northern part of the shire which we've actually kind of based off of northern england a bit so uh nice uh well i i can't speak to them being comfortable but nice and cozy stone cottages and northern moors and uh pretty hearty environment where they're at and i'm actually showing off the terrain here because uh tolkien said that the uh the ravine behind uh helms deep was inspired by cheddar gorge in england so we actually looked at some real life images of that and we kind of copied it though obviously making it a bit more a bit bigger first uh for for the backdrop so and this is not started yet uh but this will be the entrance to the glittering caves and just giving you an idea of what we can do with those cloud blocks one tiny stalactite so far but yes progress is as progress does so this yeah so this is an in progress work here we noticed the the giant exclamation point there yes um so give us a sense of the scale we got a question here is anything planned in progress for um lands like harad or umbar or earlier someone asked about roon um how far are you guys going to uh go on this map as far as you know um going beyond just like gondor and mordor places that we know and have seen a lot more of yeah so uh in terms of what we've planned we haven't actually done so as far south as we've got is rohan at the moment we are expanding our bundle next year in terms of what we plan to do um we we plan to get as far as out of zumba um and that's kind of as far south as we want to go because really that's the extent of where tolkien described um and as far east as we'll go probably the sea of roon with the eastern end of that is this far east as we'll go because again beyond that things get very very fuzzy indeed and we don't really know very much about those lands so it would kind of be fanfiction at that point if we were to build stuff yeah beyond that all right so here we have eteres and i know a lot of people are asking about moria i know we we will get to moria don't worry people we will get there well we'll get to a sort of version of yes yes uh we we actually have started planning moria and uh we're building on another map currently using this version of our of our mod uh but we do have uh to give you an idea of what that's going to eventually look at look like is thorin's halls in the blue mountain oh yes yes yeah that's sorry that's what i was thinking of when i yeah so we will see a dwarven settlement i i was mixing them up in my in my mind yes it was uh the blue mountains that we saw earlier so here uh in the top left of your screen you're seeing uh the golden hall of medusald absolutely yeah and we have we have medicine and we have uh eras in general which at russ being the largest settlement in rohan uh nearly a thousand beds here uh it's it's it's absolutely huge it took months to build it goes all the way down there you can see just down the hill there in fact you fly down just to show the scale of this place it's absolutely enormous um and it took us a very long time indeed to do not only is the city you know you have a city but you also have all the farms around it villages everything it's um it's an enormous project because it has to be and again people i cannot reiterate this enough every single one of those houses is built on the inside as well there are things going on in the houses that make sense to our uh to our place and the characters and fully decked out beds chairs we've got wood absolutely incredible all right well we'll go up to uh the uh the main the main event as far as uh better what's this concern yes oh i do recommend people don't just you know skip over some of these little details we have around just to go to the big flashy stuff uh medicine is very nice it was actually we held a contest among our builders and the conquest reforged mod community to build this and one of our the reward of one of our own players because you'll see exactly why wow looking at this now there was a whole lot more smoke in here but it was messing with some shaders for a cinematic we were doing so i had to uh remove that now uh something interesting that we've done here so this tapestry was described in the books and it said uh that light from uh shafts way up in the ceiling uh from i suppose these are either just small windows or louvers uh they uh we actually planned this to where we could turn on shaders at certain time of the day you'll see a light being chewed across this room and hit this tap history or the young uh at the field of calibrance yeah yeah you know aragorn says you know behold they'll be young thus you came right down now the north and so you have that kind of detail again it's one of those little tiny things which if you were just reading the passage you probably wouldn't even think about it or you'd miss it but right we have to pay attention to here we have theodin's throne yes wow and this is one of the advantages of of the game is that we are able to do stuff at scale that in the films they you know do to do the time and budget costs they want so this is a absolutely enormous version of xl yes which is great because we're able to put in loads of detail and and along the walls there in fact if you just look along the walls there we have tapestries yes from all over so you have helm hammerhead yeah you have the the carry on and all the agreement on them on amal anwar and stuff so you have all sorts of you know i think that's scattered the worm there and there's all sorts of you know history and the history and law of rohan is kind of represented uh on the walls there um there's keys to so yeah all sorts of stuff and and you know if you look walk around this hall you can get a sense of rohan's ryan's history which is really good now uh we had a question here um the will there be any ruins of angmar i know that's not really described at all the uh you know what angmar would have looked like or anything is there anything in that portion of the world uh there will be again one of the things we haven't covered yet but we have done plenty of ruins and we are very much ruined experts at this point because middle earth is an absolutely chock full of rice um we will show later on in the video uh farbad um the uh the ruins of tharbar which is not an honorian previously numenorean settlement uh in the north uh but we have got plenty of ruins on the map uh nasa foreign asked all these places have been done the uh village of the whole hamlet of snowboard is it correct uh this is uh this is upborn and then big one next one is under harom um those are actually canonical those economical places we didn't make those names up for once so i'm curious i always like to take kind of straw polls in the chat here so i want everyone to respond with the uh the area of middle earth that you most want to see replicated in minecraft um just to get give the guys kind of uh an idea of what what people are most amped up about it's not going to affect their the order of they how they do it necessarily in any way i'm just curious i mean it might we do want more players so oh yeah that's true this is actually gun hyro gun hero yes you notice the zigzag yeah and this is the therian field yes this is where the the kind of nobility and king would camp and then in the valley beneath you know at times of war they would have all the tents set out um obviously at the moment not such a time of war so it's kind of a bit more peaceful um a bit more agrarian but um you know this is where they would come and then this leads of course towards the past the dead which are not done yes as a matter of fact we have a little joke at the end of it but i won't go that far i just know creepy forest creepy fog that's why we love these cloud blocks right here you know more than just waterfalls i mean they really help set the stage sometimes so yes here we go we'll set back uh the next location we wanted to take to was actually alderberg which was the old capital of rohan before the king's court was moved to ederus and uh we consider that a very impressive uh build as well uh it actually has a castle of sorts in the middle now there might not necessarily be castles during this time period but it is a old uh gondorian fortification that has been built back up so we're gonna head there now yeah and