I know that this thread is very, very dead, but I wrote reviews of all 4 of the BTV maps, and I thought I should put them here. WARNING: Big posts with walls of text, spoilers, and images ahead.
This map is the very first in a 4-part series. I’ll play through each map in the series, and review each one, examining how the maps change as we go on through the series – and how they changed, for better or for worse, as the maps go on.
The Humble Apprentice:
Deaths: 1(Fail fall)
It’s not too special of a starting area, but its hardly a bad one. There’s plenty of loot to get and lots to do – it even has a small optional side-dungeon with some loot hidden within! The map gives you some leather armor, tools, and food to start you off, with wood around, and if you search you can find –
…Yeah. The loot distribution in this map can be best described as “an unceasing flood of wonderful things”. Chest filled with lots of good random loot are placed very liberally, and you’re unlikely to ever want for anything, Which is good, because of reasons I’ll discuss in the next area.
In any event, moving on from this area to the intersection is no trouble at all.
Rating – 7/10 Good start.
Intersection 1: Full of annoying vines for no real reason, but otherwise not a bad place.
Rating – 6/10
The Mysterious Castle(orange wool/Sethbling’s head):
The map continues to give an unceasing flood of amazing things in every chest. However, the mob spam begins – the outside of the castle is dotted with several spawners, making the approach to the castle fairly difficult. But the actual inside of the castle has a huge number of regular spawners – making it incredibly enemy-filled.
Let’s talk a little bit about how minecraft’s spawners work. They spawn theoretically infinite numbers of whatever type of entity they’re set to spawn – but only in specific conditions (for most enemies, those conditions can be summed up as “being in darkness”), AND while the player is near them. By default, a spawner has a range of about 16 blocks in every direction. When you’re in that radius, they’ll start spinning up and preparing to spawn things, and when you’re outside it, it stops – but retains how “close” it was to spawning its next batch of entities. Because of this, when you’re in a CTM area, not all the spawners are active at once, only the ones immediately around you. Because of this, most good CTM maps are designed so that when you’re fighting one grouping of spawners, you’re fighting just that grouping – the others are far away, or placed just close enough to give you a sense of urgency in destroying the one you’re on. This map is filled with fortresses and close-together rooms – and it lacks that balance. In this area, while you’re fighting the outside spawners, the ones in the castle are spawning. While you’re fighting the inside spawners, the spawners in the wool room and roof are spawning. Because of this, you’re always fighting TONS of enemies – it adds up quickly, and hordes build up surprisingly fast with minecraft’s spawner rules.
\With all the enchanted gear, it’s easy to cut through the mobs, but there’s so MANY of them, they’ll bring you down if you don’t move fast. There’s so much gear, even at this early part of the map, that it isn’t a big deal in any case. It has a pretty good design for an earlygame area, but there are so MANY mobs…
It also introduces the map’s secondary “bonus” objective, which is to collect the heads of various youtubers in chests guarded by custom mobs. I’ll discuss the heads in the conclusion.
Rating – 6/10 Spam-tastic
Ender pearls(magenta wool):
I liked this area! It had an interesting concept: There are many islands with mobs and chests full of amazing things, and you can use enderpearls to travel between them. It doesn’t give you quite enough enderpearls to explore them all without blocks to supplement, but that’s okay. The wool is easy to get, and once you have it, you can continue harvesting the area for as much or as little loot as you want depending on your patience. It’s the sort of place you could come back to later with a water bucket, if you felt like getting everything you could out of it. It also introduces some custom mobs, such as sword-carrying skeletons and a few other novelties. Kind of gimmicky, but it mixes things up enough to be interesting.
Rating – 7/10 Unique.
Overrun Watch Tower(white wool):
I didn’t find this area until I went back to the start – ah well!
From the outside, the watch tower looks kind of nice, even if the area around it is just a giant stone hole. On the inside, the place plays almost exactly like The Mysterious Castle – huge numbers of spawners and mob spam, with tons of loot to balance it all out. When played in the day, the daylight will neutralize the greater number of spawners, but this place would be a very hard beginning if you tried it at night. For that reason, I’d say the area could be improved immensely by toning down the spawners but putting it in darkness.
Rating – 6/10
Stairway to heav-hell(Light blue wool/Etho’s head):
This area was where the map’s mob spam began to reach its height. This area was simple stonebrick rooms, with nothing but TONS of spawners. Spawners embedded in the walls. Spawners in pillars. Even spawners lying right out in the open! Spawners that would activate as you tried to destroy other spawners! The mobs became an unceasing flood if you weren’t constantly moving forward (due to the overlapping spawner ranges discussed), and even with the amazing armor you had, and chests that provided even MORE great things placed every few blocks… the horde were still incredibly hard to cut through. For perspective, I broke 5-6 stone/iron swords just trying to cut through all the mob!
Overall, this area is more or less a distilled version of the whole map. It spams loot at you, it spams spawners, it spams enemies… it isn’t a carefully crafted experience. Even though you’re constantly in combat, it’s easy to zone out because all the mob slaughtering you’re doing starts to blur together. There’s never a break or pause, just constant destruction. If you like that, then you’ll like this map. If not, then you won’t. And I’d rather have interesting challenging situations than the mindless slaughter of this area.
Rating – 4/10
Intersection 2: A very boring intersection, clearly not designed to serve as anything but a transition.
Rating – 5/10
Back to Basics:
It’s the monument! And with it, comes a very nice base-type area – it only lacks a spot with chests to put your items, but that can be added on. It even contains something interesting; a bonus loot section where you can make a choice between 3 incredibly amazing loot chests with various specialties. The monument has everything you need, and was a very welcome rest amidst everything else. It even looked kind of nice.
Rating – 8/10
Another Day, Another Zombie(Yellow wool + Guude Head):
The mob spam problems I’ve already talked about were present in this area too, so I won’t rant about them too much. But this area is exactly what you expect it to be from the moment you walk in. A “town” with spawners shoved in every possible location. It did look okay, and the central tall building at the end was surprisingly easy compared to the rest of it. However, it doesn’t do much interesting except be filled with buildings which are filled with enemies. The mindless slaughter continues.
Rating – 5/10 It lives up to its name.
Souls of the Dead(Pink wool):
This area was one of the more interesting ones! The mob spam was toned down *slightly*, and the area had multiple interesting parts – the graveyard has custom mobs in it, such as fast-moving skeletons and invisible zombies. The mansion had witches (too many of them). There was a portion with buildings and a long-range spawner that spawned enemies at ridiculous rate, but once destroyed things cooled down. It actually tried to mix things up rather than throwing enemies at you, and I wish that this trend had continued more than it did. For that reason, it’s a better area.
This was really overall a terrible place. It starts with a totally random stone cave with spawners in the walls… for some reason. There’s no reason why it couldn’t just be a regular cave, serving as a short walk to the area, without tons of enemies. But that’s only the first blip on the terrible radar. The “real” area is a giant fortress, far bigger than any area we’ve seen thus far, full of twisting hallways and multiple branches, with lots of dead ends, that sticks to a main central area with stuff falling down on you from above as you ascend it. There are even more spawners than normal, and since the pathways are very close together, while you’re dealing with one, all the other paths near you are spawning more for you to deal with – retreating to reset the enemies is a must to bring things even to a manageable level!
Worse yet, this area spams custom mobs at you, rather than spamming vanilla mobs like normal – extremely durable zombies with knockback swords and Thorns armor! And they come at you in swarms! Its terrible! If they corner you, or knock you off the thin hole-filled pathways to fall into the lava below, you’re essentially immediately dead. This area alone was far, far harder than anything I faced in Hardened Fury or Brutality or any of the other “hard” maps I played! The fact that you get chests full or amazing iron gear and top-tier food the whole way doesn’t make it any better! You just die anyway! It’s a giant thoughtless mess, only balanced out by the loot distribution being an equally thoughtless giant mess! If 80% of the spawners hadn’t existed or at least exposed so I could destroy them all, then maybe it could have been better.
Rating – 2/10 A giant mess.
Intersection 4: Of all the areas to be connected to, did it really have to stem from… there’s still no teleporter, and it again clearly isn’t there to serve as anything but a transition.
The Mansion in the Woods(Cyan wool, BdoubleO’s head, GenerikB’s head):
This area began with a clump of spawners, but it was completely misleading. The actual area is surprisingly different from the norm! The first part has a few spawners that spawn massive amounts of mobs and activate from far away. The problem is, these mobs are speed-buffed skeletons, and they’re almost impossible to approach even all on their own. It spawns them faster than you can kill them, and they’ll charge out and try to slap you away before you can break the spawner. As I was building up from the top to destroy them, I had to deal with this crowd:
Still, one incredibly dangerous spawner is better than many hundreds of little spawners. The second part of the area has a smaller number of spawners than normal, spawning semi-powerful custom mobs. It actually felt like a normal area! It was somewhat fun to play! I actually liked this area! It even looked nice! A very nice break after the last one.
Rating – 7/10 Less spammy than normal!
Maze upon Maze upon Maze(Gray wool, Light gray wool, Amlup’s head):
This area began with an abandoned mineshaft, ripped straight from vanilla, filled up with spawners. It wasn’t difficult, but it was very boring. The wool was easy to find, at least. If it had been any longer it would have been much worse. But that was just a prelude to the “real” area. This entrance hides the way into the maze:
Even though it looks nice, the actual maze was a disappointment. The walls were made of leaves one block thick and were easily destroyed by the frequent creepers, spawned from spawners hidden in the ground. There was one nice touch; the whole maze being lit on fire at the end. I love to see terrible places burning down.
Rating – 5/10 The mineshaft was harder than the real maze
Diamond pit(Brown wool):
A lot of the areas we’ve seen so far have started with small, spawner-filled caves. This area initially had me wondering when the “real” area would start… but it was just a horrible, HORRIBLE spawner-filled cave the whole time. The spawners were hidden in the walls, in the floors, in an environment full of nondescript stone blocks. Even if you could see one of the buried spawners and destroy it, there were five more in your range that were spawning enemies while you were doing so. Trying to actually make the place safe was extremely frustrating with the incessant swarm of skeletons, creepers, and spiders, now with blazes and wither skeletons mixed in. The regular gear at this point was iron armor w/some diamond, and powerfully enchanted iron swords. The mobs weren’t really threatening as much as they were just really, REALLY annoying and frustrating!
When you actually made it to the “diamond pit”, it wasn’t actually a pit of diamonds… it was caves in diamond shapes shoved together. What a variation! I haven’t seen THAT before and done better! (I have, in a number of maps). The wool was guarded by a special custom skeleton, backed up by swarm upon swarm of regular skeletons, with “Vechs1” for a head. Seeing as it was very similar to Vechs head but also wasn’t “Vechz”, it should have been made clear to the player that this enemy WASN’T for the head monument.
While almost every area we’ve seen so far does at least SOMETHING right or unique, this area was just a giant cave filled with everything wrong about the map: Spawner spam too great to beat, where you can’t even find the spawners to destroy them! There was nothing redeemable about this area at all! Nothing! It was complete garbage! It’s especially disappointing to see this after having some interesting areas!
Rating – 1/10 It’s just a cave! JUST A STONE CAVE!
Iron bars(Black wool):
(The area name sign was replaced with item frames with iron bars)
This area seemed very complicated. Void stretched below, as it forced you to run on iron bars while skeletons attack you, battle on thin ore-filled stone spirals with blazes and skeleton spawners embedded in the ground. Like many areas of this nature, it doesn’t give you much to deal with these, especially since the spawners are still as hidden as always. I ended up sprinting through it all, and at the end I was surprised to find black wool! It didn’t feel special or spammy enough. Turns out that this actually WASN’T the final area – the “real” final area actually contains the green wool, going totally against the standard accepted CTM order. It’s fine to go against the norm like that, but you should indicate it to the player with a sign “This area has the wool going in the last space on the monument, but it’s NOT the final area”!
Rating – 4/10 Boring false ending
Into the Nether(Red wool, Blue wool, Zisteau’s head):
At this point, all the areas had begun blurring together. This one contained no custom mobs, just more and more normal mob spam, similar to Diamond Pit. There were big stone towers with spawners in diamond shapes on top, but little point to destroying them since there were mobs coming from so many other places. It was fairly short, so it would be easy to run through, but hard if you decided to slog it out. Red wool was right at the start, barely guarded with a few ghast and blaze spawners, and the blue wool was placed behind a miniature fortress at the end, but none of it felt particularly climactic or difficult. We’re just too strong to worry about non-custom mobs, not even the blazes, since the map starts the area by handing you tons of fire resistance 8-minute potions. The only interesting part was the end, where we got an actual lore book saying dark magic was seeping into our world, and there were some custom wither skeletons guarding a “core”. There was instructions to dig given very non-intuitively (it said dig right… WHICH RIGHT!?), to find the true final dungeon.
But before we do that, there’s a loose end.
Rating – 5/10 We’ve seen swarms too often.
Jungle Zone(lime wool):
A giant jungle area, with the wool straight at the end! This one would have been possible to play regularly, since you can see most of the spawners in the leaves. It’s a pretty normal area, with nothing special about it at all. I pretty much got the wool and got out, so I can’t say too much about it that I haven’t already said somewhere else. It was completely my fault I missed it back in Another Day, Another Zombie too.
Rating – 5/10 Can’t believe I missed it…
The Final Area(green wool):
First off, the map tells you beforehand: Make sure to play through all the other areas before this one! But the area contains the green wool, not the black wool. There’s no indication that this area contains the green wool, and some players might waste time searching for a green wool area that didn’t exist, assuming that possibly a head for the head monument is here. Either the order of the wools should have been switched around to resemble a normal map, or you should have been told, again: This area contains the green wool!
As for the actual area, it was very unexpected, but it was actually an interesting idea! The hallway lined with beacons and a few spawners appeared innocuous, but most of the beacons you see in the picture are “evil” beacons, which give off negative potion effects! This was a neat idea that I haven’t seen done in other CTMs before, and better yet, no mob spam! However, it was an incredibly easy area – the beacons only gave poison, not wither, and all you had to do was smash one of the blocks making up the beacons to disable them. Because of that, it failed to pose a real significant challenge. Still, it was at least something interesting!
Rating – 6/10 Something new
Conclusion:
Beneath the void was a giant spamfest. Almost every area was full to the brim with monster spawners. It was difficult, but more difficult in a slow, grindy way, rather than difficult in a challenging or interesting way. In the early intersections, the gameplay of the areas is so same-y they start to blend together. The loot chests dump tons of good stuff on you right from the start, so much you’ll have to make multiple trips through each area to possibly gather everything worth having. But the loot barely gets better as you proceed through the map, and I didn’t feel like I was advancing much in power. The map’s intersection structure was confused, and I ended up playing a lot of the areas out of order. If there had been clear indication of what order to play the areas in, things would have been much better. As for the head monument, it’s an interesting idea to have miniature boss-fights as a side objective, but there isn’t much indication of what is where. I sadly ended up unable to complete it.
However, despite that, you can see some clear potential in some of the map’s areas. A few feel like they have interesting ideas that could have been executed on a little better. The map’s few good moments are generally when it switches out of mob spam mode to try something else. There’s a huge gap in quality between the areas, with about 1/3 of them being interesting and 2/3 being awful.
Preface: In my quest to play and review the entire BTV series, we’ve arrived at the second map! After the spamfest that was the first one, we’ll see whether the second one improves, or falls into the same flaws. This map is fairly modern, and does use some of 1.7’s new functionalities – but how well does it work?
Spawn: The introduction area gave me déjà vu to the last one! It’s designed almost the exact same way, and also becomes very dangerous at night. There’s plenty of loot at the onset, but its all marked and specific, giving off the impression that the map is trying to get you set up properly rather than dumping tons of stuff on you with thoughtless randomized loot. In order to make it to the intersection, you must traverse a brief cave, which again is filled with spawners, some in clumps, all hidden within the walls. This is a problem that will persist throughout the map, similar to the first – spawners hidden in walls, making them too difficult to find and destroy. Other than that, this was an okay start.