our justification for that was when we looked at the name obviously we know very little about ellsberg because it wasn't really ever described in the book but the justification for that was uh it's called aldeberg now why would it be which means old fortress in old english now why would uh old young when he came upon this place call it old fortress if there wasn't already a fortress there um so our justification for it is if you look at the top of the uh sort of civil civil there kind of similar to houndsteep um this is an old gondorian fortification which was inhabited and kind of taken over uh by the rohirim so this is uh you know um they're kind of reusing the uh the elements of the past much as you know people's uh after the fall of the roman empire did um um you know when they found these old fortifications in these old cities i do want to let you know that uh we're doing a lot of teleporting around because there are i mean kilometers thousands of blocks between some of these locations it is all explorable as foreign said earlier but if we if we walked i believe we were telling you the other day that the entire fellowship path uh all the way to mordor it would take about 11 hours walking in time on the server yeah so for those of you unfamiliar if you if you were to just walk like kind of like he is walking right now it would take you 11 hour hours of straight walking yeah so uh we appreciate the warp option for sure yes um so here we are now in the old gondorian watchtower which has been converted into a kind of noble residence um um this is where emma and element eowyn would have grown up with their father yeah um there's the kind of third martial of the rhythm up can i explain you how much i hate spiral staircases but then just gonna cheat and cut through them yeah that way i believe there's one room up here in particular that looks quite unique yes here we go so this has an um all the berg itself took quite a bit of time as well uh it's really where we started to refine our idea of rohan because before we were kind of doing a somewhat fantasy medieval look uh our intentions were really good but from this point forward you actually end up in uh the fold of rohan and you'll start to see the style change a little bit but i didn't think we had plans for albert was there uh what was next on our uh visitation list here uh so that's we just kind of skimmed over rohan obviously plenty more to see in rohan but that's for the uh for the viewers to come on themselves and see i think what we'll do now is we'll go to lindon and have a look at uh fallon the old uh the old capital or the old nordorian capital i should say uh where gil gallard had his court and uh is now falling into ruins mostly yes so so as you said we have uh kind of the ruins of linden here and again if you guys are interested in volunteering in articraft or supporting them uh please go to articraft.me and um yeah check out check out their site absolutely yeah so full on was like four one's a cool location you can see that this kind of core of the city is still inhabited but over the over the centuries and over the millennia the elves have been leaving yeah and so the outer most sort of districts of it and indeed the palace where kilgallah used to have his court are now falling into ruin um you know as the elves slowly leave so it's quite a cool effect of kind of this central bit that's you know still living but then the rest of it is all is all ruined and the ruins get more and more room the further away you go the older they are essentially all right so this question comes up a bit i i mentioned earlier we'd probably answer it a few times here um so how do you get onto the server you do need a mod and you need to be on a um computer correct uh yeah so uh you need to have a java edition of minecraft uh and then you just go to our website which has been linked and literally just download the the launcher it's as easy like i always emphasize this it's just as easy as downloading minecraft this literally says something which installs itself for you you two clicks and you're on the server it's as simple as that but you do need the general edition of minecraft in order to uh to join us easy-peasy there was a time where things were much more difficult but we we've tried to make accessing our our server as simple as possible we've trimmed the fat on our builder application so we can get you in the world quicker and learning from some of our best builders so i will be happy to have everyone on and even if you decide you don't want to build it's not a requirement for joining uh we would love it uh but you know we've as he said we've spent uh seven nearly eight years uh working on this map so the more people that get to come on here and enjoy it and take a look around to you know it it doesn't just sit here to collect dust that's yeah so uh so you can't you know if you're someone like you know me for example who's worthless when it comes to like actually doing productive things in minecraft you could still download everything from your website and you could still kind of look around uh and enjoy middle earth is that correct yeah absolutely and we encourage everyone to do it because um something we do occasionally as well we'll get the audiobook on in discord and we'll walk around with love and follow the audiobook and it is it does make the experience of of listening to the audiobook so much more immersive when you're actually walking through these locations for yourself um and uh and kind of seeing how uh you know everything everything looked so it is it is a fantastic experience and um i highly recommend it to anyone um but just just on linda on here um going back to the second age show um this is something that we will see i think uh in the second year and it was it's kind of completed or it's uh it's inhabited form which would be quite cool and uh here is mythology another yes another city in the fund oh yeah sorry in lindon i should say which yeah which is uh pretty extensive this is actually probably our one of our oldest builds uh a third region we completed on the map oh someone asked how many uh gigabytes uh yeah so what what yeah what uh what kind of specs do we need you know what what should someone expect if they want to download uh this uh so gigabytes of the map i would say about 30 probably at the moment it's expanding with time in terms of the specs you need it's not bad it's not that hard obviously it's a little bit more intensive than normal minecraft but i would suggest if you can run like modern games on your pc then you will have no problems running this at all yeah um yeah you don't have to download the whole map likely it's hosted on a server in fact uh it's a question we get asked often uh hey can i get a download of the map of this section the answer is no because this is a dynamic and ever changing world we uh we have to keep it on the server and i highly doubt you want to download 30 gigabytes of minecraft map anyways so um that being said uh specs recommended specs but i would say if you've got at least six gigabytes of ram and a decent graphics card you should be able to run this um whether or not you're able to run it as well as some of the folks on our server who have nasa computers you take these massive screen shots is another thing entirely but it shouldn't stop you from getting on as fournette said if you can at least run some modern games so absolutely uh so quick quick counter through lindon and then uh yeah on to thorin's halls which is a location not much known about so this is the place which uh after some wandering and a bit of time in dunland it was a variable came to uh after arable was taken by smaug and they kind of improved it and worked on it uh in the years of their exile and this is where thorin lived and this is where all the doors you've used in the hobbit lived um prior to their journey uh with with builder but in the years since the hobbit because we are set um 60 or 70 years after the hobbit um this place has been improved and expanded upon with the wealth coming from erebor um it's remained part of the long beard kingdom but now a sort of local lord uh rules over and this is just one of 11 uh dwarven minds in the blue mountains so this is wow there you go this is the main hole so this is where the the throne is i know this is like the marine corps oh yes the throne holes kind of above this gotcha okay we got a nice dwarven statue i love dwarven stuff yeah seven stars enduring and yeah all that stuff is awesome this actually took a very long time too i had multiple leaders change hand with it so what was this about uh two years or so uh before it took about two years yeah so what you're seeing now is a tiny percentage of uh of the rentals uh we have there are multiple halls in here there's an entire mine system below us uh which you can see down there um so expanding out for you know hundreds of blocks underneath yeah oh yeah the scale of it is just mind-blowing and throwing souls and this is like thor and souls is our biggest organ hall currently but compared to warrior it's it's uh it's i i should say it's dwarfed by mourinho yeah the minds of moria or the minecraft of mori as someone mentioned earlier will be insane uh so mathilda asks uh do you have a discord server for people joining the minecraft server and you guys do correct yes yeah we absolutely yeah we absolutely do uh if you go to our website autocrafterme there is a link to our discord there um very easy to join just click up and join and we have an information page for people joining for the first time so if you go there that explains everything that's going on server how to apply to build how to look around all those all the questions people tend to have is that are on there and then of course we have a general chat we have a chat for law discussion we have all that stuff on there as well um so uh yeah people ask about joining the team more than happy to have people join the team this is what we're always looking for it's a very manpower intensive project as you can imagine and so the more people we have the better the more workers we have the better so absolutely if you want to help please do come on and apply to build and we'll be happy to uh to uh to teach you and to kind of bring you on board um as well as developers someone asked about developers yeah how many things about this as well there is there is uh there is a space for people to help work on plug-ins and stuff if you have any experience with minecraft plugins please do come on and help as well that would be awesome fantastic yeah yeah but now throwing souls is crazy it's uh yes oh man i'm loving this yeah some people it's funny some people like have a real love for the elves and like ellen building some people love men and stuff and then some people just they when they see one stuff it's like wow this is like this is the stuff i love to see like yes um yeah it's funny everyone has their own preferences making my way up to the throne hall now but no there are some other interesting things like we said we always have a use for every part of every build that we make we we don't build something that has no meaning um we have for example uh there is a uh aquifer system as well as uh i don't know kind of a water distribution center that comes out of a lake above in the glacial uh the glacial floor and it's uh it actually we have dug tunnels that go down to each part of the city and water is flowing through them to get to each part of the city so like the furnaces they're powered uh by water stuff as well and there's lots of it lots of other places where that water goes and it it's just i don't know yeah i i'm i'm kind of annoyed that we go that far sometimes but it really makes it better so you guys are are thinking through the physics of everything which is kind of crazy yeah absolutely yeah and then just how like you know we kind of think about it logically like if a group of you know people or dwarves lived underground like this like what they need to survive where do they get food from you know where you know how do they how does their economy work and all this stuff and we think about the stuff and we try to make it um you know try to make it work when we say that like a build has like a thousand beds in it we think we clearly have a population chart for each area and we do it by counting beds and we actually have like uh 1200 beds in one city for example and which place them down to encounter them so uh we had a question about the arkansas so during this period of time this is after the events of the the hobbit so the the arkanstone would be on thorn's tomb in erebor so i take it you that'll be part of your build once you guys get to airborne it will indeed yeah yeah it will um so we look we look forward to arable very much i think it will be you know we'll do maurya first um which will be obviously yeah mostly uninhabited other than orcs and then and then arable will be the largest uh inhabited dwarven settlement uh on the map in case you didn't believe us yes here it is oh yeah so this is our water system oh man yeah filtration so that you know the water comes in it's pure it's uh drinkable water so this is filtration this is not the dwarven public baths if anyone was uh worried about that we have those too yeah this is one of my favorite hauls right here with all the different banners going through it i think oh yeah minor skills yes down here a few other games the idea behind yeah the idea behind these these halls and these corridors is that these used to be mining tunnels which um uh you know have been exhausted of their ore and then the dwarves over time turn those into uh housing so they dig their houses into the sides of the tunnels and live in them and so you see that in some parts you know you have you know upper class doors middle class doors you have the poorer yeah so this is like poorer doors down here and this is more recently a mining tunnel you can see it's a bit more rough um down here but um yeah it's kind of streets that lead down into the mines so yes we've we've thought of everything yeah now now how long um how long did three or uh thorin's halls take roughly like this is obviously a pretty big build you mentioned earlier that it would be uh dwarfed by maurya um so how long did thorin's halls take to give us kind of a reference point of how long moria might take so thorn souls took approximately two years now uh this doesn't mean that maurya will take like you know five or six right um because uh touring tools is inhabited and maury isn't an immense amount of the work that goes into this stuff is doing interiors and working out you know professions for different areas and yeah and all this all this extra detailing that you have to do whereas when it's a it's an abandoned hall that's ruined and hasn't been lifted for a thousand years it's a little easier to do uh there isn't as much work because in there so more yes much bigger but luckily uh tolkien made it pretty much empty and uh abandoned so makes our lives a lot easier okay so we're gonna have a look at the the final project we're going to look at today is that uh a work in progress project just to give people an idea of the kind of planning that goes into the work that we do um well i don't know the reason why i put you on the spot here do you want to tell us about the law of uh so it is i believe along the guathlow river is that correct that's absolutely correct yeah yeah okay um so this would actually come into play in the second age series there's a very big battle of guathlow um where sauron is kind of that's the last battle of the uh the war of the elves and sauron where he's finally driven out of area door yeah yeah absolutely um and then and then sort of over time you know farbed is this important river crossing um originally as a ford but later they built this in another bridge which you can see there being planned out um and originally a numenorian settlement and then over time it kind of was split the southern half belonged to gondor the northern half belonged to arnold um and uh it was kind of ruled in a sort of jointly ruled jointly essentially um and uh was inhabited for many many years and um even after the fall of on or it continued to be inhabited for a long time um but in the last 100 years that was the final kind of blow there was the um the great winter and then there were these floods after the great winter which completely devastated the place and that the the few remaining people