Rating – 7/10
Intersection 1: A very simple, non-dangerous intersection. Nothing special about it.
Rating – 7/10
Miner’s Expedition(White wool):
This area starts the map off on the right foot! The spawners contain some custom mobs right away, and while there are less of them, many of them are in the worst possible place… buried in the walls and floors! For the majority of this dungeon, it’s nigh-impossible to make any area completely safe, as there’s always another spawner hiding somewhere in the walls! It makes the initial part of the area and the map into a major slog when it doesn’t need to be. And it’s a pity, because in the later part of this area near the wool, it stops hiding the spawners and starts putting them out in the open like normal – and when it does that, it’s actually pretty fun to play!
The locale of the area was a simple “underground mines” area, but did add a lot of other elements into the mix, such as vines, and creeper spawners surrounded by TNT. None of it was truly new or unique, but it did feel more inspired than “stone cave #451”. The area provides plenty of good loot to help us get started out, and each chest was unique with hand-placed loot, rather than the formulaic randomized loot of BTV1, even though there wasn’t much variation in what was in the chests. The area was actually fairly long - almost TOO long. However, that could have been improved not by chopping off portions of the area, but to move the buried spawners out in the open so we could break them faster. That alone would have made the area have a faster pace.
This whole area gave off a very light “Ragecraft” vibe, though it isn’t nearly as polished as the titular series. It was actually a fairly good starting area! I hope to see more like this.
Rating – 7/10
Pharoah’s Riches(Magenta wool):
The start of this area was a simple approach to the temple. The primary thing in your way was spawner towers, small towers containing 9 spawners in a huge square on top. These spawners covered just about every mob type – creepers to blow you up, zombies to swarm you, and skeletons to shoot you down while you tried to pillar on top of them. They were challenging, but mostly because there wasn’t really any good way to approach them. One possibility to improve this would be to have overhangs in some of the area – the cliffs are already there – so you could drop down from above on top of the towers and break the spawners that way. This area also introduced a new custom mob, with golden armor, weapons, and of course, cactus heads with thorns. I could go on an entire rant about thorns, but I’ll save it for later, because there weren’t too many enemies here and the map gave plenty of food, so it was excusable. …For now.
Once you got to the second part of the area, things got interesting. The pyramid was surprisingly empty, but below it was a huge network of catacombs full of loot and monster spawners, and you’re given nothing but a half-complete map to guide you. Actually giving you a half-map of the area in a maze-type area was a neat idea, but it proved unneeded, as the maze itself was small enough that you could find the wool without needing the map. All the passages were very cramped, and if you moved too slowly the mob spam in a tight space could become overwhelming and force you to retreat – but the place is designed so that if you move quickly, it won’t become unmanageable, thankfully. Overall, this place was pretty fun to play through, at least for the second part. The first part, however, could be improved by either giving the player a good way to get on top of the spawner towers or making them less insane and more approachable.
Rating – 7/10
Mayan Ruins(orange wool):
This area was the worst one so far. The area started with a large, grassy plain leading up to a temple, filled with custom mob spawners… buried in the ground, and almost impossible to find with the very nondescript terrain. With little loot located in the outer area, it’s far better to just run through the whole thing entirely rather than trying to make it safe. Once you make it into the temple, things don’t get much better – we have another maze, with no map and 1-block-wide passages. It’s far easier to just smash your way through the walls until you find things than to navigate the maze genuinely. The maze definitely overstayed its welcome, which is sad because the previous (next?) area was actually a fairly good example of how to do a maze area! If the maze had more loot, an indication of which way to go, or was just shorter, then maybe it could have been fun. As it is, there’s no real reason to go through a bunch of 1-block-wide passages. At least the outside looks nice.
Rating – 4/10
Lava Lake Castle(Yellow wool):
Deaths: 3(1 tower swarm, 1 attempt to get items back, 1 lava fall)
The first portion of this area uses the same towers from Pharoah’s Riches, except way more of them. They have the same problems as last time, with little good ways to approach them, with skeletons shooting you down and creepers blowing you up every time you get close. Now, it’s repetitive, with almost no variety in either the towers or the situation when you approach the towers. Sure, some have less spawners and some have more, but it doesn’t change that the majority of this area is just pillaring up to destroy the spawners you need to get to, both in towers and ghast spawners located high up in pillars. Things get a little better once you make it to the actual castle (pictured), with the inside being an intense fight, with the spawners only hidden in the pillars rather than in the walls. But the buildup to get there is just so boring and repetitive!
Rating – 4/10
Spider Cave(Light blue wool):
Deaths: 4(Spider swarm)
Do note that this was not a separate area but a connection made to the last area near the end, and I named it myself. I have it separated because it’s completely different. And WORSE.
The design of this area is terribly simple. It’s a giant, relatively nondescript stone cave, with cobwebs EVERYWHERE. Within the cobwebs are spider spawners. LOTS of spider spawners. A lot of them just spawn normal spiders, but there are also special spiders which set you on fire and deal extra damage. Here’s how the area works: If you try to break the spawners, then unending swarms of dozens of spiders will knock you into the cobwebs and kill you, giving you no chance to escape, just because you stood still long enough to try and break the cobwebs. There’s so many spiders, and the spawners are surrounded by cobwebs, making them hard to get to. Your only real option is to try to run through the area as fast as possible, in the hopes of making it to the wool before the giant unending pile of spiders ends you – which they will. At the start, it hands you some getting-slapped-around-and-dying supplies (health/regen potions), but it doesn’t help at all! This area is thoughtless, and has too many enemies to attempt to make safe by destroying all the spawners. It’s terrible. It could have been improved only by toning down the amount of spawners until standing still DIDN’T result in you being surrounded by 30 of the things within seconds!
Rating – 2/10
Intersection 2:
It was an interesting intersection! It was entirely underwater, but it gave water breathing, making it bearable! There was a lot of command block text, which made a chest appear, and told me where to find a secret. The secret in question was a choice between chests full of armor or chests full of weaponry – just like the choice in the first map! Still pretty neat. However, despite the command blocks around, they didn’t tell you about the really important thing – that the monument was located in an innocuous teleporter only labeled “side area”. Even worse – and this completely ruins the intersection – the water breathing command blocks eventually stopped working, forcing me to build my own air bubbles and move from bubble to bubble. Because of that…
Rating – 4/10
Monument:
Why was this place located behind a teleporter labeled “Side area”? This whole place has a lot of neat things, like free farms built with redstone and a huge storage room area, but the setup is awkward, clunky, and somewhat confusing. Just as an example, the place is very big despite being empty, and it has three floors – however, instead of just walking up stairs to get into the floors, you have to go into a command-block powered “elevator”, and press a button to be teleported to your floor. Once there, you’d have to wait a few seconds for the wooden blocks blocking your exit to drop away, then you could actually go out into the floor you were at. It’s a neat bit of command-block magic, but… why? After you’ve seen it work a few times, it just becomes annoying to have a clunky, slow system being your main method of transportation around your base. Just use stairs if you aren’t going to do anything special with an elevator.
This is also the first point where some teleport malfunctions began, as I was teleported into a future area out of nowhere. I managed to get back to the monument, but it was very confusing. I’ll talk about it more in a moment.
Rating – 7/10
Frozen Tundra(Gray wool):
This area had an interesting concept: A big, open area with a few “puzzles” to solve with new places in them, revealed by a lore book at the start of the area. However, the big, open area you start in (pictured) is completely boring and ugly with nothing in it except your 2 critical puzzle objectives, making it feel like a pointless walk with some natural spawns to get where you need to be. As for the puzzle objectives, one of them had the redstone completely fail (I was told to walk into a fireplace to get teleported to the area, instead I just burned). Thankfully, the one that worked had the wool! It was a fairly short and simple library dungeon. Not bad, and it contained a surprising amount of command block stuff to keep things going, such as spiders with fireworks shooting out. Overall, the puzzle part was totally unnecessary, and probably should’ve been removed entirely. Just put us in the library dungeon with whatever the other thing was as a side dungeon. That, or make the frozen tundra in the area’s name a more interesting place to be. Once you made it into the library, it was a fine dungeon. The third intersection is also found here.
Rating – 7/10
Jungle Snipers(Lime wool):
This area initially had me scared of skeleton party land, but it was just a giant jungle-y plain with some spawners. The building with the wool was almost completely unguarded, and only a 30-second walk from the entrance. You were attacked by a few custom mobs, but nothing particularly difficult. It was off-putting how short it was. I can’t say much else about the area, because there really wasn’t much else of an area!
Rating – 3/10
The Faint Desert(Pink Wool):
Just like with the Frozen Tundra, this area worked as something of a “scavenger hunt”. We got 2 hints given at different places (one at the start and one further in given by an NPC – a cool event, but why?), but they were both hints for the same objective, leading to much confusion. The desert appears to be backed up by long-range spawners, but like the tundra, is also largely empty. Once you find the gravel pond, you get to the REAL area.
The real area is a neat little laboratory/maze area, but it’s very short. There are a few interesting things in it, such as some laboratory-type exhibits and another small maze, but the mobs guarding it are far too tanky (diamond armor zombies already?). This area could definitely have been improved by replacing the diamond armor mobs with less tanky, but more interesting custom enemies. Other than that, once you made it past the desert part, it was fine.
Rating – 6/10
Intersection 3: I use “intersection” here very lightly. Hidden deep within the library area in gray wool was a teleport to a small room with three colored class blocks on pedestals with area named underneath them. Like any normal player, given no books to explain what was happening, I assumed I’d found some sort of bonus monument. But no, it was the third intersection. You break the glass blocks to travel to the areas in question. It’s a neat system, but I had no idea how it worked, since the map doesn’t bother telling me. There is at least a way back to the monument, but it’s ONE-WAY… and worse, it stopped functioning after the first time I used it! Every single time you want to get here, or go back to the monument and your very nice base, you have to go through the library dungeon, then the frozen tundra, then teleport into the monument. Or in reverse if you’re heading back. It’s very poorly set up, overall. Tell the player how to access areas, and give proper, working teleporters to and from.
Rating – 3/10
Furthermore, one of the teleports was exceedingly buggy – the corrupted lands teleport. It was triggering constantly in other areas, including the monument and Under the Lava and Through the Cave.
Corrupted Lands(Light gray wool):
Deaths: 2(Mob swarms!)
This area was a giant spamfest. It does look nice, though the ceiling and walls could definitely use some work. The gameplay was not quite so good, however. Outside the building you see in the picture, the entire area is nothing but simple plains with a LOT of 2x2 spawner clusters. While trying to break down one of these mini-clusters, you’d be in range of one or even 2 other ones, and before long, the place would be filled with so many skeletons, cave spiders, and creepers you would be forced to retreat to despawn the enemies and make it bearable. I tried to make the outside a safer place, but it was honestly easier to just ignore it all and run straight into the castle – which is safer!
Once you make it inside the castle, things do get a little better. You have to run through underground staircases and corridors while assaulted by mobs occasionally, and it’s actually pretty fun! Once you make it to your goal, the castle roof, things get bad again, with more 2x2 spawner clusters serving as the primary threat guarding the wool. This area could have been improved with less, tougher spawners or more carefully-placed spawners, rather than just 2x2 boxes placed everywhere. It feels thoughtless.
Rating – 5/10
Under the Lava and Through the Cave(Purple wool):
This area was very short. A short ways in, you’re given a bunch of Fire Resist potions to swim through a lava pool. After that, there’s just a short run through a stonebrick cave with weak and uninteresting custom mob spawners buried in the walls and then you arrive at the wool! Or, that’s what I did, after the map’s badly malfunctioning positional teleports ended up taking me to the Corrupted Lands the first 5 times I tried. At the end, there’s the fourth intersection! This area could have definitely done with a length improvement, and having more challenges to overcome than just a large cave with spawners. As it is, it’s incredibly boring.
Rating – 4/10
I also made a discovery in this area. Throughout the map, I’ve seen lots of empty chests. But the majority of the chests seemed to be working, so I thought little of it. Turns out, they were actually broken random loot chests! All the chests that should’ve been randomized loot were actually empty. It does speak to this map’s loot distribution that I’m doing perfectly fine without lots of random stuff in my inventory. If the map had had as much random loot as the first one, such a bug would’ve resulted in me having nothing. I was too far in to restart and try to fix it, but know that I can’t say much about this map’s loot distribution since I only got 2/3 of the loot available. However, I should note that most of the areas after this one started relying entirely on random loot again. I had to finish the map relying mostly on loot from the earlier areas.
If you want to play the map yourself, heed this advice: The map must be played in a specific 1.7 snapshot in order for the random loot to function properly!
Stairs to Heav-Hell(Cyan wool):
Of all the area to do a rehash of, the one that was chosen was the one from that - along with The Dormitories - codified all the problems with the first map! This iteration was done… *slightly* better. There were spawners placed evenly at the first part, spawning creepers, skeletons, and other “normal” mobs, which at this point we’re butchering like they’re nothing. You follow the stairs down, explore a few side rooms, and cut through a lot of enemies. The only problem is when you reach the last room, which is just a massive cluster of spawns, natural and otherwise, and you cut through them all like they’re nothing because your gear is enchanted iron and they’re just generic mobs. This horde:
Was destroyed immediately. The mob spam is at least not particularly crippling, even if it’s just because everything is eliminated in an instant. Other than that, the only interesting thing about this area other than being a reskin of an already-used area is that it gives you an infinite flint and steel at the start and tells you to look for netherrack (there isn’t enough around to avoid using torches). After using custom mobs for a while, a reversion to “natural” minecraft enemies comes off as odd. It would again have been better to make this area stand out more with some sort of twist on the original area, aside from making it darker and more nether-y.
Rating – 5/10
Intersection 4(Brown wool): It’s a nice little intersection with a teleport back. And it does contain another “choice” thing where you get to choose between 2 good things (eternal strength until you die vs. protection 4 diamond chestplate). It also has a small side-challenge where you shoot arrows at a wooden button and when you hit it you get brown wool. A pretty good place overall.
Rating – 8/10
Target Practice(Green wool):
This area was a (small) castle filled with a bunch of spawners and broken random loot. The spawners were again regular mobs too weak to oppose us, and even though the spawners were buried in the floor, the halls were small enough I could stop them with torches. It wasn’t challenging and didn’t have anything interesting about it. Several of the areas we’ve played in a row have been nice-looking areas that have been completely devoid of interesting gameplay or challenges. This one is no different. Compared to many of the early areas, which had command blocks (like in Frozen Tundra) or at least something interesting driving them, many of the later-game areas just feel so… aesthetically inspired, yet hollow on the inside.
Rating – 4/10
Ghasts Have Nine Lives(Blue wool):
This area finally broke out of the bog for a moment, and was a genuinely interesting troll area. The map drops you into lava but is generous enough to give fire resist, and throws ghasts at you. It’s an interesting trap, and makes up the entirety of the area, which is fine. I generally expect these trolls out of brown wool, but it’s still an interesting trick regardless of what wool color it is.
Rating – 7/10
Forgotten lava Lake(Red wool):
This area was alright! You have to run on small hole-filled pathways above lava for the first portion while being attacked by ghasts. It’s an interesting challenge that manages to be a good level of difficulty and tension for an almost-final area. Once you make it into the castle at the end, the first part is totally empty, but then you descend into the area’s final challenge, a zone with tons of wither skeletons and pigmen to fight. Many of the wither skeleton spawners are surrounded by bedrock, making it annoying to fight off the hordes whilst trying to retrieve the diamond blocks and wool from the area. However, just being unable to destroy the spawners actually feels BETTER to me than having the alternative of them just being buried in the wall so it takes way too much effort to find and destroy them. That lets me focus on doing what I need to do, rather than being forced between doing my objective while hindered by hordes or burning tons of time searching for the spawners. Overall, this area wasn’t bad! It actually could’ve been a little longer!