who lived there abandoned it so it has now been fully abandoned is sinking into the swamp and the last thing so this this will definitely be as as we've said multiple times here this uh this is set in three thousand six of the third age is that right three thousand correct yeah um so this will be kind of in ruins more or less you know it won't be in a a working state um you know this will be another one of those uh ruined areas of middle earth yeah there's plenty of those um yeah yeah i mean the last time we see farber really in the narrative is when boromir uh comes on his great journey north i think tolkien says something that you know the strength and hardly could require to do what barometer doesn't fully recognize the narrative but it is incredible what he did traveling all that way from gondor on his own and he crosses starboard and he loses his horse at the forwards um right to make the west the rest of the way uh on foot on the great bridge by this point had fallen apart was broken down um but he makes his way through here as well i do we uh we take our ruins kind of seriously uh there are some buildings that might be newer uh that could still be standing uh i don't know what the leaders plan particularly for this uh but they definitely built the framework of the original building to give themselves an idea of what it would look like but uh okay you know for example yeah i was gonna ask like what give us kind of an idea of you know some of the things like we see things floating around and we see a lot of stuff built in green so what's kind of take us behind the curtain here for the you know those of us not involved in the builder like myself that are totally clueless when it comes to minecraft so what what are these like kind of guides to help people as they build yes and we also have project uh blogs so for example we've got middle class and there's a lot of terms that we use on the server that would i guess drive some people nuts but for example this says it's a house and it's part of the epoch iv so we break down uh the generations of civilizations that would have inhabited this site in the epochs and that determines how ruined it is what the architectural style is and we have builders follow a particular style for each one uh so you start out with plots like this where you know you have you know like your name the type of class it's going to be the epoch etc and then players are assigned to that particular plot and they complete one plot at a time in order to read a project you have to plan it out ahead of time to the best of your ability so when you want to lead like a city or a town you create a thread a forum post and you uh include your name who's going to be helping build it with you what the plan is what your style is ahead of time so and the reason we do that is because there have been times for example myth on like we showed earlier we really didn't have much of a plan going forward with it and it took us 14 months to complete that and six of it was redoing old areas um so just the continual development to try to plan things out as quickly as possible thor bad here for example just one of these sections right here that that looks huge and required a lot of planning once we actually started it it maybe took like two months okay so you know it really cuts down on the amount of time that you would otherwise spend and we we realize that's necessary for a project as large as our i mean we want to see the end of this project at some point right yeah you know so uh they'll see like green blocks for example just for frames and even up here we have a pallet uh that you would use so here's all the different layers of erosion from stone debris all the way down to muck so oh wow i was going to ask you know what are these sections that are oh then we have wildlife so what what are like uh off to the right there um so what is what is this section that's floating up in the sky here yeah so this is this is a build guide yeah oh it's a guide yeah exactly so if someone coming to fargo for the first time they haven't built into style before they can come here see going from literally wool layout through to you know replacing it with grass and kind of beginning to you know add layers to it and detail it and just how to detail it stage by stage by stage um until you have the final kind of ruined um products and all this stuff is based upon kind of like roman ruins and kind of um you know uh thing you know just make it look as realistic as possible we can quickly take a look actually at noon and ask to see what a finished one of these cities looks like uh newman asks of course being the uh once capital of arnold now now very much ruined and you can see this is the kind of thing that we end up with when it comes to these ruins so the foundations of the houses remain um some of the bigger buildings are a bit more intact ah yeah but it is uh it's very much um very much abandoned and very much ruined as it should be so um so we've we've got a lot of you know questions obviously about specific locations you guys um so is the edge of your map right now kind of you're you're working on the misty mountains so to speak um i know you're working on moria um you know where and goblin town is a whole nother uh location are are all of those currently under construction so to speak so this is a section of the misty mountains which are shot now uh so you can see uh going back to the point we were trying to make earlier about about geology uh we've got a lot of work so you can see that's a realistic glacier we've got the flow lines of the marine we've got a lake at the bottom there you know we put our work here we put our research in when it comes to doing mountains in this game uh and terrain in general um so yes we do have the misty mountains uh partially on the map um we were talking earlier about how minecraft updates with time in the future they are increasing the limits of heights that you can build in the game um so at the moment it's 256 blocks but it's increasing to 384 and so what we're doing is we're kind of we're going to be kind of re-releasing the terrain on the map to make it much much larger um which of course will match middle earth because we want you know we want the mountains to be as big and as imposing as possible so um but you can see we already have uh uh you know quite quite large mountains um and quite extensive weapons already now have you made uh which side of the misty mountains are we on here have you made the mirror mirror yet uh we have not made the mirror yet no um this is kind of the uh section of missy mountains next to rivendell so just to the east of riverdale uh at the moment who are looking out here even this isn't complete yet um in fact it may not be until we get our newer misty mountains and as he was saying um you know like just to hesitate on putting in a lot of effort into this just for us to redo it later uh so um that's been in plan and work for a little while but uh yes these are the misty mountains for those that wanted to see and we can briefly uh you know we were planning to do kind of a future of our server while i was floating over tharbad i think just to have something in the background and i can fly through the initial moria uh layout okay while fournette is discussing our future plans and maybe showing you the full yeah and uh we do have a question you know we've uh mentioned you know people can go to your website uh if they're interested in helping what advice would you give to someone who's never played minecraft before or they don't have much experience with it but they're really fired up by this project and this could be the thing that really gets them into minecraft what advice would you give to them for you know starting and wanting to work their way to where they could help you guys on this well what i would say actually is that if you've never played minecraft before that actually could be in some ways an advantage because the way that we build and the way that we construct stuff due to our modern due to you know wanting to make it historically accurate um is uh quite different to the way that you would maybe build normally in minecraft so actually if you've never built before if you learn our style kind of from the ground up that probably will help you if you learn how to copy our styles and learn how to do how you know the things that we do um it's probably an advantage so i wouldn't i wouldn't say i wouldn't let that discourage you if you've never played the game before um half just flying through here so this is the initial plan for moria these are quotes from the book um which you know we are including on signs as we go through to ensure that we are kind of sticking to the law uh as we uh as we go so this is uh going in from the west end of maurya and then descending my advice for new players would also be this um when you first join our server especially if you're a previous minecraft player you might and even if you're not you might be overwhelmed by the fact that we have i think it is in the current version of the mod about 8 000 different blocks of materials that you can use and um but if we ever use all 8 000 in one field so don't worry um oddly enough the best advice is keep it simple don't get too frustrated with it don't get overwhelmed um no rome wasn't built in the day and neither was our server we had plenty of players that were um that start out on this project and they have no idea what they're doing and now some of them i trust them to lead projects in ways i wouldn't you know wouldn't want to put on anyone else because they're just they've gotten that good now and it you know we all trust each other uh to uh we all trust each other that's for sure and um this continuation of this project is going to require that you know people maybe come out of their comfort zone a little bit with certain builds uh but for the most part we keep it simple like uh for example uh we showed you edirest earlier uh that has uh i don't even want to know how many houses hit it i think it's over 800 homes in it but they're all broken if you break them down it's a rectangle with a roof that's all you really need to know and uh there's no reason to get overwhelmed with that and so we'd love to have anyone on who is willing to give and give it at least a try uh because that's we love we love teaching new people how to build that's for sure agreed um something that none of the rings suggested we could have a look uh back at the shire maybe have a look at michael delving the capital of the show just gets to a slightly better frame rate yeah we we had kind of a rough rough frame rate the first time around when we first started so i thought you know we can revisit a couple of those locations um and then you know we've probably got plenty of people new here to the stream on this yes yes let's go to uh hobbiton and back in write fest uh tour de force of the shire right there just to uh get people familiar with what it looks like uh so then yeah again we met we mentioned the tolkien illustration um if you if you google tolkien illustration the shire it'll probably come up but this is uh you can see exactly that frame that he was just at um it's really incredible like if if you've seen that illustration before you know it just from looking at his frame there down to the chicken coop that's in the picture too yeah oh that's fantastic yeah yeah let's go ahead and go through back end again i mean we've we've got uh time to oh we've got somebody running around too yes yes so those are is that someone someone working or someone just kind of just exploring i guess i would imagine exploring uh yeah in fact uh a lot of our builders are watching the stream today so i i can almost count on it not being someone actually working right now so yeah see oh i seem to there we go yeah so uh just a quick overview of that again i'm actually glad i'm coming back in here because i had the brightness turned off earlier so yeah make it more pleasant here's uh bilbo's office and details such as the uh map of uh airborne yeah can we get a higher map version of that yeah that would be great i'd say so is resolution one of those things that has really come a long way with minecraft since you guys started this uh resolution has been so normal minecrafter each block is 16 by 16 pixels and and the uh the textures we use are 32 by 32 so it's a little more detailed um but uh it is uh still you know noticeably recognizably minecraft you do have some um textures out there that are super high resolution it almost doesn't feel like the game anymore so we tried to sort of walk the line between a little bit more detail uh but not being you know almost uncanny valley if you know what i mean yeah absolutely yes and again we have you know used uh of uh you know oh it's not even minecraft anymore and i this looks like minecraft as someone who has watched my kids play hours of minecraft i can i can attest this definitely looks minecraft but it also looks very familiar in terms of uh you know middle earth like all the illustrations i've seen over the years like this i i think you guys have nailed the uh the tone of walking that line for sure um we had a question is there any fields of pipeweed yes there are in fact in the south farming uh if we go to longbottom uh famous uh leaf from that from that region uh pipeweed i will emphasize is tobacco it's not anything else for people who think uh there might be that those are hops uh heart seeker i think it's somewhere around it i think it's there um i say that as if you can see where i'm pointing yeah it looks like not like tobacco in a saying since but yeah it is so we we've uh we've infuriatingly uh watched uh multiple uh videos memes over the years of people like uh obviously that peter jackson didn't make this any better making the hobbits look blitzed out of their minds oh yeah yeah we'll cover that to clear that up i've done this on a couple other streams but yes the pipeweed is tobacco 100 that's uh tokens catholic uh principles probably wouldn't look right characters rip it up so we could take a brief look at nicole delving the capsule that's probably a good yes to catch up on a place that you don't see at all in the bookstore films really but um really nice really nice location in the shower so yeah this was the kind of de facto in a sense capital of the chara is where the mayor of the show lived in the uh in the west farming uh next to the white downs and so all the all the rock around here is chalk which was tolkien specifically mentioned oh yes yes he mentioned that uh the fat mirror in nuka belding i think was uh either at his home or at the uh in in town which we've named the white hair and um picked a roof collapsed and covered him in white chalk and it was the laugh of the shire for years so this little passage like that that was mentioned yeah right near the end of the book and we took that and we made a whole town based off of it so it's fantastic um so we did have uh the question is whether top made yet our weather top is made yeah we can go oh yes that would be fantastic yeah we haven't been there yet so weathertop is an interesting location where in the film it's this quite quite substantial ruin and yes pretty big thing on top of a mountain but in the book tolkien described it as looking like a crown on the old hill's head and that description is what we went with so it was once a tower but now really only the foundations remain and so tolkien didn't you know specify that it was this enormous thing it was more just the foundations of this this mighty tower that once existed yes um and so that's we have that for weathertop and in fact the place where frodo was stabbed was not on top of where the top it was in a little dell uh just down to the side of the uh the hill as well where they when they camped overnight um it's just on the uh western side of the hill um yeah well uh with my f1 enabled i'm not directionally accurate at the moment it's just it's a bit further you kind of keep it in the right direction yeah oh well i was just going to pick a deal and you could have told anyone that was the one it's actually got a little ranger there you go that's cool there you go yeah it's got a little ranger camp in it so we have we do actually have some evidence of the ranges uh throughout area door i love it there's a few little camps here and there we also have in fact uh their settlements in the angle because of course there wasn't just a bunch of kind of burly men with