Rating – 7/10
Beneath The Void(Black wool):
Deaths: 1(Void!)
This area was shorter than expected. It has exactly one challenge: The room you see in the screenshot. Blazes and ghasts attacking you as you have to bridge your way over void. Jumping isn’t an option thanks to the ceiling – just bridging. But it’s more complicated than it looks. The game constantly gives you blindness forever to make up for the lack of void fog. Here’s the problem. There’s no good way to approach this. Most of your options are just taken away from you. You can’t kill the blazes then push forward, because blindness doesn’t let you see them to fire back with your own bow and arrows. Bridging isn’t an option, because you’ll get fireballed straight into the void. You could try to move from island to island with your own bridges, trying to always stay with your back against the wall so you don’t get shot into oblivion. I suspect this is the intended path. However, this also doesn’t work, since blazes will eventually spawn in such numbers with the slow play that that option requires, that you’ll be criss-cross shot from a hundred directions every time you leave safety. This is a problem with a lot of “hard” maps – they think out a hard and challenging problem, but not a good way for a player to solve it. In many of those challenges, and here, the only real way to win is some form of “cheese” strategy. Enderpearls would work fine, but so would, say, the fire resistance potions you were just handed a couple areas ago. That was what I used, and it makes the entire area into something flat-out laughably easy. It’s unoriginal, and it isn’t fun. This is one of the most disappointing final areas I’ve ever seen.
Rating – 2/10
And that’s the end. We’ve won.
CONCLUSION:
This map at first seemed to solve many of the problems that came with the first map, but started to revert back to them as time went by. Mob spam was still an issue, albeit to a slightly lesser extent. It used custom mobs earlier and more often, which was a welcome change, but few of the custom mobs had much interesting about them other than being stronger than their generic variants. Like with the first map, we see a few of the areas having interesting concepts, but many are just uninspired and boring. The loot during the earlier areas contains a lot of hand-placed or named loot, but as you enter the later areas, this is switched out for more random loot chests (which all broke for me). The balance of what loot I DID get was typically fairly evenly matched with the mobs, but a few specific pieces of loot were blatantly overpowered (see: +20 Attack damage sword). Area difficulty ranged from very easy to extremely difficult in no particular curve as you moved through the wool, and it was a total crapshoot what difficulty you would get every time you entered a new place. There were some command block mechanics at play, and how much they were involved varied from area to area (they were at their strongest in the midgame, but there were far less such mechanics in the lategame). As I noted, several key command blocks malfunctioned, making things difficult to deal with at points – the most major being the water breathing for the second intersection. On the aesthetics side, many of the areas actually looked pretty good! There was some over-reliance on cave-like aesthetics, but several of the area generally varied things or had nice-looking points: The building in Corrupted Lands looks really good, for example.
Compared to the first map, overall? I’d say it’s an improvement, but it doesn’t learn quite enough from its failings. Should you play it? …Well, if you derived any enjoyment from the first, or want a map like the first but less intense than it, you might like this one. But if you’re new to minecraft maps, your time is better spent on epic maps like Corona Trials and Ragecraft 3. Soon, we’ll see what the third map has in store for us.
It begins simply, with a nice forest-type area. It tricks you into thinking that that’s your first area. But no. Unlike the first maps, where the cave it dropped you in really was your first area, there’s a huge mushroom cave up ahead that’s the REAL first area:
It’s… an interesting setting. The spawners aren’t concealed in the ground, thank goodness- they’re covered in easily identifiable blocks. There are a LOT of spawners though, and the place quickly gets filled with enemies if you don’t move fast. It’s a very short cave, but the spawners are mostly the same throughout. Chests with good starting supplies are scattered around everywhere, and altogether, it makes for a fairly challenging starting area. I appreciated it. And best of all – no randomized loot to be seen thus far! It could definitely be improved by toning down the huge amount of spawners. As it is, it’s hard to beat if you don’t dash through it.
Rating – 6/10
Old Miner’s Cave(orange wool):
Deaths: 1 (Tried to rush final part)
This area continues some of the trends that I like. A good amount of non-randomized loot. Spawners that are in logical locations rather than just random spots in the wall. However, it also starts to reveal a problem… even if this map fixes some of the problems of 1 and 2, the areas we’ve seen so far… just aren’t that interesting. The last area was a mushroom cave. This area is a sandstone cave. It’s okay to have simple settings, but this area doesn’t really change the way in which you fight enemies. It is again short, and at the end you have some blaze spawners to keep things interesting. It’s a fairly simple, fine area, if entirely un-memorable.
Rating – 6/10
Jungle Ravine(magenta wool):
Deaths: 1(Mob swarm)
This area has a mob spam problem! The area reminds me somewhat in the dormatories but in a different setting: Multiple paths, catwalks, and tunnels progressing through the same area. It’s all so close together that mobs are sure to build up to immense levels. The places you have to go to have simply terrible approaches – you have to descend into tiny rooms with vines or ladders, causing you to get swarmed by all manner of zombies, spiders, and creepers. It was generally a fast and hectic area, but the mobs just got so bad at some points that you pretty much had to retreat or burn through sword after sword trying to cut through them all. There was some grace given with the bountiful loot chests, at the very least. This area could probably be improved a lot by just letting us descend down with stairs rather than a 1x1 circle of vines that you can’t go back up. Or making it bigger with some more empty space for less mob spam!
Rating – 5/10
Into the Depths(Light blue wool):
This area played fine, but was aesthetically uninspired. It was a stone cave that used diorite. Diorite was a new block when this map was made, but that didn’t make it NOT a stone cave. It’s just varying it with a new type of stone. The enemies you fight are fine, but the bottom portion with the wool is so laden with spawners, you never had time to break any because there were always more enemies spawning! However, there was one part about this area I really liked. One chest had a “Food pack” NBT-powered chest. Once you grabbed it out, a command block would helpfully inform you that you needed to place it on the ground to use it. Very nice! The redstone and command blocks seem a lot more stable in this map, particularly as compared to the first one.
Rating – 6/10
Intersection 2/Monument:
This is one of the best Intersections/Monuments I’ve ever seen! It’s a nice, good-looking house that just feels cozy, and has enchantment stands and a brewing area and a base located in a natural way that looks good and is easy to modify as you see fit. The house is fairly small and has multiple floors (with proper stairs – no elevator crap), and each floor has one of the intersection areas branching off of it as well as a new part of the base. It feels really nice and is all and intersection and monument area should be!
Rating – 9/10
House in the Woods(Yellow Wool):
What I liked best about this area was the variance. First, you had the approach to the house in the woods (pictured), then you were inside the house, then you reached a dungeon in the house’s basement. It helped capture a good sense of progression, and I hope to see more like it. Most of the spawners were hidden in hard-to-find locations, and there were lots of them spawning many regular enemies. At this point, our own gear can easily cut these enemies down. It would have been better to replace several of the normal spawners with a few elite enemy spawners – though that’s not a complaint with this area but more the Beneath The Void maps in general! Once you get past the usual mob spam, this area was of above-average quality.
Rating – 7/10
Village Swamp(Lime wool):
For once, a swamp area without witches! It didn’t have much else interesting in it, though. Spawners are lined across the shore and ceiling of the river you follow, rather than in the walls, which is nice. As you go through the area, the water in the river you’re following gets deeper, which does create a valuable sense of progression… but doesn’t really change how the area plays. You have a few short side-paths to take for some extra loot, but it’s a very linear area beyond that. The first part of this area feels well-designed enough, even though it ends up being simpler to swim past the spawners rather than break them. Once you reach the village part of the area, however, it’s a little disappointing. The map doesn’t really change things up aside from the area you’re fighting in being a village. You end up fighting the same enemies in mostly the same way the entire way through – the spawners are all in the open, rather than inside the tiny houses. Again, there isn’t anything in particular that’s wrong with this area, but it wasn’t very interesting, either.
Rating – 6/10
Plantation Ruins(Pink wool):
A setting I haven’t seen much before; a farm with real food still there to harvest! This farm makes up the first part of the area, but it’s really… empty. There isn’t much there except scattered food and natural enemies. Proceed through it, and you’ll make it to the second portion, a segment where you proceed through crowded and cramped gravel tunnels. This is definitely the area’s low point, with all the tunnels feeling like the exact same thing. They’re easy to cut through and relatively boring. Finally, you make it to the wool room, which looks really nice and is a fair challenge – even if it continues to spam regular mobs at you and hide the spawners. It was okay, but the gravel tunnels underneath the plantation could definitely have been shortened quite a bit.
Rating – 6/10
Intersection 3:
To start, we have a teleporter back. That’s good. But this intersection has a problem similar to BTV2’s intersection 3, in that it doesn’t explain itself very well. Or at all. See, on the wall, there’s many bedrock-type structures in the shape of portals. When you approach some of them, they’ll turn into nether portals that teleport you to the next area. It’s neat, and works perfectly well when you figure it out, but it would probably take any group of players a few minutes to realize how it works. A book saying “approach the non-crumbling stonebrick portals” would have helped immensely.
One more thing. Throughout the map, there’s been some bonus collectibles for us to find: Bedrock keys. In the first area, we got a book telling us how they worked, and each area since then has had 1 key in it. The way they work is really neat, and I managed to get them all. But the book promised they would unlock for us “a room full of good loot” and what they actually unlocked was… not that. It’s a shop, which lets you buy 3 things with your exp levels. Regeneration potions. Prot 2 enchanted books. Knockback 1 enchanted books. Not useless, but extremely underwhelming since this loot has been built up and fought for throughout all of intersections 1 and 2. I would have been much happier if there just been a room full of chests getting us set up for Intersection 3.
Rating – 7/10
A Dark Knight(Cyan wool):
Deaths: 1(Accidental fall while leaving area)
After figuring out how the intersection worked, I headed here first. The first part of the area is pretty much a swarm of natural spawns from spawners I could hardly see, but after that it gets better. Running around on catwalks, using teleporters, and exploring plenty of interesting and unique side-rooms makes for a very interesting area. This whole place had a lot of much-needed supplies, making it feel very rewarding to explore every side-room I could. When you make it to the end, it at first has an interesting gimmick: All your torches are deleted upon placement by a dark magic aura, forcing you to work without them for a little while. Taking away one of your tools forces you to change things up, but the area isn’t designed so that you’ll be helpless without them. However, it starts to fall apart when you get closer to the bottom, and Elder Guardians take away your pickaxe, leaving you with no way to deal with spawners until you beat the area for good. Then there’s a chest with a block of sand above it, but since you can’t break the sand or the chest… At least, you do get to fight the Elder Guardians at the end of the area, and it’s probably the most challenging thing we’ve had so far! We’ve gotten to the point where we have enchanted iron/chain gear for most of our stuff, and the map is still throwing natural spawns at us – just increasing numbers of them. It’s actually used less custom mobs than BTV 1 and 2 so far! I hope we start seeing a shift to having tougher run-of-the-mill enemies to fight, or the difficulty of the map will continue to fall. This area had a few stutters, but a good basic concept and a good fight at the end.
8/10
The Quarry(Gray wool):
It’s a cave! Most of this area was more of a quarry-themed cave than anything, but it did have a few buildings and rooms to keep things interesting. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, but again, not much interesting about it either. It could have used more custom mobs or something else game-changing. It’s a very simple area as-is. Little memorable about it.
Rating – 6/10
Underwater Temple(Light gray wool):
Water areas! Water combat is very hard to get right in Minecraft. Many people reading won’t remember Vech’s “Endless Deep”. The reason why they won’t remember it is because Vechs made the map hard to find; it was an example of water combat done wrong. This area too, is an example of water combat done wrong. At the start, you have a village with houses, spawners, and loot chests with some water-related gear to help you. A fair start. Sadly, no depth strider is available. Then, you enter into the area’s second portion: A water maze. Now, water mazes can be a terrible, terrible thing as certain other maps have shown me, and this one isn’t particularly good, but it has loot chests and doesn’t go on too long, so it is at least bearable. But once you make it through, you’re dropped into the THIRD part: The water caves (pictured). This is where things go bad. First off, this is a terrible environment to fight guardians in. They’re giant, empty caves, when fighting guardians is about using cover and the environment to avoid their lasers. With no environment to work off of, you pretty much have to stay low to the ground and build a pillar whenever a guardian attacks. Hope you have lots of blocks! About the giant, empty caves… they’re GIANT! You have to swim through them agonizingly slowly, and worse yet – they aren’t linear, they have a lot of side-paths, forcing you to spend minutes swimming to get one loot chest that isn’t nearly worth it. The way to Intersection 4 is hidden down here too, but it’s separate from the wool, meaning you’ll probably find it and then have to keep exploring to get to the wool, then find your way all the way back once you have it!
After what’s probably about 15-20 minutes spent doing nothing but swim forward, you’ll finally reach the actual temple, an itty-bitty building in a big round cavern. And what’s the wool guarded by? A guardian nest, or anything else interesting? No, it’s guarded by a nice, dry room, with skeletons, zombies, and creepers. Just like everything else. This area is without a doubt, the worst in the map, and should be totally reworked. Better yet, just cut out the huge cave section and have the maze lead to the temple – the caves suck away any goodwill I had for the first parts.
Rating – 3/10
Intersection 4:
Our gateway to the map’s final areas! This intersection has an obsidian/bedrock/sea lantern aesthetic going on, and it actually looks fairly nice with the lighting. None of the area have name signs, though, so I took the liberty of naming some of the areas myself. Furthermore, the Brown Wool is hidden at the very bottom of the intersection, in a rather obscure place – I was able to find it, but I can see a lot of people missing it. This intersection is fine. Nothing special but at least it looks nice.
Rating – 7/10
Void Zone(Blue wool):
As far as void areas go… I thought this one was okay! We FINALLY had some custom mobs (speed-boosted zombies and spiders), making the area feel tense and threatening for the first time in a while. The area is short enough to not overstay its welcome, which was good. Again, there isn’t anything wrong with this area. It could have used more loot to make up for the whole “void” thing, but other than that, I thought it was fine! The fortress at the end is the best part, being fun to tackle and a good challenge for the end of the map.
Rating – 7/10
Bedrock zone(Green wool):
This area began with a 2-block high and full of random bedrock blocks. Throughout were zombie spawners. It sounds simple, but it created an interesting dynamic: While you’re trying to get through, the zombie spawners will quickly spawn many zombies, forcing you to move in ways so as not to get cornered while also trying to reach your objective. The only problem was, well… we have diamond armor at this point. Getting caught by the zombies isn’t really a threat at all.
Once we make it through that, we have another area of bridges suspended above void. It’s roughly the same challenge as blue, deal with projectile and melee enemies while being only a few hits away from a void death. I had hoped to get something different for this last area. There’s nothing special to say about it, other than void.
Rating – 6/10
Netherrack Zone(Purple Wool):
This area felt like a rather generic final area. A big netherrack area with a lot of custom enemies – though none of them memorable or notable – and a lot of spawners. There are a few notable points, such as at the start, when it offers you a “choice” between blaze protection (an iron chestplate with Fire Prot 3) and skeleton protection (an iron chestplate with Proj Prot 3). Of course, I have diamond armor with regular protection, so I needed neither. The final part puts you in a huge room and gives you ladders and blocks with which to scale a giant obsidian pillar to make it to the wool box at the top. It’s been done before, but at least it was challenging and felt epic! As long as you take the corners of the pillar, things will be fairly easy. This area felt more like filler than a real inspired area – there was so little unique about it. A good note to mapmakers – make sure all your areas have a clear idea behind them, or something that makes it unique. Don’t just churn out areas in the middle just so you can meet the standard CTM 16 wool mark. If you see no point to making a whole new area, you can always put another wool in one of your older areas and add onto it. This area just didn’t feel inspired or necessary at all, and this isn’t the first area in the map that’s felt that way.
Rating – 5/10
Final Dungeon(Red and Black wool):
To begin, we had an incredible build-up. One of the areas branching off of I4 had a book telling you about the final dungeon: Once you were in, there was no going out. Your spawn was set. You only had the gear you could carry in your inventory, plus anything in your enderchest. Then, to enter, you had to throw that info book into a fire.
Once you were inside, you would be greeted with what is pictured. Now, the intro for the map on the forums said that BTV3 would be a “survival based” map, where you had to scavenge for resources. Yet, I never had to farm once during my whole time playing the map. This is the only area where I actually felt like I was in a survival map, moving from island to island, gathering resources. Now, considering we’re cut off from our main base, and all our backup gear, it could be an incredible risk to have our last area be “bridging over void”. But it works. Why? Because the map gives you loot. Loot like there’s no tomorrow. All the loot you could want! Chests full of swords and armor! The islands have wood, coal, and iron deposits to mine! And better yet, this area also contains an item that totally changes things, my favorite item I have ever received in a CTM: The Void Net. As long as you hold it in your inventory, it will “catch” you if you fall into the void. The book that came with it implied it would wear out with use, and sometimes it would be buggy and fire off prematurely, but it saved my life several times over, and I didn’t even end up breaking it – though I got at least 40 uses out of it, many. It was the best.
That said. The area is long. REALLY long. Islands go off in both direction, and expand outwards for QUITE a ways. It took me several hours to beat the area. I liked the concept of slowly getting more and more OP resources while you moved from island to island, but if this area doesn’t strike you as fun, it can wear you down very fast. Also… it looks terrible. Bedrock and some blocks that aren’t bedrock sometimes. Definitely a bad aesthetics score here. This area has a lot of custom mobs, some of which are fun (a miniboss skeleton with a punch bow, but the skeleton can’t move), some of which are crap (“boomtown” creepers that instantly explode), but at least it keeps things feeling varied. At the end of it all, of course, you have the final black wool dungeon. It’s made up of multiple parts – a castle with too many enemies to beat any way other than sprinting through, a sewer section so easy it feels like a breather, and one final, last, desperate descent to the wool, on wooden platforms with blazes everywhere – and it all felt like a good, epic finish.
This was a good dungeon. I liked it. It could’ve been shorter, but I had fun. It was good. I want to see more like this.
Rating – 8/10
CONCLUSION:
Beneath The Void 3… is a good map. Is it a great, amazing map? No. Did it have some real effort put into it, and managed to be a cut above most of the maps I review here? Yes! It improves significantly on the previous maps – though the mob spam problems and wonky loot distribution haven’t been completely excised, almost every other area has seen some real improvements. The difficulty remains consistent throughout, rather than going all over the place. While the final area in a lot of maps of this type can be a disappointment, this map’s final area was actually a really good challenge! The one thing that was really hit-or-miss in this map would definitely be the aesthetics. Some areas, like A Dark Knight, looked fairly inspired, while other areas used simple, bland, trite block variations like the area I dubbed “Netherrack Zone” – it’s a meaningful name! But the effort of the aesthetics in any given area also indicated how much inspiration had gone into the area as a whole. Several of the areas could have been removed with very little lost, they were just so generic! I would have rather seen second wools in areas like The Dark Knight rather than the “Netherrack Zone” or “The Quarry”. In terms of functionality, there was about as much redstone in this map as there was in BTV2 – that is, plenty powering teleporters and intersections, but not much used to spice up the areas you fought through. However, all of it worked much better than the last map. I had few technical problems this time around.
So, overall… should you play it? Well, again, if you liked the previous ones at all, you’ll like this one the best. If you’ve played through all the “major” maps and are looking for a lesser-known one to fill your time, this one might be your jam. It depends. Soon, we’ll see how the FOURTH one in the series holds up…
Preface: Beneath the Void 4 – the final map in the 4-part series! Or at least, the final map today – though the thread for them has been dead for quite some time now. Considering the slow but sure improvement of the previous maps, you’d think the fourth one would have been where it all REALLY came together. But despite that… the map was actually very poorly received! Not a lot of people said they enjoyed it, as compared to Beneath The Void 3. Where did it go wrong? Did it improve or didn’t it? Well… let’s take a look through this review and walk through the areas. How does it measure up to the other maps? Maybe we can find out what happened.
Spawn:
Alright. The previous maps had an above-average number of command blocks compared to most maps I play, and this map REALLY goes whole-hog with it. The spawn is powered by a lot of command blocks, with options rooms, and appearing/disappearing corridors. At the very end of the third map, you were given a choice between completing the monument or becoming one with the void – and this map actually has a very interesting continuation of that, starting you in the final choice room from BTV3! That said… if you hadn’t been playing the maps up to that point like I had, it probably would have just been confusing.
Once you got all the the options set up, the map teleported you to a… class selection area? In the map’s description on the forums, it mentioned that it was a very “experimental” map, and this certainly qualifies. The choice of the classes is set up with a book philosophically waxing about the choices we make, and whether they’re bad or good (I’ll talk about this “choice” theme throughout the map, and how it’s totally forgotten about). You have 3 chests, and inside each one was a book with a class name. Now, the map very much has multiplayer in mind with its design – not just here, but at other parts of the map, too. This class system supports up to 3 players, and the clear intent is to have different players fill different “roles”. Despite that, the classes don’t mean all that much – all you get is a book that lets you use specific raw materials to craft various items – some aren’t worth it, or replaced entirely by what you get in chests. A few later on may have been useful – though, I didn’t see them all, we’ll get to that later.
I grabbed the Alchemist book, expecting there to be a class description inside. Nope, that was my choice! We’re Alchemists now! Other than that, though, the setup for this map is very well-done, very cool. It looks nice and flashy and does do a good job of getting you excited for what’s to come. Now, for the actual map to start…
Rating – 8/10
Starting Area(White wool):
This place is interesting. The map definitely kicks off strong, throwing you into a strange environment with nothing but your class book, useless on its own. It gives you wood and coal and other materials you need to beat the area, and it feels like a really nice, “lite survival” starting area. The main threat throughout is natural spawns, which can be frustrating in their large numbers, but they’re hardly impossible to beat. There’s even a fairly clever touch, in that parts of the area contain some of the materials you’d need to make a few basic recipes with your class book hidden in the environment. Once you reach the white wool, you’re immediately teleported out of the area forever, which surprised me. There isn’t anything irreplaceable there, but I’d still like to be able to go back… all in all, it’s a good starting area. It sets a nice tone for the rest of the map.
Rating – 8/10
Monument/Dimension Cube:
This functions as the map’s “intersection” – standard intersections are completely abandoned, replaced entirely by teleporters. As you beat more areas and get more wool, you’ll unlock different “versions” of the intersection, with different teleporters. It’s a neat idea, and not a bad one, either. It works fine and isn’t particularly clunky. The monument is also interesting – every time you place a wool down, you’ll receive a special item to commemorate your achievement. These ranged from “good useful items” to “random crap”. For example, White wool gives out “White Wooly”, a Smite 2 stone sword.
Each version of the intersection save the last also contains a side area – the first one is a lush place full of trees. Attempting to farm here reveals that the tick speed has been sped up – that means that when you chop a tree, the leaves decay almost instantly, and crops/trees grow almost immediately, too!
Despite everything that this place has, the one place it lacks is a major, useful base. Since there’s a lot of block replacement here, if you aren’t careful, chests you placed could get overwritten! Knowing this, I built my base in the side area of the first version of this place… but not everyone going into the map will know this. It should have been made clear by that map that you have to be careful where you build your base!
Other than that, while not perfect, this intersection definitely feels… unique. I haven’t seen much like this before – and that’s probably something I could say for a lot of this map.
Rating – 7/10
Peaceful Valley(Orange wool):
This place… almost felt like it was designed to serve a story purpose, rather than a gameplay one. So let’s talk about the story. It spends most of its time following the “Bavarian” civilization and its people, and their journey through the world. I’ll tell you more as it develops, but for the beginning part, they settled in “lush lands full of resources” which serve as our starting areas. This area’s story is that it is the world before it was settled, devoid of both people and resources. For that reason, this area feels far more like an environment to gather resources in than an area to conquer – still no spawners, only natural mobs, and a whole lot of chests with useful items scattered about. It’s an interesting area to explore, but we sort of already did this with the first area. This area is even easier, with even less challenge! We haven’t been going on long enough to need a break just yet. The next area will hopefully make good on the promise made by the map’s spawn and first area.
Rating – 5/10
Mysterious Mines(Yellow Wool):
Our very first maze area! The setting is fairly simple, a long series of interconnected mineshafts making up a giant maze which we needed to solve to reach the wool. Now, throughout many CTMs I’ve played, mazes of this type tend to fail in 2 different ways: One, they don’t put any loot in the maze so it feels unsatisfying. In this, the map does fine. The maze has plenty of good things in it to reward you for every wrong turn you take. Two, the entire maze is the same. And here… the map completely fails. See the picture up there? That’s the whole maze. There’s the occasional spawner, and the natural mob hordes, but nothing really challenging that actually changes up the gameplay. It’s just 15-30 minutes of the exact same hallways. It doesn’t even switch it up when you make it to the wool, it just has two spawners instead of one! That said, I do have to give the area some credit – it at least has the good courtesy to teleport you out once you have the wool. But that doesn’t change the fact that this area gets very boring, very fast. It should have either have different variations of rooms rather than the same cut-and-paste hallway, or be shortened down to a 5-minute jaunt.
Rating – 4/10
Jungle Chasm(Magenta wool, kkraft’s head):
This area starts out looking very… square. The MCedit brush strokes are fairly obvious here. It’s very similar to the last area, in that the main threat is natural spawns and some generic mob spawners. The regular spawners come in small numbers, only one or two at a time, and are un-primed, so I can usually destroy them before they have a chance to do anything. However… this threat is not equivalent to our gear level. At this point, my gear is full chain armor with some iron mixed in, enchanted tools, a power II bow, a Smite 2 Unbreakable gold sword… Basically, I’m ready to handle larger numbers of enemies and custom mobs. But these areas are quite in opposition to the mob spam of previous maps – in fact, they almost feel too empty!
The area does at least change the environment a little (descending a cliff, going through a cave…), but rarely changes the enemies you encounter or their numbers, making it feel like the same. The one exception is a brief fortress-type area at the back, with kkraft as a miniboss and some good loot. Still, the spawners there were unprimed, and kkraft is locked away in a little room, so it was still incredibly easy. I understand if the map is trying to make a really steady difficulty curve that starts off far on the lower end, but these earlier areas are so simple, they’re hardly holding my attention. It doesn’t need to be difficult, but we do need something to do or a problem to solve in the earlier areas to keep us engaged.
Rating – 4/10
Castle Sewers(Light blue wool, Casamuel’s head):
Deaths: 1 (Natural mob swarm, aided by witch poison)
Remember at the beginning of the map, there was that book I mentioned, playing up “choices” as the theme? This is one of the few areas where I felt like that was used fairly well. You have three different paths to choose from to attack the castle in the picture: Take one of the cliffs on opposite sides and fight through the castle, or attack head-on and enter the titular Castle Sewers. It isn’t really three options so much as two, since the cliff paths are more-or-less the same thing. Despite the good idea of giving you multiple ways to invade a castle, neither path is particularly interesting. The Cliffside paths have you smashing through barricades with spawners behind them, and it gets repetitive very quickly – it doesn’t last long at least. The sewer path is pretty much a straight shot through the forest to the sewers, but once you’re inside them, it’s ridiculously easy – there are spawners in the walls and floors, but they aren’t primed, so you can easily light up the 3x2 sewer corridors. Even if they do spawn, it isn’t cave spiders or silverfish or anything you’d expect in a sewer – it’s just regular zombies and skeletons. The sewers drop you off right at the wool and are incredibly easy to get through. Which is a pity, because the castle part you go to through the cliff options is probably the most interesting part of the area. It’s nice-looking, with all your standard castle fare – spawners under pillars, and all that. Still, we’re just too strong to have much trouble with only a handful of generic enemies. The only interesting or engaging challenge in the entire area is Casamuel’s miniboss fight, where he’s backed up by cave spiders – but it ends too soon. This entire area is repetitive and easy. It looks nice, and the basic concept is interesting, but that’s really it.
Rating – 5/10
Cavern of the Gods(Lime wool):
A very dark desert… chock full of natural spawns, too! In this area, we finally got a custom mobs: Zombies with stone swords and leather helm/boots. They’re hardly tougher than normal zombies, and since the spawners aren’t primed they don’t have much of a chance to spawn, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction! Aside from that, this area has little interesting. Lots of houses filled with loot, a handful of spawners, and a neat-looking but mostly harmless little pyramid at the end. There was a room with six spawners in it, but with none of them primed, I could simply smash them before they did anything.
Rating – 5/10
Old Fountain of Youth(Gray wool):
This area actually put up a fight! Sure, it was mostly from the insane hordes of natural spawns, but it did put up a fight! There were more custom mobs here, though none of them anything special, just regular enemies with some armor. The odd thing about this area was that it was really short; none of the areas in the map so far have been particularly long, but this area stood out as especially small. At the end, we had the “fountain of youth” as a very brief water section with a few guardians. All in all, this area was fine. Not particularly bad or good.
Rating – 6/10
As our wool reward for this area, all recipe books were upgraded to a level 2 version. My old recipe book let me make instant healing 1 splash potions, and instant damage 3 splash pots. My new one lets me make all that plus a strength potion and a book that heals all players (I’m playing alone). I’m happy that I have a book to make potions, but the map itself has provided plenty of potions – I’m not at a shortage! I know that the warrior’s book can make weapons and armor, but the map has plenty of that, too. The enchanter can make books of enchanting, but we’ve found those in chests as well! By now, my main problem with how the classes work has become clear: There’s no real use for them, or rather, no need to use them! The map’s chests alone provide all I could need and more. I don’t need a book to help me craft extra supplies.
When a player hears the word “class” they generally think of gear or abilities, rather than crafting specializations. Crafting specializations is all the classes are at their core, so that’s what they should be called.
(Misplaced Picture :C)
Six Feet Under(Pink wool, Dinnerbone’s head):
This area was very, very tiny. A simple desert cave that went around a corner, had a building, then the wool was right under it. The weird thing about this area was, it was absolutely CHOKED with regular enemies. Just CHOKED with them! There were tons! I slaughtered more, but more just came! I didn’t stay too long, so I’m not sure whether they were all just extreme amounts of natural mobs, or spawners placed in such a clever way that I didn’t notice them at all. It looks nice, at least…
Rating – 4/10
Purple(Purple wool):
This area was very… purple. It’s a dark area filled with obsidian, lava, and cobwebs. It’s very hard to see, actually! The majority of this area didn’t have spawners, just the usual hordes of natural spawns… however, at some points, there were blaze spawners hidden in the walls. The… obsidian… walls. Really, it was just best to keep moving throughout the entire thing! The first part, progressing through caves like you see above, wasn’t particularly interesting. The second part, however, changed things up; it was a volcano! The approach and climb of the volcano was a good, tense fight, with lava and blazes and other enemies around the whole way. But once you reach the top, all that tension dissipates… I was expecting something to fight inside the volcano, but there’s nothing there except the wool. Overall, this area did at least have one interesting thing! If the entire area was a huge climb up a bigger volcano, then it would have been much more interesting. Venturing through dark, obsidian, cobweb-filled caves might be a little challenging but it isn’t particularly new or exciting.