with bows it was a whole little society which which remained um in the angle uh so we do have that uh remaining um this is the troll shots we're in uh oh yeah um so this is where we we find uh sting and orchest and glam dream absolutely yeah and in fact the uh the trolls i mean of course they came here in the lord of the rings they came here many years later and they finally came and they right they find the stone trolls um it is yeah it's just it's just downhill um but yeah this is one of the one of our favorite locations oh here you go here it is oh yes oh you even have a nest with some eggs on the one shoulder there yeah nice like quite amusing i think yes right then uh well fournette i think uh you know we want everyone to be encouraged to see the rest of the map themselves absolutely uh we get the world painter map up oh yeah could we uh real quick could we go see tom bombadil's house i know that was on our first first part of our server where we were a little laggy i know that's one that a lot of people really like so we'll do that and then we can do the full full map that's bombadill's house right here quite a comfy little cottage and i love that the the birds aren't just like static but they're actually flapping their wings and everything we sometimes joke because they're on a cobweb model so we have dr berg seagulls look especially yeah on from some angles and here's uh one of our uh stupids or overseers dressed as a uh that's tom bombadil which is uh always nice let's see but tom doesn't mind he just he just shut him out of his own house man that's fine all right so what's the what's the artwork on the wall here oh okay that's a looks like a tree i think he might be all blindfolded yeah yeah and yes his his coat is blue and his boots are yellow and i love hanging over here nice little oh yeah my my favorite thing is always the kitchen because i love our pots and pans and couples oh yeah wow little little details like that that's why i will always say you know like i kind of like sam gamjee's dead you know what wizards and dragons so you should buy your turrets potatoes etc you know i i always prefer little locations like this yeah as far as some details like we we know uh that it was tradition at one point in time across europe to uh put down the fresh straw on the floor for your guests oh straw wasn't fresh then you were offending your guests by showing that you didn't clean your floors and put fresh straw down yes that's where the word threshold comes from uh it's the uh the edge of the you know when you walk across over the threshold into the house the thresh is on the floor where the straw so now this this would be the room that the hobbit slept in correct yeah this is the guest room which obviously at this time is not uh they've got the beds made because the lights aren't for many years the llamas have come along but yes it is then we're going upstairs here yes where uh where tom and his lady uh you know sing songs like a comfy room too hey we've actually uh copied uh this uh tom bombadil's house onto our server spawn and we've turned it into sort of an rpg thing like you'll want to find yourself in a dark forest okay it's like going downstairs to learn how to build okay so this is uh so we mentioned this earlier someone was asking about the andy circus lord of the rings uh audiobook coming out real soon um and we mentioned it earlier but i think it might have gotten uh lost in all of our chat but you guys actually go on tours through minecraft uh through middle earth minecraft here along with the audiobook so you're actually following along with the story seeing all these things that are mentioned what frodo's talk what frodo sees um that's got to be one of the coolest experiences about this isn't it oh it's fantastic it's my my single favorite thing to do on the server is to walk around and to kind of hear the descriptions and hear the characters and and just to be in the places that they were in it's is it's i mean i don't think there's any in my view there's no better way to experience the book really um it is so immersive and the audiobook we use in particular is the uh phil dragash version it's the one where oh yeah um went through and he understands sound effects and yeah and that adds to the kind of atmospheric feeling of the entire thing and it's just awesome it's it's so cool and anyone can do it anyone can anyone can follow along if you have your uh if you listen in you can work out where the directions are and follow along all right so what are we looking at right now what do we have here well you might recognize the sign oh yeah there we go so we've got the prancing pony so i noticed you still have the kind of the green frames in the sky there so this is still in in progress uh build then yeah we actually had brie completely done on the map uh but after we started redoing the shire to bring it up to date of course there was a lot broken with previous versions uh we we we were so excited that we decided to start redoing bree um we actually had kind of a medieval tudor looking town before but uh tolkien very well mentioned it's you know it's a hundred stone houses on a hill so you know like uh before it was like they were wooden tuber you know maybe some uh waddle and doll but but now they're they're mostly stone and uh yeah you mentioned that uh for those who are outside the town uh buildings like the francine pony end would look hideous but they it had sort of a a charm to it that the locals liked and that's kind of what we've gone for here so um nothing's really uh set in stone for this this will also be something that we continue on in our future update um kind of like so is that is the interior of the prancing pony is it still in progress or is it something we could look at yeah there's there's some room okay oh okay so you've got kind of the rooms made still need uh to build all the exact seating and stuff like that yeah down the hall here we're gonna have some nice hobbits hobbit-sized rooms yes oh yes with the round windows yes so yeah anyone who who missed it earlier so the this build is based on the books not the films um so you will come across some areas we we mentioned uh you know helms deep and stuff like that earlier so some of these will be different than what you're used to if you've only seen the films but they've very meticulously gone through the books and discovered what clues they could find for um for this and i love i love that you guys also use real world inspiration much the same way tolkien did when you mention you know certain geographical features or locations that he used for inspiration um you guys then go back and look at those for inspiration to to build out these areas yeah and i think it really it's kind of paying homage to to not just him but also you know the world that he was inspired by i think there is a quote from him where he said you know the middle earth is the world as it is or you know it is inspired by the world around me and then and that's kind of what we go with as well three in particular uh this this style here is taken from the stone villages and the cotswolds uh that tolkien uh was inspired by um when he went through um i think if we switch to my um my screen now yeah absolutely map which i've been working on all right so so what are we looking at here what is uh this is obviously this is a map um so this is kind of your master plan so to speak essentially yeah so this is a third party program called world painter which allows uh users to kind of edit uh minecraft worlds uh in in ways which you couldn't do in-game it allows you to raise mountains and and you know rivers and oceans and stuff that you couldn't do uh normally so uh i have this enormous map um which uh you can see that says here we have the western coast of lindon and we have the the remnants of valerian over here so uh if i just zoom in this is tom orwen we were looking at earlier yeah really up here you have henry and these are the remnants of blair and here's where gondolin gondola needs to be for example uh and then you have lindon um this is where fallon is here uh over here is myth uh down here is holland which we haven't shown in the video uh shire here uh and but you can see i mean not only do i have all the