Rating – 6/10
The Pillars of Creation(Cyan wool):
Deaths: 3(Charged creeper blasts)
The difficulty here increased significantly! For once, we had less natural spawns, but they were replaced with NEW horrible creatures…
The landscape was a very odd, not-good-looking block variation of ice, clay, bedrock, and obsidian. The setting was a giant plain with the titular pillars jutting up out of the ground everywhere. But the plains themselves contained nothing – nothing but holes in the ground leading to caves. In those (many) caves was loot, and deep down… the wool. I like the design of having lots of separate caves containing loot connected by a large main area, so that you can explore as much or as little as you care to. That said… the main area felt almost too big, and too empty. Like there was too much space between the caves which contained the actual challenges, making them hard to find. The caves were different and unique at first due to the crazy mix of custom mobs, and managed to even be a good challenge for once! However, after you’ve seen the first few, you’ve seen all of them – they don’t vary that much, and the cave with the wool is just a longer version of all the other caves. All in all, this area had a good challenge, but the caves still needed more variance, and the giant plain in the center could be cut down to size – just a little.
Rating – 6/10
Rising Waters(Light gray wool, Beto’s head):
This area… well, it did look fairly nice, for a stone cave with water. After the challenge of Pillars of Creation, this area was astonishingly easy by comparison. The enemies consisted of custom mobs, but it seems to be the same bunch of custom mobs we’ve been fighting from previous area. We have: Invisible boot-wearing skeletons and zombies, lightly-armored enchanted bow skeletons, and a few other ones – none of them really stand out, and a lot of the spawners they come from are on “rotation”, meaning they spawn a different random mob each time. Not only does seeing the same few custom enemies after a few areas get boring, none of them are even particularly challenging. They’re just… slightly more dangerous than your common fodder, that’s all. None of them have any real identity, so they all sort of blend together as a generic mass of random enemies.
There wasn’t anything particularly bad or good about this area – it wasn’t very interesting, but it did end fairly quickly, as most of the areas in the map do.
Rating – 6/10
I think I should talk about the story here. To keep you updated: The Bativian civilization had to leave the lush, fertile land they had at the start, because of a crippling drought. The areas so far appear to have been places they tried to settle, but failed… but I wouldn’t know, because the amount of lore books has been steadily decreasing! Dimension Cube/Intersection 1 had 4 areas, and 3 of them had lore books explaining about the area. Intersection 2? No books at all. And for Intersection 3, this is the only area with a lore book! We’ve also gotten one every time we’ve unlocked a new intersection, but that’s not a lot… I don’t expect a ton of story, I know it’s a nice bonus. It just feels bad to have consistent lore books for the first parts of the map only for them to suddenly dry up and disappear halfway through. Maybe the lore books dried up… just like the Bativian’s resources did??
On The Edge(Red wool, Grumm’s head):
At least this place wasn’t boring! The main gameplay of the area consists of a levels-type ordeal – you have layers of floating block floors, with so many holes you have to parkour constantly to stay on top, and you don’t want to be sent down plummeting to the floor because the good stuff and your way out are at the top. It’s a good concept with the potential for some exciting gameplay, and this area delivers… okay. The spawners spam huge amounts of mobs, with lots of projectiles (skeletons/blazes), and it’s VERY HARD to stay on top of anything. Many of the spawners seem to be sped up, and while you’re fighting on one level, you’re in range of spawners on the levels above and below you… basically, the mob spam in this area piles up VERY fast, and there’s almost no safe places to retreat to to clear out the mobs. Any platforms you want you have to build yourself. Expect to have to retreat several times just to not have too many blazes to realistically avoid. Furthermore, there isn’t really any penalty when you do fall down, save fall damage – the bottom is nice solid ground, and the mobs are the same on most of the levels – if each level had a differing theme and a different mob, with things slowly getting worse as you fell… that would make this area a lot cooler. As it is, it’s a lot of mob spam but the area doesn’t pack much punch.
Rating – 6/10
I should mention that around this point, I got the last upgrade for my class recipe book. How the command blocks work for the recipe book is, after unlocking the upgrade, when you hold an old recipe book, it will take it from you, and give you a new better recipe book. How it worked for ME is that it took away my old recipe book… but didn’t give me the new one. Turns out, when you lose your recipe book, whether it be to fire, lava, or glitch command blocks, you can NEVER get it back. Nobody knows why you couldn’t have just had a button that gives you the most recent one you’ve unlocked. But that’s how it is. Of course, I hadn’t been needing or using it before, and I didn’t need it after, either. Add it to the pile of reasons why classes aren’t really important at all.
On a Pedestal(Green wool):
Finally, we had an area a cut above the areas! This place’s gimmick was… fairly similar to that of “On The Edge”. This time, you have to navigate hole-filled bridges, dotted with pillars full of mobs. It’s manageable, but if you fall down, you’ll end up in a much worse place chock-full of tons of high-level custom enemies. It’s a good concept, and it could easily have been the entire area. Sadly, it’s only the first half, and the second half involves a lot of pillaring up while being fired upon by blazes and ghasts – something I’ve done before at least 5 times. One of which was in the “Netherrack Zone” from BTV3. I should note that for a lot of the later-game areas, while the gameplay gets more intense, many of the areas abandon aesthetics and are made up of insane nonsensical block variations. I mean… look at this picture. It doesn’t look good when it’s this dark, and it doesn’t look any better lit up with torches. It’s a pity, too, because the hand-crafted areas kkraft makes oftentimes look really good! Despite that, this area has had the best gameplay for a while.
Rating – 7/10
Main Street(Brown wool):
A neat troll area. It seems like just a road over void with too many blazes and ghasts, but… none of the enemies will ever move or attack you. A nice break before the final areas.
Rating – 7/10
Platform to Platform(Blue wool, jeb_’s head):
Red wool had you fighting and parkouring on a sparse hole-filled field of blocks, on multiple layers. Green wool had you fighting and parkouring on a sparse hole-filled field of blocks, moving from bridge to bridge. Now blue wool has us fighting and parkouring on a sparse hole-filled field of blocks… immediately above void. Not only do most of these areas seem to be going in reverse difficulty as we move down the wool monument, the three non-troll areas of the fourth intersection all use the same basic gameplay concept! Is it a bad one? Absolutely not! But… it would be nice to see something different…
On its own merits: This area is really REALLY stressful and tense. Not from drawing you in with super-intense combat, but artificial tension added by having you only one finger slip away from being sent spiraling into infinite void. I count myself lucky I didn’t go into void once in this area. It was luck, and also the fire resistance potions I had on the entire time to protect against the blaze hordes. Those helped too.
As you can see, you have to parkour your way from safe-er obsidian platform to obsidian platform. Many of them have not-unwelcome loot on them, and also enemies. Such as punch skeletons. And spider swarms. And ghasts with buffed fireball explosion power. Also, there are potions randomly falling from the sky for no particular reason. Which would be fine if there was some way to predict or avoid them, but considering the position of parkouring over void this area puts you in, dodging potions isn’t very plausible. This place is by far the most difficult area in Intersection 4, and if you did the areas in the “right” order, it would be a massive difficulty spike from Intersection 3! It was really intense, and I had fun with it – though only because I managed to stay above the void - , but it feels like too much! Of all the areas, this one could stand to be toned down a little!
Rating – 6/10
The Final Area(Black wool):
This area re-used the same concept as Beneath The Void 3, but added a caveat: In addition to being cut off from your base entirely, it also put you in a different starting area depending on which class you picked – the areas reconnected, meaning you would “meet up” with your scattered allies as you moved forward. But… it only works if you’re playing the map with friends! People trying to play in singleplayer don’t get much love here. So I missed out on that aspect of the area, because I always play maps solo.
The actual area itself was probably my favorite area in the entire map. It’s a long, brutal trek forward, with you trying to make it to the black wool with every elite mob you’ve seen so far resisting you every step you take. Instead of bridging to void island after void island, you’re advancing through a variety of different environments. One bad thing I noticed is that there were a few TOO many natural spawns, especially around the place the map dropped me into. Thankfully, it ceased once I got further into the area. The area’s lowest point was definitely the final part – a redux of the very first area you entered, but with most of the spawners swapped out for elite custom mobs, and the loot left untouched. It would be interesting if only the original area’s basic structure was used and a lot was changed to add tons of new stuff to the area, but the only major thing changed was that the floor was removed for the wool room – meaning you’ll need to bridge the void while under fire from ghasts and blazes and things. Not fun, and I’ve done it before a million times. Once you make it, you’re teleported back to the monument, and… that’s it!
I liked this area. The ending was something of a disappointment, but I had fun with it overall, even without friends.
Rating – 8/10
Hall of Past Maps:
Unlocked at the third “dimension cube”, this place contains snapshots of some past areas. Such as:
Frozen Tundra
Mayan Ruins
Stairs to heav-Hell
Village Swamp
Void Walkway
Spider Cavern
Each one was unlocked as you placed more heads on the head monument. The area choices seemed rather odd – the majority of them actually codified some of the problems of the past maps, rather than being their best areas. In each one, you would be teleported through parts of the area in question – all while being held in a barrier-block cage, so essentially spectator mode. This seems to accomplish two purposes: One, advertising the other maps, two, giving nostalgia value. Since of course I’ve played the others in a row to get to this one, I should get the nostalgia value, but… I don’t think this place adds anything at all. It’s just letting you see some areas, but that doesn’t really tell you anything. Now, if it had let you play a short segment themed after the past area in question, and given a reward at the end, then it could have been something really cool. But the hallway in the map doesn’t even give you any sort of reward for finishing it! It just comes off as pointless.
This wasn’t an area, just one of the side-areas for the Dimension Cube, but I still wanted to talk about it, so I’m not going to give it a number rating.
Conclusion:
And… that’s the end! We’re done with every map of Beneath The Void! 1, 2, 3, and 4! As of writing, there aren’t any more… but if a 5 is ever released, you bet I’ll review it! Now, before we actually go and talk about how this map compares to 3 and all that… there’s a few things about the map I haven’t found a good place to mention, but would still like to talk about.
The Scrolls: Throughout the map, you were given special books called scrolls. When thrown on the ground, they would activate a special effect. These effects provided a ton of functions, and the scrolls made up a good portion of loot in the map. These scrolls generally went into a few main categories: A select few scrolls have good, useful effects that I like (Book of Safe Keeping – summons an enderchest to store things in), several have good, small effects but come in large numbers and are generally useless after you have a few stored up (Book of Charm – grants 10 XP levels). Then, there’s everything else – almost totally useless scrolls. For example, a lot of the scrolls have combat use (Book of Instability – weakens mobs around you), but, for that reason, you need them on your hotbar to get good use out of them. The problem: You’re FAR better off with potions than you are with scrolls. Even the more powerful ones are dwarfed by the all-purpose utility of just having a potion of instant health II to use instead. For that reason, scrolls are an interesting mechanic, but there really isn’t a reason to get into them and use a lot of them.
The Head Monument: The head monument has been a staple of every BTV map. In 1 and 2, there were spawners that spawned minions with the heads guarding chests containing the heads in side-rooms. This mechanic was at its best in BTV3, with the head enemies being persistent mobs located in the middle of the areas as “minibosses” of sorts, generally being more powerful than the standard fare and making things more interesting when they showed up. In this map, all the heads are locked behind iron bars or in side-rooms, and they won’t fight you unless you go fight them. They’re still interesting encounters, but now they’re wholly optional, and I feel like that takes something away from them. This was the only BTV map where I actually managed to complete the head monument, though!
The Story: This map is the only map I’ve played so far with enough story to get a story rating that isn’t N/A! However, the story is just… forgotten about towards the end. For the fourth copy of the dimension cube, we have lore books in 2 of the 4 areas. They each describe how the Bativians were looking in holes in the bedrock – in the void – for places to settle, and how they had to fight through hell and back just to survive down here, and still couldn’t find a place to settle. And then? It just… doesn’t continue. There weren’t any lore books in the final area, at least no that I found. I wasn’t ultra-thorough but if it was hidden anywhere designed to be found by everyone, I would have seen it. We’ll never know what happened to the Bativians or their efforts to colonize the void. Nobody will know. It’s a pity.
Overall, this map… well, go back and look at my numeric ratings for a second. You’ll notice that for most of the areas, it’s a mire of 5s, 6s, and 4s, with the occasional 7 or 8. It doesn’t really go much lower or higher. There’s nothing catastrophically wrong with this map. No part of it is truly terrible or rage-inducing. It’s just… boring. A lot of parts of the map are boring. You have classes, but they hardly do anything. In the early areas, you only fight natural spawns despite your gear being far above their level, meaning they get slaughtered very easily. The custom mobs up their game as time goes by, but many of the custom enemies were repeated throughout the areas, and are never really “introduced” so much as just showing up. Many of the custom mobs are so random they feel more generic! Despite the fact that I fought the same ones so often, I can hardly remember any of them! On the aesthetics side, while there are exceptions, most of the areas are essentially just caves with weird block variations. They don’t look all that great. For functionality, most of the stuff in the map did work fine – the scrolls were even set up so that they wouldn’t all activate if you were to die and drop them in a deathpile – but the map taking my class recipe book away from me is a huge point against it.
This map’s main, core problem is that it seemed to focus on having unique command block mechanics over having a good, challenging to map to use them in. There’s no reason to use most of the scrolls – I’m fine without them. Same for the class system! The teleporters, dimension cubes, and the monument is all very cool… but none of it matters at all, because the areas they leads to aren’t interesting. There are a few exceptions, but at the start, the areas have their own identity but are generally boring. By the end, many of the areas have devolved into random block and mob variations to the point where it would be hard to tell them apart! The last intersection of the map almost felt like playing one continuous area, rather than many separate ones… and that area went on too long.
So, should you play it? It depends… I wouldn’t say it’s a COMPLETE waste of your time, but several of the mechanics – such as the classes, a few scrolls, and the final area – are really meant to be played in multiplayer. This map would be at least something of a fun ride with friends, but might not be the best use of your time if you want to play all alone.
the class selection in BTV4 is broken in multiplayer. don't bother.
I know that this thread is very, very dead, but I wrote reviews of all 4 of the BTV maps, and I thought I should put them here. WARNING: Big posts with walls of text, spoilers, and images ahead.
Beneath The Void
6/13/17
Made by kkraft234
For 1.5.x
Link
Style: Area-based
Preface:
This map is the very first in a 4-part series. I’ll play through each map in the series, and review each one, examining how the maps change as we go on through the series – and how they changed, for better or for worse, as the maps go on.
The Humble Apprentice:
Deaths: 1(Fail fall)
It’s not too special of a starting area, but its hardly a bad one. There’s plenty of loot to get and lots to do – it even has a small optional side-dungeon with some loot hidden within! The map gives you some leather armor, tools, and food to start you off, with wood around, and if you search you can find –
…Yeah. The loot distribution in this map can be best described as “an unceasing flood of wonderful things”. Chest filled with lots of good random loot are placed very liberally, and you’re unlikely to ever want for anything, Which is good, because of reasons I’ll discuss in the next area.
In any event, moving on from this area to the intersection is no trouble at all.
Rating – 7/10 Good start.
Intersection 1: Full of annoying vines for no real reason, but otherwise not a bad place.
Rating – 6/10
The Mysterious Castle(orange wool/Sethbling’s head):
The map continues to give an unceasing flood of amazing things in every chest. However, the mob spam begins – the outside of the castle is dotted with several spawners, making the approach to the castle fairly difficult. But the actual inside of the castle has a huge number of regular spawners – making it incredibly enemy-filled.
Let’s talk a little bit about how minecraft’s spawners work. They spawn theoretically infinite numbers of whatever type of entity they’re set to spawn – but only in specific conditions (for most enemies, those conditions can be summed up as “being in darkness”), AND while the player is near them. By default, a spawner has a range of about 16 blocks in every direction. When you’re in that radius, they’ll start spinning up and preparing to spawn things, and when you’re outside it, it stops – but retains how “close” it was to spawning its next batch of entities. Because of this, when you’re in a CTM area, not all the spawners are active at once, only the ones immediately around you. Because of this, most good CTM maps are designed so that when you’re fighting one grouping of spawners, you’re fighting just that grouping – the others are far away, or placed just close enough to give you a sense of urgency in destroying the one you’re on. This map is filled with fortresses and close-together rooms – and it lacks that balance. In this area, while you’re fighting the outside spawners, the ones in the castle are spawning. While you’re fighting the inside spawners, the spawners in the wool room and roof are spawning. Because of this, you’re always fighting TONS of enemies – it adds up quickly, and hordes build up surprisingly fast with minecraft’s spawner rules.
\With all the enchanted gear, it’s easy to cut through the mobs, but there’s so MANY of them, they’ll bring you down if you don’t move fast. There’s so much gear, even at this early part of the map, that it isn’t a big deal in any case. It has a pretty good design for an earlygame area, but there are so MANY mobs…
It also introduces the map’s secondary “bonus” objective, which is to collect the heads of various youtubers in chests guarded by custom mobs. I’ll discuss the heads in the conclusion.
Rating – 6/10 Spam-tastic
Ender pearls(magenta wool):
I liked this area! It had an interesting concept: There are many islands with mobs and chests full of amazing things, and you can use enderpearls to travel between them. It doesn’t give you quite enough enderpearls to explore them all without blocks to supplement, but that’s okay. The wool is easy to get, and once you have it, you can continue harvesting the area for as much or as little loot as you want depending on your patience. It’s the sort of place you could come back to later with a water bucket, if you felt like getting everything you could out of it. It also introduces some custom mobs, such as sword-carrying skeletons and a few other novelties. Kind of gimmicky, but it mixes things up enough to be interesting.
Rating – 7/10 Unique.
Overrun Watch Tower(white wool):
I didn’t find this area until I went back to the start – ah well!
From the outside, the watch tower looks kind of nice, even if the area around it is just a giant stone hole. On the inside, the place plays almost exactly like The Mysterious Castle – huge numbers of spawners and mob spam, with tons of loot to balance it all out. When played in the day, the daylight will neutralize the greater number of spawners, but this place would be a very hard beginning if you tried it at night. For that reason, I’d say the area could be improved immensely by toning down the spawners but putting it in darkness.
Rating – 6/10
Stairway to heav-hell(Light blue wool/Etho’s head):
This area was where the map’s mob spam began to reach its height. This area was simple stonebrick rooms, with nothing but TONS of spawners. Spawners embedded in the walls. Spawners in pillars. Even spawners lying right out in the open! Spawners that would activate as you tried to destroy other spawners! The mobs became an unceasing flood if you weren’t constantly moving forward (due to the overlapping spawner ranges discussed), and even with the amazing armor you had, and chests that provided even MORE great things placed every few blocks… the horde were still incredibly hard to cut through. For perspective, I broke 5-6 stone/iron swords just trying to cut through all the mob!
Overall, this area is more or less a distilled version of the whole map. It spams loot at you, it spams spawners, it spams enemies… it isn’t a carefully crafted experience. Even though you’re constantly in combat, it’s easy to zone out because all the mob slaughtering you’re doing starts to blur together. There’s never a break or pause, just constant destruction. If you like that, then you’ll like this map. If not, then you won’t. And I’d rather have interesting challenging situations than the mindless slaughter of this area.
Rating – 4/10
Intersection 2: A very boring intersection, clearly not designed to serve as anything but a transition.
Rating – 5/10
Back to Basics:
It’s the monument! And with it, comes a very nice base-type area – it only lacks a spot with chests to put your items, but that can be added on. It even contains something interesting; a bonus loot section where you can make a choice between 3 incredibly amazing loot chests with various specialties. The monument has everything you need, and was a very welcome rest amidst everything else. It even looked kind of nice.
Rating – 8/10
Another Day, Another Zombie(Yellow wool + Guude Head):
The mob spam problems I’ve already talked about were present in this area too, so I won’t rant about them too much. But this area is exactly what you expect it to be from the moment you walk in. A “town” with spawners shoved in every possible location. It did look okay, and the central tall building at the end was surprisingly easy compared to the rest of it. However, it doesn’t do much interesting except be filled with buildings which are filled with enemies. The mindless slaughter continues.
Rating – 5/10 It lives up to its name.
Souls of the Dead(Pink wool):
This area was one of the more interesting ones! The mob spam was toned down *slightly*, and the area had multiple interesting parts – the graveyard has custom mobs in it, such as fast-moving skeletons and invisible zombies. The mansion had witches (too many of them). There was a portion with buildings and a long-range spawner that spawned enemies at ridiculous rate, but once destroyed things cooled down. It actually tried to mix things up rather than throwing enemies at you, and I wish that this trend had continued more than it did. For that reason, it’s a better area.
Rating – 7/10
Dormatories(Purple wool, Vintagebeef’s head, PauseUnpauses’s head):
Deaths: 7(1 lava related, 3 falling related, 2 attempts to retrieve items, 1 zombie swarm cornering me)
This was really overall a terrible place. It starts with a totally random stone cave with spawners in the walls… for some reason. There’s no reason why it couldn’t just be a regular cave, serving as a short walk to the area, without tons of enemies. But that’s only the first blip on the terrible radar. The “real” area is a giant fortress, far bigger than any area we’ve seen thus far, full of twisting hallways and multiple branches, with lots of dead ends, that sticks to a main central area with stuff falling down on you from above as you ascend it. There are even more spawners than normal, and since the pathways are very close together, while you’re dealing with one, all the other paths near you are spawning more for you to deal with – retreating to reset the enemies is a must to bring things even to a manageable level!
Worse yet, this area spams custom mobs at you, rather than spamming vanilla mobs like normal – extremely durable zombies with knockback swords and Thorns armor! And they come at you in swarms! Its terrible! If they corner you, or knock you off the thin hole-filled pathways to fall into the lava below, you’re essentially immediately dead. This area alone was far, far harder than anything I faced in Hardened Fury or Brutality or any of the other “hard” maps I played! The fact that you get chests full or amazing iron gear and top-tier food the whole way doesn’t make it any better! You just die anyway! It’s a giant thoughtless mess, only balanced out by the loot distribution being an equally thoughtless giant mess! If 80% of the spawners hadn’t existed or at least exposed so I could destroy them all, then maybe it could have been better.
Rating – 2/10 A giant mess.
Intersection 4: Of all the areas to be connected to, did it really have to stem from… there’s still no teleporter, and it again clearly isn’t there to serve as anything but a transition.
The Mansion in the Woods(Cyan wool, BdoubleO’s head, GenerikB’s head):
This area began with a clump of spawners, but it was completely misleading. The actual area is surprisingly different from the norm! The first part has a few spawners that spawn massive amounts of mobs and activate from far away. The problem is, these mobs are speed-buffed skeletons, and they’re almost impossible to approach even all on their own. It spawns them faster than you can kill them, and they’ll charge out and try to slap you away before you can break the spawner. As I was building up from the top to destroy them, I had to deal with this crowd:
Still, one incredibly dangerous spawner is better than many hundreds of little spawners. The second part of the area has a smaller number of spawners than normal, spawning semi-powerful custom mobs. It actually felt like a normal area! It was somewhat fun to play! I actually liked this area! It even looked nice! A very nice break after the last one.
Rating – 7/10 Less spammy than normal!
Maze upon Maze upon Maze(Gray wool, Light gray wool, Amlup’s head):
This area began with an abandoned mineshaft, ripped straight from vanilla, filled up with spawners. It wasn’t difficult, but it was very boring. The wool was easy to find, at least. If it had been any longer it would have been much worse. But that was just a prelude to the “real” area. This entrance hides the way into the maze:
Even though it looks nice, the actual maze was a disappointment. The walls were made of leaves one block thick and were easily destroyed by the frequent creepers, spawned from spawners hidden in the ground. There was one nice touch; the whole maze being lit on fire at the end. I love to see terrible places burning down.
Rating – 5/10 The mineshaft was harder than the real maze
Diamond pit(Brown wool):
A lot of the areas we’ve seen so far have started with small, spawner-filled caves. This area initially had me wondering when the “real” area would start… but it was just a horrible, HORRIBLE spawner-filled cave the whole time. The spawners were hidden in the walls, in the floors, in an environment full of nondescript stone blocks. Even if you could see one of the buried spawners and destroy it, there were five more in your range that were spawning enemies while you were doing so. Trying to actually make the place safe was extremely frustrating with the incessant swarm of skeletons, creepers, and spiders, now with blazes and wither skeletons mixed in. The regular gear at this point was iron armor w/some diamond, and powerfully enchanted iron swords. The mobs weren’t really threatening as much as they were just really, REALLY annoying and frustrating!
When you actually made it to the “diamond pit”, it wasn’t actually a pit of diamonds… it was caves in diamond shapes shoved together. What a variation! I haven’t seen THAT before and done better! (I have, in a number of maps). The wool was guarded by a special custom skeleton, backed up by swarm upon swarm of regular skeletons, with “Vechs1” for a head. Seeing as it was very similar to Vechs head but also wasn’t “Vechz”, it should have been made clear to the player that this enemy WASN’T for the head monument.
While almost every area we’ve seen so far does at least SOMETHING right or unique, this area was just a giant cave filled with everything wrong about the map: Spawner spam too great to beat, where you can’t even find the spawners to destroy them! There was nothing redeemable about this area at all! Nothing! It was complete garbage! It’s especially disappointing to see this after having some interesting areas!
Rating – 1/10 It’s just a cave! JUST A STONE CAVE!
Iron bars(Black wool):
(The area name sign was replaced with item frames with iron bars)
This area seemed very complicated. Void stretched below, as it forced you to run on iron bars while skeletons attack you, battle on thin ore-filled stone spirals with blazes and skeleton spawners embedded in the ground. Like many areas of this nature, it doesn’t give you much to deal with these, especially since the spawners are still as hidden as always. I ended up sprinting through it all, and at the end I was surprised to find black wool! It didn’t feel special or spammy enough. Turns out that this actually WASN’T the final area – the “real” final area actually contains the green wool, going totally against the standard accepted CTM order. It’s fine to go against the norm like that, but you should indicate it to the player with a sign “This area has the wool going in the last space on the monument, but it’s NOT the final area”!
Rating – 4/10 Boring false ending
Into the Nether(Red wool, Blue wool, Zisteau’s head):
At this point, all the areas had begun blurring together. This one contained no custom mobs, just more and more normal mob spam, similar to Diamond Pit. There were big stone towers with spawners in diamond shapes on top, but little point to destroying them since there were mobs coming from so many other places. It was fairly short, so it would be easy to run through, but hard if you decided to slog it out. Red wool was right at the start, barely guarded with a few ghast and blaze spawners, and the blue wool was placed behind a miniature fortress at the end, but none of it felt particularly climactic or difficult. We’re just too strong to worry about non-custom mobs, not even the blazes, since the map starts the area by handing you tons of fire resistance 8-minute potions. The only interesting part was the end, where we got an actual lore book saying dark magic was seeping into our world, and there were some custom wither skeletons guarding a “core”. There was instructions to dig given very non-intuitively (it said dig right… WHICH RIGHT!?), to find the true final dungeon.
But before we do that, there’s a loose end.
Rating – 5/10 We’ve seen swarms too often.
Jungle Zone(lime wool):
A giant jungle area, with the wool straight at the end! This one would have been possible to play regularly, since you can see most of the spawners in the leaves. It’s a pretty normal area, with nothing special about it at all. I pretty much got the wool and got out, so I can’t say too much about it that I haven’t already said somewhere else. It was completely my fault I missed it back in Another Day, Another Zombie too.
Rating – 5/10 Can’t believe I missed it…
The Final Area(green wool):
First off, the map tells you beforehand: Make sure to play through all the other areas before this one! But the area contains the green wool, not the black wool. There’s no indication that this area contains the green wool, and some players might waste time searching for a green wool area that didn’t exist, assuming that possibly a head for the head monument is here. Either the order of the wools should have been switched around to resemble a normal map, or you should have been told, again: This area contains the green wool!
As for the actual area, it was very unexpected, but it was actually an interesting idea! The hallway lined with beacons and a few spawners appeared innocuous, but most of the beacons you see in the picture are “evil” beacons, which give off negative potion effects! This was a neat idea that I haven’t seen done in other CTMs before, and better yet, no mob spam! However, it was an incredibly easy area – the beacons only gave poison, not wither, and all you had to do was smash one of the blocks making up the beacons to disable them. Because of that, it failed to pose a real significant challenge. Still, it was at least something interesting!
Rating – 6/10 Something new
Conclusion:
Beneath the void was a giant spamfest. Almost every area was full to the brim with monster spawners. It was difficult, but more difficult in a slow, grindy way, rather than difficult in a challenging or interesting way. In the early intersections, the gameplay of the areas is so same-y they start to blend together. The loot chests dump tons of good stuff on you right from the start, so much you’ll have to make multiple trips through each area to possibly gather everything worth having. But the loot barely gets better as you proceed through the map, and I didn’t feel like I was advancing much in power. The map’s intersection structure was confused, and I ended up playing a lot of the areas out of order. If there had been clear indication of what order to play the areas in, things would have been much better. As for the head monument, it’s an interesting idea to have miniature boss-fights as a side objective, but there isn’t much indication of what is where. I sadly ended up unable to complete it.
However, despite that, you can see some clear potential in some of the map’s areas. A few feel like they have interesting ideas that could have been executed on a little better. The map’s few good moments are generally when it switches out of mob spam mode to try something else. There’s a huge gap in quality between the areas, with about 1/3 of them being interesting and 2/3 being awful.
OVERALL RATING:
Gameplay: +++++----- 5/10
Aesthetics: ++++++---- 6/10
Functionality: ++++++++-- 8/10
Story: N/A
VERDICT: ++++++---- 6/10
Beneath the Void 2
7/9/17
Made by kkraft234
For 1.7.x
Link
Style: Area-based
Preface: In my quest to play and review the entire BTV series, we’ve arrived at the second map! After the spamfest that was the first one, we’ll see whether the second one improves, or falls into the same flaws. This map is fairly modern, and does use some of 1.7’s new functionalities – but how well does it work?
Spawn: The introduction area gave me déjà vu to the last one! It’s designed almost the exact same way, and also becomes very dangerous at night. There’s plenty of loot at the onset, but its all marked and specific, giving off the impression that the map is trying to get you set up properly rather than dumping tons of stuff on you with thoughtless randomized loot. In order to make it to the intersection, you must traverse a brief cave, which again is filled with spawners, some in clumps, all hidden within the walls. This is a problem that will persist throughout the map, similar to the first – spawners hidden in walls, making them too difficult to find and destroy. Other than that, this was an okay start.
Rating – 7/10
Intersection 1: A very simple, non-dangerous intersection. Nothing special about it.
Rating – 7/10
Miner’s Expedition(White wool):
This area starts the map off on the right foot! The spawners contain some custom mobs right away, and while there are less of them, many of them are in the worst possible place… buried in the walls and floors! For the majority of this dungeon, it’s nigh-impossible to make any area completely safe, as there’s always another spawner hiding somewhere in the walls! It makes the initial part of the area and the map into a major slog when it doesn’t need to be. And it’s a pity, because in the later part of this area near the wool, it stops hiding the spawners and starts putting them out in the open like normal – and when it does that, it’s actually pretty fun to play!