locations but something that i've really tried to do um going on the realism theme is to make the terrain as realistic as possible so yeah you know if you zoom in you can see not just flat yeah no it's not just flat you have all these little streams here so something we haven't mentioned if you find any stream on the map if you follow it for long enough it will join to different rivers and you will eventually reach the ocean um any stream on the map that you can find will do that wow that's an autographed guarantee so uh yeah and then of course you have a mountains here you have glaciers up here in the mountains these are the mountains above angmar this region here is um and in fact something i can do is just to show you uh give some reference i can turn on the uh the map of middle earth uh which you can see if i sort of turn it on and off oh yeah it corresponds exactly absolutely so the map i've been making um we have mercury of course uh bayern's house here carrock now that is one that i am very much looking forward to seeing is bayern's house yeah absolutely it's going to be it's going to be really cool to build and then of course motorcycle which is an enormous enormous forest on the map of course brandenville's halls airport dale and lake town all that stuff all out here um and then i can go further south through the brown lands um these are the end of the wheel here and uh the falls of us down here and yeah and you know uh these are now's the end wash this took a long time to do oh my god yeah um you know you you can see there's these are the fields of rohan and stuff and this is where ass is so we were looking at her ass earlier this is the hill that i made for it and then everyone's built on top of that um so it is an enormous amount of work and then you get further south into gondor this is minister for where it will be you might want to show them harry for sure because a few people were asking about that yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah so yeah so we had the question is the map one-to-one on area and length that is not one-to-one do you know roughly what the the ratio is i know exactly yeah it's 1-58 so it's two and a half thousand square kilometers in size it's roughly the area of uh dorset in england or rhode island in the u.s so it's not it's not like the size of europe as middle earth is you know in sort of reality actually obviously you know as it would be um but it is still enormous it's still many times the size of you know game maps that you might know from you know skyrim or gta 5 or these other games which are these huge open world games all the witcher 3 massive open world games our map is much much bigger than them um it takes literal you know hours to walk if you wanted to walk from you know north south on this map it would take you you know like 15 hours or something stupid um it's uh it's it's absolutely enormous and uh you know just for context this area that i'm in now you could probably fit the entire skyrim game map into lebanon probably quite easily oh my goodness if i zoom out you know it's it's all that around it as well yeah go further south this is uh this is going to be where umbar is yes and the desert over here as well so it's it's vast and uh it takes an enormous amount of work to do this i've been working on this for since 2013 and you can see um just just by looking at it how much how much time and how much effort this takes to do um and of course i'm incorporating all of the descriptions into the book into the terrain as well i look at um you know where talking describes certain areas um you know when the fellowship walk through them i make sure that it corresponds exactly to what he described um and so uh it's it's a lot of fun uh but at the same time is it is a big time commitment yeah well absolutely but it very much is worth it in the end because um you know people people build it and people make something incredible out of it so uh we just got the question so when will it be finished what's your your estimate on how much time you guys have at your current pace now obviously you know we've got so we've got over 500 people watching this so if a good portion of you uh people that are currently watching this go and help and volunteer this could be done faster hint so absolutely yeah but if you guys were trucking along at a route around the same you know kind of pace that you've been doing how how much longer do you think you guys would have until you complete the map uh current estimate puts the amount completion of 2035 um oh wow yeah uh there is that much more work to do yeah so we started in 2014 and yeah so we're looking at like a 20-year project in total to finish this at the moment you know from start to finish uh but as you say as you very rightly say the more people we have the quicker it'll be done and that's right you know the better it is for everyone involved really the quicker things get done um so uh yeah uh highly recommend joining highly recommend looking around and of course if uh you know if you if you want to and you feel motivated to please do join and help out it's much appreciated and grant again that is uh artacraft.me um it has all the information on their website you can get on their discord server uh by going to their website uh there's um frequently asked questions so if you've got questions about um how to join i saw someone one of your guys in the chat earlier commenting about an apprenticeship uh you know when you when you first join um and you mentioned earlier you don't have to be a minecraft expert to to come in and help um so what what's the apprenticeship uh like for someone who's you know new to the server do you want to take this one huh yes yes um essentially we have a free build quad server where uh you get to demonstrate your skills in building uh now it's not like we're asking you to build a medieval castle that you've previously built on the survival server no we're just asking that you know we'll give you hey uh here here's an example of a house in rohan it is a blacksmith we we want you to build this put your own twist to it and if you can do that for us um then we'll we'll take a review of it we'll we'll make suggestions and if you're accepted you'll become an apprentice uh after that point we have um you know you're you're on a trial period and that period lasts as long as you need uh there's no limitation on it and during that time we're just teaching you how to build with the styles that we have you're helping out in small ways on projects uh under the supervision of some of our more experienced builders and uh from that point we then give you the opportunity where you can make i think it's two additional builds in a certain style um and just to show that you're capable of building like a like an elven ruin uh anna rohan house or a shire build and a dwarven hall a dwarven home and um from that point once you complete uh those two of those objectives we make you a full builder on the server and at that point you have the opportunity to lead small projects uh you have the opportunity to apply for cities towns whatever you want to take on um and then you just kind of grow from there great and i should have asked this at the beginning i don't know what i was thinking um but we've got uh i got some questions from my uh patreon supporters um so uh armaniel uh asked what inspired you guys to do this and uh how many hours i know you said how many years but uh give us a sense of how many hours you guys each spend on this you know maybe per per week well okay so what inspired us to do this um so i well i will say that when i when i first started playing minecraft um there is there was or there is a still server called minecraft. um they are server doing the same thing and i joined them back in 2011 uh and and started helping them out um and they are a fantastic server they still exist and and they've done some great things um but they are a server which is uh vanilla they're not modded like we are and they have more of a focus on the uh the movies over the books uh and i is a massive talking nerd uh really wanting to see things recreated uh in in a way that was kind of law appropriate in the way that matched my vision and tolkien's division i guess um so uh i