The locale of the area was a simple “underground mines” area, but did add a lot of other elements into the mix, such as vines, and creeper spawners surrounded by TNT. None of it was truly new or unique, but it did feel more inspired than “stone cave #451”. The area provides plenty of good loot to help us get started out, and each chest was unique with hand-placed loot, rather than the formulaic randomized loot of BTV1, even though there wasn’t much variation in what was in the chests. The area was actually fairly long - almost TOO long. However, that could have been improved not by chopping off portions of the area, but to move the buried spawners out in the open so we could break them faster. That alone would have made the area have a faster pace.
This whole area gave off a very light “Ragecraft” vibe, though it isn’t nearly as polished as the titular series. It was actually a fairly good starting area! I hope to see more like this.
Rating – 7/10
Pharoah’s Riches(Magenta wool):
The start of this area was a simple approach to the temple. The primary thing in your way was spawner towers, small towers containing 9 spawners in a huge square on top. These spawners covered just about every mob type – creepers to blow you up, zombies to swarm you, and skeletons to shoot you down while you tried to pillar on top of them. They were challenging, but mostly because there wasn’t really any good way to approach them. One possibility to improve this would be to have overhangs in some of the area – the cliffs are already there – so you could drop down from above on top of the towers and break the spawners that way. This area also introduced a new custom mob, with golden armor, weapons, and of course, cactus heads with thorns. I could go on an entire rant about thorns, but I’ll save it for later, because there weren’t too many enemies here and the map gave plenty of food, so it was excusable. …For now.
Once you got to the second part of the area, things got interesting. The pyramid was surprisingly empty, but below it was a huge network of catacombs full of loot and monster spawners, and you’re given nothing but a half-complete map to guide you. Actually giving you a half-map of the area in a maze-type area was a neat idea, but it proved unneeded, as the maze itself was small enough that you could find the wool without needing the map. All the passages were very cramped, and if you moved too slowly the mob spam in a tight space could become overwhelming and force you to retreat – but the place is designed so that if you move quickly, it won’t become unmanageable, thankfully. Overall, this place was pretty fun to play through, at least for the second part. The first part, however, could be improved by either giving the player a good way to get on top of the spawner towers or making them less insane and more approachable.
Rating – 7/10
Mayan Ruins(orange wool):
This area was the worst one so far. The area started with a large, grassy plain leading up to a temple, filled with custom mob spawners… buried in the ground, and almost impossible to find with the very nondescript terrain. With little loot located in the outer area, it’s far better to just run through the whole thing entirely rather than trying to make it safe. Once you make it into the temple, things don’t get much better – we have another maze, with no map and 1-block-wide passages. It’s far easier to just smash your way through the walls until you find things than to navigate the maze genuinely. The maze definitely overstayed its welcome, which is sad because the previous (next?) area was actually a fairly good example of how to do a maze area! If the maze had more loot, an indication of which way to go, or was just shorter, then maybe it could have been fun. As it is, there’s no real reason to go through a bunch of 1-block-wide passages. At least the outside looks nice.
Rating – 4/10
Lava Lake Castle(Yellow wool):
Deaths: 3(1 tower swarm, 1 attempt to get items back, 1 lava fall)
The first portion of this area uses the same towers from Pharoah’s Riches, except way more of them. They have the same problems as last time, with little good ways to approach them, with skeletons shooting you down and creepers blowing you up every time you get close. Now, it’s repetitive, with almost no variety in either the towers or the situation when you approach the towers. Sure, some have less spawners and some have more, but it doesn’t change that the majority of this area is just pillaring up to destroy the spawners you need to get to, both in towers and ghast spawners located high up in pillars. Things get a little better once you make it to the actual castle (pictured), with the inside being an intense fight, with the spawners only hidden in the pillars rather than in the walls. But the buildup to get there is just so boring and repetitive!
Rating – 4/10
Spider Cave(Light blue wool):
Deaths: 4(Spider swarm)
Do note that this was not a separate area but a connection made to the last area near the end, and I named it myself. I have it separated because it’s completely different. And WORSE.
The design of this area is terribly simple. It’s a giant, relatively nondescript stone cave, with cobwebs EVERYWHERE. Within the cobwebs are spider spawners. LOTS of spider spawners. A lot of them just spawn normal spiders, but there are also special spiders which set you on fire and deal extra damage. Here’s how the area works: If you try to break the spawners, then unending swarms of dozens of spiders will knock you into the cobwebs and kill you, giving you no chance to escape, just because you stood still long enough to try and break the cobwebs. There’s so many spiders, and the spawners are surrounded by cobwebs, making them hard to get to. Your only real option is to try to run through the area as fast as possible, in the hopes of making it to the wool before the giant unending pile of spiders ends you – which they will. At the start, it hands you some getting-slapped-around-and-dying supplies (health/regen potions), but it doesn’t help at all! This area is thoughtless, and has too many enemies to attempt to make safe by destroying all the spawners. It’s terrible. It could have been improved only by toning down the amount of spawners until standing still DIDN’T result in you being surrounded by 30 of the things within seconds!
Rating – 2/10
Intersection 2:
It was an interesting intersection! It was entirely underwater, but it gave water breathing, making it bearable! There was a lot of command block text, which made a chest appear, and told me where to find a secret. The secret in question was a choice between chests full of armor or chests full of weaponry – just like the choice in the first map! Still pretty neat. However, despite the command blocks around, they didn’t tell you about the really important thing – that the monument was located in an innocuous teleporter only labeled “side area”. Even worse – and this completely ruins the intersection – the water breathing command blocks eventually stopped working, forcing me to build my own air bubbles and move from bubble to bubble. Because of that…
Rating – 4/10
Monument:
Why was this place located behind a teleporter labeled “Side area”? This whole place has a lot of neat things, like free farms built with redstone and a huge storage room area, but the setup is awkward, clunky, and somewhat confusing. Just as an example, the place is very big despite being empty, and it has three floors – however, instead of just walking up stairs to get into the floors, you have to go into a command-block powered “elevator”, and press a button to be teleported to your floor. Once there, you’d have to wait a few seconds for the wooden blocks blocking your exit to drop away, then you could actually go out into the floor you were at. It’s a neat bit of command-block magic, but… why? After you’ve seen it work a few times, it just becomes annoying to have a clunky, slow system being your main method of transportation around your base. Just use stairs if you aren’t going to do anything special with an elevator.
This is also the first point where some teleport malfunctions began, as I was teleported into a future area out of nowhere. I managed to get back to the monument, but it was very confusing. I’ll talk about it more in a moment.
Rating – 7/10
Frozen Tundra(Gray wool):
This area had an interesting concept: A big, open area with a few “puzzles” to solve with new places in them, revealed by a lore book at the start of the area. However, the big, open area you start in (pictured) is completely boring and ugly with nothing in it except your 2 critical puzzle objectives, making it feel like a pointless walk with some natural spawns to get where you need to be. As for the puzzle objectives, one of them had the redstone completely fail (I was told to walk into a fireplace to get teleported to the area, instead I just burned). Thankfully, the one that worked had the wool! It was a fairly short and simple library dungeon. Not bad, and it contained a surprising amount of command block stuff to keep things going, such as spiders with fireworks shooting out. Overall, the puzzle part was totally unnecessary, and probably should’ve been removed entirely. Just put us in the library dungeon with whatever the other thing was as a side dungeon. That, or make the frozen tundra in the area’s name a more interesting place to be. Once you made it into the library, it was a fine dungeon. The third intersection is also found here.
Rating – 7/10
Jungle Snipers(Lime wool):
This area initially had me scared of skeleton party land, but it was just a giant jungle-y plain with some spawners. The building with the wool was almost completely unguarded, and only a 30-second walk from the entrance. You were attacked by a few custom mobs, but nothing particularly difficult. It was off-putting how short it was. I can’t say much else about the area, because there really wasn’t much else of an area!
Rating – 3/10
The Faint Desert(Pink Wool):
Just like with the Frozen Tundra, this area worked as something of a “scavenger hunt”. We got 2 hints given at different places (one at the start and one further in given by an NPC – a cool event, but why?), but they were both hints for the same objective, leading to much confusion. The desert appears to be backed up by long-range spawners, but like the tundra, is also largely empty. Once you find the gravel pond, you get to the REAL area.
The real area is a neat little laboratory/maze area, but it’s very short. There are a few interesting things in it, such as some laboratory-type exhibits and another small maze, but the mobs guarding it are far too tanky (diamond armor zombies already?). This area could definitely have been improved by replacing the diamond armor mobs with less tanky, but more interesting custom enemies. Other than that, once you made it past the desert part, it was fine.
Rating – 6/10
Intersection 3: I use “intersection” here very lightly. Hidden deep within the library area in gray wool was a teleport to a small room with three colored class blocks on pedestals with area named underneath them. Like any normal player, given no books to explain what was happening, I assumed I’d found some sort of bonus monument. But no, it was the third intersection. You break the glass blocks to travel to the areas in question. It’s a neat system, but I had no idea how it worked, since the map doesn’t bother telling me. There is at least a way back to the monument, but it’s ONE-WAY… and worse, it stopped functioning after the first time I used it! Every single time you want to get here, or go back to the monument and your very nice base, you have to go through the library dungeon, then the frozen tundra, then teleport into the monument. Or in reverse if you’re heading back. It’s very poorly set up, overall. Tell the player how to access areas, and give proper, working teleporters to and from.
Rating – 3/10
Furthermore, one of the teleports was exceedingly buggy – the corrupted lands teleport. It was triggering constantly in other areas, including the monument and Under the Lava and Through the Cave.
Corrupted Lands(Light gray wool):
Deaths: 2(Mob swarms!)
This area was a giant spamfest. It does look nice, though the ceiling and walls could definitely use some work. The gameplay was not quite so good, however. Outside the building you see in the picture, the entire area is nothing but simple plains with a LOT of 2x2 spawner clusters. While trying to break down one of these mini-clusters, you’d be in range of one or even 2 other ones, and before long, the place would be filled with so many skeletons, cave spiders, and creepers you would be forced to retreat to despawn the enemies and make it bearable. I tried to make the outside a safer place, but it was honestly easier to just ignore it all and run straight into the castle – which is safer!
Once you make it inside the castle, things do get a little better. You have to run through underground staircases and corridors while assaulted by mobs occasionally, and it’s actually pretty fun! Once you make it to your goal, the castle roof, things get bad again, with more 2x2 spawner clusters serving as the primary threat guarding the wool. This area could have been improved with less, tougher spawners or more carefully-placed spawners, rather than just 2x2 boxes placed everywhere. It feels thoughtless.
Rating – 5/10
Under the Lava and Through the Cave(Purple wool):
This area was very short. A short ways in, you’re given a bunch of Fire Resist potions to swim through a lava pool. After that, there’s just a short run through a stonebrick cave with weak and uninteresting custom mob spawners buried in the walls and then you arrive at the wool! Or, that’s what I did, after the map’s badly malfunctioning positional teleports ended up taking me to the Corrupted Lands the first 5 times I tried. At the end, there’s the fourth intersection! This area could have definitely done with a length improvement, and having more challenges to overcome than just a large cave with spawners. As it is, it’s incredibly boring.
Rating – 4/10
I also made a discovery in this area. Throughout the map, I’ve seen lots of empty chests. But the majority of the chests seemed to be working, so I thought little of it. Turns out, they were actually broken random loot chests! All the chests that should’ve been randomized loot were actually empty. It does speak to this map’s loot distribution that I’m doing perfectly fine without lots of random stuff in my inventory. If the map had had as much random loot as the first one, such a bug would’ve resulted in me having nothing. I was too far in to restart and try to fix it, but know that I can’t say much about this map’s loot distribution since I only got 2/3 of the loot available. However, I should note that most of the areas after this one started relying entirely on random loot again. I had to finish the map relying mostly on loot from the earlier areas.
If you want to play the map yourself, heed this advice: The map must be played in a specific 1.7 snapshot in order for the random loot to function properly!
Stairs to Heav-Hell(Cyan wool):
Of all the area to do a rehash of, the one that was chosen was the one from that - along with The Dormitories - codified all the problems with the first map! This iteration was done… *slightly* better. There were spawners placed evenly at the first part, spawning creepers, skeletons, and other “normal” mobs, which at this point we’re butchering like they’re nothing. You follow the stairs down, explore a few side rooms, and cut through a lot of enemies. The only problem is when you reach the last room, which is just a massive cluster of spawns, natural and otherwise, and you cut through them all like they’re nothing because your gear is enchanted iron and they’re just generic mobs. This horde:
Was destroyed immediately. The mob spam is at least not particularly crippling, even if it’s just because everything is eliminated in an instant. Other than that, the only interesting thing about this area other than being a reskin of an already-used area is that it gives you an infinite flint and steel at the start and tells you to look for netherrack (there isn’t enough around to avoid using torches). After using custom mobs for a while, a reversion to “natural” minecraft enemies comes off as odd. It would again have been better to make this area stand out more with some sort of twist on the original area, aside from making it darker and more nether-y.
Rating – 5/10
Intersection 4(Brown wool): It’s a nice little intersection with a teleport back. And it does contain another “choice” thing where you get to choose between 2 good things (eternal strength until you die vs. protection 4 diamond chestplate). It also has a small side-challenge where you shoot arrows at a wooden button and when you hit it you get brown wool. A pretty good place overall.
Rating – 8/10
Target Practice(Green wool):
This area was a (small) castle filled with a bunch of spawners and broken random loot. The spawners were again regular mobs too weak to oppose us, and even though the spawners were buried in the floor, the halls were small enough I could stop them with torches. It wasn’t challenging and didn’t have anything interesting about it. Several of the areas we’ve played in a row have been nice-looking areas that have been completely devoid of interesting gameplay or challenges. This one is no different. Compared to many of the early areas, which had command blocks (like in Frozen Tundra) or at least something interesting driving them, many of the later-game areas just feel so… aesthetically inspired, yet hollow on the inside.
Rating – 4/10
Ghasts Have Nine Lives(Blue wool):
This area finally broke out of the bog for a moment, and was a genuinely interesting troll area. The map drops you into lava but is generous enough to give fire resist, and throws ghasts at you. It’s an interesting trap, and makes up the entirety of the area, which is fine. I generally expect these trolls out of brown wool, but it’s still an interesting trick regardless of what wool color it is.
Rating – 7/10
Forgotten lava Lake(Red wool):
This area was alright! You have to run on small hole-filled pathways above lava for the first portion while being attacked by ghasts. It’s an interesting challenge that manages to be a good level of difficulty and tension for an almost-final area. Once you make it into the castle at the end, the first part is totally empty, but then you descend into the area’s final challenge, a zone with tons of wither skeletons and pigmen to fight. Many of the wither skeleton spawners are surrounded by bedrock, making it annoying to fight off the hordes whilst trying to retrieve the diamond blocks and wool from the area. However, just being unable to destroy the spawners actually feels BETTER to me than having the alternative of them just being buried in the wall so it takes way too much effort to find and destroy them. That lets me focus on doing what I need to do, rather than being forced between doing my objective while hindered by hordes or burning tons of time searching for the spawners. Overall, this area wasn’t bad! It actually could’ve been a little longer!
Rating – 7/10
Beneath The Void(Black wool):
Deaths: 1(Void!)
This area was shorter than expected. It has exactly one challenge: The room you see in the screenshot. Blazes and ghasts attacking you as you have to bridge your way over void. Jumping isn’t an option thanks to the ceiling – just bridging. But it’s more complicated than it looks. The game constantly gives you blindness forever to make up for the lack of void fog. Here’s the problem. There’s no good way to approach this. Most of your options are just taken away from you. You can’t kill the blazes then push forward, because blindness doesn’t let you see them to fire back with your own bow and arrows. Bridging isn’t an option, because you’ll get fireballed straight into the void. You could try to move from island to island with your own bridges, trying to always stay with your back against the wall so you don’t get shot into oblivion. I suspect this is the intended path. However, this also doesn’t work, since blazes will eventually spawn in such numbers with the slow play that that option requires, that you’ll be criss-cross shot from a hundred directions every time you leave safety. This is a problem with a lot of “hard” maps – they think out a hard and challenging problem, but not a good way for a player to solve it. In many of those challenges, and here, the only real way to win is some form of “cheese” strategy. Enderpearls would work fine, but so would, say, the fire resistance potions you were just handed a couple areas ago. That was what I used, and it makes the entire area into something flat-out laughably easy. It’s unoriginal, and it isn’t fun. This is one of the most disappointing final areas I’ve ever seen.