decided to sort of strike out on my own i started building this map i got some people together and that's kind of how autographed was founded um and that's where we where we started off we've been we've been rolling ever since um as to how many hours a week i think it very much varies really depending on the person there is i would say for anyone thinking of joining there is no we don't expect you to come on it's like a job or something you know you know require you to clock in and out and stuff you know it's not not anything anything like that you could spend as little as you know an hour a week on the server if you wanted to you know just build a couple of houses log out and that would be awesome like that would be more than appreciated um but you know obviously there are some people who who do spend more time on it and put more more hours into it it really depends on how motivated you are how much you want to help you know it's individual down to the person really and we appreciate any and all help that we get yeah i spend about 30 hours a week 27 afk three actually being productive on the uh on the map now uh there are times where i probably dedicated to about an hour a day if not more into helping out with this project uh i've been going at it since january 2015 and i also came from uh the previous server minecraft middle earth that he came from wow your fan is yeah it's about ready for taking off yeah sorry i'll probably probably switch streams out yes yes no um yeah as soon as we i'm getting to the point now to where i just want to you know i want to make my gardens and leave me alone please so i'll be happy to train some folks to uh replace my workload on the server a little bit if i can just build my garden so yeah yes damn gamji of the of articraft in your garden sam gamsy's a lot cooler than me i mean we would both be accused of being fat by golem and that's about it so other than that and i did want to mention as well you know if you're if you're someone watching this and thinking you know i i'm just not a video game or technically uh you know uh a technical person there's no way i'm gonna i'm gonna do this but i appreciate the project and really want to help make it happen you guys also have a patreon um and that helps with things like uh you know um sometimes you have to hire uh people to like create things uh graphics or textures stuff like that is that correct that's absolutely crazy yeah so we have we have monthly server costs um to run to keep the server running and keep the website running so we have those and then as you say we do occasionally commission people uh to do uh work whether it's terrain work or whether it's texture work and that kind of thing so occasionally some uh some money does change hands and and a patreon uh helps us with that so uh any and all the donations are massively appreciated as well fantastic all right all right um was there anything else that you guys wanted to show us um we've kind of looked at done the tour we've got the i'm thinking right here what i may do real quick is just quickly uh pull up or foreign if you've got it uh do you have any uh screenshots of like some uh gondor concepts uh i don't have any on hand at the moment um i think i'm sure i can quickly get one right fast uh yeah i believe uh i believe uh what some of our uh builders actually independently post on twitter a few of them a whole lot more artistic than i am and they've uh we've got a few of them are just kind of setting the standard um for what we're going to do in the future and what we're planning ahead uh wow uh i'm having a lot of trouble finding eagle real quick so that's okay i have to wait another day and we and we did i know some people have asked about uh lorien we we did see that earlier so this stream will be available after um so you can go back to the beginning uh it was fairly uh fairly early on i think right after we went to see rivendell we saw uh um we saw laureate yeah yeah uh if you if you could real quick switch back over yeah absolutely yeah i wanted to show you the in progress build of carrot skeleton uh we've got to throw our uh we we gotta grow our unpaid workers some uh that's just the vote every now and then oh yeah yes so paris galadon is the capital of uh lorient wood and uh it is in progress i will say uh definitely stick forward in the future stick around for the future because when we update to our newest version i mean these funny looking yellow trees just turn into beautiful golden magnificent beasts so um i'm really excited for the future of how this project looks uh but as far as what we've got uh even so far here it it just continually blows my mind uh all the little details yeah fit into under fit under here yeah you know for example like the uh we the design process behind these buildings here was that you know we want them to be as lightweight as possible so this is a flight for example that the elves would uh live in yes and uh their profession stuff is actually going to be on the ground because i don't imagine you want to run a blacksmith in a tree right yeah it's a little storehouse down here for wine etc so oh we know you know at least certain elves once we get over to uh thranduils halls i'm sure there'll be some some wine being consumed over there license lander that was made up by the dwarves yes fantastic well i i think that'll about do it for us today thank you guys so much for taking us on this tour i in particular love seeing these kind of in progress things and seeing um you know how much organization uh you guys put into this you've got all these uh you know we see red and green blocks here and um we've got reference uh you know references for for people working on it so everyone knows what they're working on oh that's fantastic um so everyone yeah everyone's you know uh kind of pulling in the same direction so to speak um it's really incredible what you guys have done here i can't wait to um you know see what progress you make over the coming years again everyone um if you are interested at all in helping whether that's building or um you know sending your friends who are minecrafters uh it's artacraft.me um so be sure to check that out again here's one of the best shots right there of uh oh we've got some activity now so these are these are some of the volunteers i take it yes yes yeah these are all these are our community members so we've got sauron and frodo yeah obama deal all living in harmony with the joker the joker well thank you guys again so much this is this was a lot of fun and i think i speak for everyone in the chat when i say the work you guys have been doing here is uh absolutely incredible um keep up the great work and uh thanks again for coming on thank you so much for for joining us and for for showing our work off we always we always love to have new people come on and look around especially tolkien fans so it's been it's been fantastic absolutely well we will definitely uh you know keep in contact and maybe uh do another future uh live stream when you guys have a new area to show off or anything like that and uh thank you uh to all the volunteers all of you guys i know there's quite a few of you been here in the chat and some of you guys here on screen at this moment um you guys are doing uh the work of aru himself here so um all right guys well that'll do it for today once again uh one last one last pitch here go to articraft.me right now after the stream check it out volunteer help them out and uh help build uh middle earth in minecraft and help make this project come to come to full fruition um that'll be all for us so we'll see you next time here on nerd of the rings

Channel: Nerd of the Rings

Views: 422,495

Keywords: middle-earth, minecraft, minecraft middle-earth, ardacraft, arda, minecraft build, gaming lotr, lotr gaming, lotr mod, lotr build, lord of the rings build, lord of the rings mod, lord of the rings, history of middle-earth, men of the west, nerd of the rings, tolkien, jrr tolkien, tolkien game, lotr

Id: 6sHND96Sm2g

Length: 98min 0sec (5880 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/West-Sample-3635]

That's the first thing what I am gonna do when I am coming home from work. 🤣 I install minecraft again.

[u/GoomBuster]

That sounds cool