Rating – 2/10
And that’s the end. We’ve won.
CONCLUSION:
This map at first seemed to solve many of the problems that came with the first map, but started to revert back to them as time went by. Mob spam was still an issue, albeit to a slightly lesser extent. It used custom mobs earlier and more often, which was a welcome change, but few of the custom mobs had much interesting about them other than being stronger than their generic variants. Like with the first map, we see a few of the areas having interesting concepts, but many are just uninspired and boring. The loot during the earlier areas contains a lot of hand-placed or named loot, but as you enter the later areas, this is switched out for more random loot chests (which all broke for me). The balance of what loot I DID get was typically fairly evenly matched with the mobs, but a few specific pieces of loot were blatantly overpowered (see: +20 Attack damage sword). Area difficulty ranged from very easy to extremely difficult in no particular curve as you moved through the wool, and it was a total crapshoot what difficulty you would get every time you entered a new place. There were some command block mechanics at play, and how much they were involved varied from area to area (they were at their strongest in the midgame, but there were far less such mechanics in the lategame). As I noted, several key command blocks malfunctioned, making things difficult to deal with at points – the most major being the water breathing for the second intersection. On the aesthetics side, many of the areas actually looked pretty good! There was some over-reliance on cave-like aesthetics, but several of the area generally varied things or had nice-looking points: The building in Corrupted Lands looks really good, for example.
Compared to the first map, overall? I’d say it’s an improvement, but it doesn’t learn quite enough from its failings. Should you play it? …Well, if you derived any enjoyment from the first, or want a map like the first but less intense than it, you might like this one. But if you’re new to minecraft maps, your time is better spent on epic maps like Corona Trials and Ragecraft 3. Soon, we’ll see what the third map has in store for us.
OVERALL RATING:
Gameplay: +++++----- 5/10
Aesthetics: +++++++--- 7/10
Functionality: +++++----- 5/10
VERDICT: +++++----- 5/10
Beneath The Void 3
9/6/17
Made by kkraft234
For 1.8.x
Link
Style: Area-based
The Mushroom Mile(spawn/white wool):
It begins simply, with a nice forest-type area. It tricks you into thinking that that’s your first area. But no. Unlike the first maps, where the cave it dropped you in really was your first area, there’s a huge mushroom cave up ahead that’s the REAL first area:
It’s… an interesting setting. The spawners aren’t concealed in the ground, thank goodness- they’re covered in easily identifiable blocks. There are a LOT of spawners though, and the place quickly gets filled with enemies if you don’t move fast. It’s a very short cave, but the spawners are mostly the same throughout. Chests with good starting supplies are scattered around everywhere, and altogether, it makes for a fairly challenging starting area. I appreciated it. And best of all – no randomized loot to be seen thus far! It could definitely be improved by toning down the huge amount of spawners. As it is, it’s hard to beat if you don’t dash through it.
Rating – 6/10
Old Miner’s Cave(orange wool):
Deaths: 1 (Tried to rush final part)
This area continues some of the trends that I like. A good amount of non-randomized loot. Spawners that are in logical locations rather than just random spots in the wall. However, it also starts to reveal a problem… even if this map fixes some of the problems of 1 and 2, the areas we’ve seen so far… just aren’t that interesting. The last area was a mushroom cave. This area is a sandstone cave. It’s okay to have simple settings, but this area doesn’t really change the way in which you fight enemies. It is again short, and at the end you have some blaze spawners to keep things interesting. It’s a fairly simple, fine area, if entirely un-memorable.
Rating – 6/10
Jungle Ravine(magenta wool):
Deaths: 1(Mob swarm)
This area has a mob spam problem! The area reminds me somewhat in the dormatories but in a different setting: Multiple paths, catwalks, and tunnels progressing through the same area. It’s all so close together that mobs are sure to build up to immense levels. The places you have to go to have simply terrible approaches – you have to descend into tiny rooms with vines or ladders, causing you to get swarmed by all manner of zombies, spiders, and creepers. It was generally a fast and hectic area, but the mobs just got so bad at some points that you pretty much had to retreat or burn through sword after sword trying to cut through them all. There was some grace given with the bountiful loot chests, at the very least. This area could probably be improved a lot by just letting us descend down with stairs rather than a 1x1 circle of vines that you can’t go back up. Or making it bigger with some more empty space for less mob spam!
Rating – 5/10
Into the Depths(Light blue wool):
This area played fine, but was aesthetically uninspired. It was a stone cave that used diorite. Diorite was a new block when this map was made, but that didn’t make it NOT a stone cave. It’s just varying it with a new type of stone. The enemies you fight are fine, but the bottom portion with the wool is so laden with spawners, you never had time to break any because there were always more enemies spawning! However, there was one part about this area I really liked. One chest had a “Food pack” NBT-powered chest. Once you grabbed it out, a command block would helpfully inform you that you needed to place it on the ground to use it. Very nice! The redstone and command blocks seem a lot more stable in this map, particularly as compared to the first one.
Rating – 6/10
Intersection 2/Monument:
This is one of the best Intersections/Monuments I’ve ever seen! It’s a nice, good-looking house that just feels cozy, and has enchantment stands and a brewing area and a base located in a natural way that looks good and is easy to modify as you see fit. The house is fairly small and has multiple floors (with proper stairs – no elevator crap), and each floor has one of the intersection areas branching off of it as well as a new part of the base. It feels really nice and is all and intersection and monument area should be!
Rating – 9/10
House in the Woods(Yellow Wool):
What I liked best about this area was the variance. First, you had the approach to the house in the woods (pictured), then you were inside the house, then you reached a dungeon in the house’s basement. It helped capture a good sense of progression, and I hope to see more like it. Most of the spawners were hidden in hard-to-find locations, and there were lots of them spawning many regular enemies. At this point, our own gear can easily cut these enemies down. It would have been better to replace several of the normal spawners with a few elite enemy spawners – though that’s not a complaint with this area but more the Beneath The Void maps in general! Once you get past the usual mob spam, this area was of above-average quality.
Rating – 7/10
Village Swamp(Lime wool):
For once, a swamp area without witches! It didn’t have much else interesting in it, though. Spawners are lined across the shore and ceiling of the river you follow, rather than in the walls, which is nice. As you go through the area, the water in the river you’re following gets deeper, which does create a valuable sense of progression… but doesn’t really change how the area plays. You have a few short side-paths to take for some extra loot, but it’s a very linear area beyond that. The first part of this area feels well-designed enough, even though it ends up being simpler to swim past the spawners rather than break them. Once you reach the village part of the area, however, it’s a little disappointing. The map doesn’t really change things up aside from the area you’re fighting in being a village. You end up fighting the same enemies in mostly the same way the entire way through – the spawners are all in the open, rather than inside the tiny houses. Again, there isn’t anything in particular that’s wrong with this area, but it wasn’t very interesting, either.
Rating – 6/10
Plantation Ruins(Pink wool):
A setting I haven’t seen much before; a farm with real food still there to harvest! This farm makes up the first part of the area, but it’s really… empty. There isn’t much there except scattered food and natural enemies. Proceed through it, and you’ll make it to the second portion, a segment where you proceed through crowded and cramped gravel tunnels. This is definitely the area’s low point, with all the tunnels feeling like the exact same thing. They’re easy to cut through and relatively boring. Finally, you make it to the wool room, which looks really nice and is a fair challenge – even if it continues to spam regular mobs at you and hide the spawners. It was okay, but the gravel tunnels underneath the plantation could definitely have been shortened quite a bit.
Rating – 6/10
Intersection 3:
To start, we have a teleporter back. That’s good. But this intersection has a problem similar to BTV2’s intersection 3, in that it doesn’t explain itself very well. Or at all. See, on the wall, there’s many bedrock-type structures in the shape of portals. When you approach some of them, they’ll turn into nether portals that teleport you to the next area. It’s neat, and works perfectly well when you figure it out, but it would probably take any group of players a few minutes to realize how it works. A book saying “approach the non-crumbling stonebrick portals” would have helped immensely.
One more thing. Throughout the map, there’s been some bonus collectibles for us to find: Bedrock keys. In the first area, we got a book telling us how they worked, and each area since then has had 1 key in it. The way they work is really neat, and I managed to get them all. But the book promised they would unlock for us “a room full of good loot” and what they actually unlocked was… not that. It’s a shop, which lets you buy 3 things with your exp levels. Regeneration potions. Prot 2 enchanted books. Knockback 1 enchanted books. Not useless, but extremely underwhelming since this loot has been built up and fought for throughout all of intersections 1 and 2. I would have been much happier if there just been a room full of chests getting us set up for Intersection 3.
Rating – 7/10
A Dark Knight(Cyan wool):
Deaths: 1(Accidental fall while leaving area)
After figuring out how the intersection worked, I headed here first. The first part of the area is pretty much a swarm of natural spawns from spawners I could hardly see, but after that it gets better. Running around on catwalks, using teleporters, and exploring plenty of interesting and unique side-rooms makes for a very interesting area. This whole place had a lot of much-needed supplies, making it feel very rewarding to explore every side-room I could. When you make it to the end, it at first has an interesting gimmick: All your torches are deleted upon placement by a dark magic aura, forcing you to work without them for a little while. Taking away one of your tools forces you to change things up, but the area isn’t designed so that you’ll be helpless without them. However, it starts to fall apart when you get closer to the bottom, and Elder Guardians take away your pickaxe, leaving you with no way to deal with spawners until you beat the area for good. Then there’s a chest with a block of sand above it, but since you can’t break the sand or the chest… At least, you do get to fight the Elder Guardians at the end of the area, and it’s probably the most challenging thing we’ve had so far! We’ve gotten to the point where we have enchanted iron/chain gear for most of our stuff, and the map is still throwing natural spawns at us – just increasing numbers of them. It’s actually used less custom mobs than BTV 1 and 2 so far! I hope we start seeing a shift to having tougher run-of-the-mill enemies to fight, or the difficulty of the map will continue to fall. This area had a few stutters, but a good basic concept and a good fight at the end.
8/10
The Quarry(Gray wool):
It’s a cave! Most of this area was more of a quarry-themed cave than anything, but it did have a few buildings and rooms to keep things interesting. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, but again, not much interesting about it either. It could have used more custom mobs or something else game-changing. It’s a very simple area as-is. Little memorable about it.
Rating – 6/10
Underwater Temple(Light gray wool):
Water areas! Water combat is very hard to get right in Minecraft. Many people reading won’t remember Vech’s “Endless Deep”. The reason why they won’t remember it is because Vechs made the map hard to find; it was an example of water combat done wrong. This area too, is an example of water combat done wrong. At the start, you have a village with houses, spawners, and loot chests with some water-related gear to help you. A fair start. Sadly, no depth strider is available. Then, you enter into the area’s second portion: A water maze. Now, water mazes can be a terrible, terrible thing as certain other maps have shown me, and this one isn’t particularly good, but it has loot chests and doesn’t go on too long, so it is at least bearable. But once you make it through, you’re dropped into the THIRD part: The water caves (pictured). This is where things go bad. First off, this is a terrible environment to fight guardians in. They’re giant, empty caves, when fighting guardians is about using cover and the environment to avoid their lasers. With no environment to work off of, you pretty much have to stay low to the ground and build a pillar whenever a guardian attacks. Hope you have lots of blocks! About the giant, empty caves… they’re GIANT! You have to swim through them agonizingly slowly, and worse yet – they aren’t linear, they have a lot of side-paths, forcing you to spend minutes swimming to get one loot chest that isn’t nearly worth it. The way to Intersection 4 is hidden down here too, but it’s separate from the wool, meaning you’ll probably find it and then have to keep exploring to get to the wool, then find your way all the way back once you have it!
After what’s probably about 15-20 minutes spent doing nothing but swim forward, you’ll finally reach the actual temple, an itty-bitty building in a big round cavern. And what’s the wool guarded by? A guardian nest, or anything else interesting? No, it’s guarded by a nice, dry room, with skeletons, zombies, and creepers. Just like everything else. This area is without a doubt, the worst in the map, and should be totally reworked. Better yet, just cut out the huge cave section and have the maze lead to the temple – the caves suck away any goodwill I had for the first parts.
Rating – 3/10
Intersection 4:
Our gateway to the map’s final areas! This intersection has an obsidian/bedrock/sea lantern aesthetic going on, and it actually looks fairly nice with the lighting. None of the area have name signs, though, so I took the liberty of naming some of the areas myself. Furthermore, the Brown Wool is hidden at the very bottom of the intersection, in a rather obscure place – I was able to find it, but I can see a lot of people missing it. This intersection is fine. Nothing special but at least it looks nice.
Rating – 7/10
Void Zone(Blue wool):
As far as void areas go… I thought this one was okay! We FINALLY had some custom mobs (speed-boosted zombies and spiders), making the area feel tense and threatening for the first time in a while. The area is short enough to not overstay its welcome, which was good. Again, there isn’t anything wrong with this area. It could have used more loot to make up for the whole “void” thing, but other than that, I thought it was fine! The fortress at the end is the best part, being fun to tackle and a good challenge for the end of the map.
Rating – 7/10
Bedrock zone(Green wool):
This area began with a 2-block high and full of random bedrock blocks. Throughout were zombie spawners. It sounds simple, but it created an interesting dynamic: While you’re trying to get through, the zombie spawners will quickly spawn many zombies, forcing you to move in ways so as not to get cornered while also trying to reach your objective. The only problem was, well… we have diamond armor at this point. Getting caught by the zombies isn’t really a threat at all.
Once we make it through that, we have another area of bridges suspended above void. It’s roughly the same challenge as blue, deal with projectile and melee enemies while being only a few hits away from a void death. I had hoped to get something different for this last area. There’s nothing special to say about it, other than void.
Rating – 6/10
Netherrack Zone(Purple Wool):
This area felt like a rather generic final area. A big netherrack area with a lot of custom enemies – though none of them memorable or notable – and a lot of spawners. There are a few notable points, such as at the start, when it offers you a “choice” between blaze protection (an iron chestplate with Fire Prot 3) and skeleton protection (an iron chestplate with Proj Prot 3). Of course, I have diamond armor with regular protection, so I needed neither. The final part puts you in a huge room and gives you ladders and blocks with which to scale a giant obsidian pillar to make it to the wool box at the top. It’s been done before, but at least it was challenging and felt epic! As long as you take the corners of the pillar, things will be fairly easy. This area felt more like filler than a real inspired area – there was so little unique about it. A good note to mapmakers – make sure all your areas have a clear idea behind them, or something that makes it unique. Don’t just churn out areas in the middle just so you can meet the standard CTM 16 wool mark. If you see no point to making a whole new area, you can always put another wool in one of your older areas and add onto it. This area just didn’t feel inspired or necessary at all, and this isn’t the first area in the map that’s felt that way.
Rating – 5/10
Final Dungeon(Red and Black wool):
To begin, we had an incredible build-up. One of the areas branching off of I4 had a book telling you about the final dungeon: Once you were in, there was no going out. Your spawn was set. You only had the gear you could carry in your inventory, plus anything in your enderchest. Then, to enter, you had to throw that info book into a fire.
Once you were inside, you would be greeted with what is pictured. Now, the intro for the map on the forums said that BTV3 would be a “survival based” map, where you had to scavenge for resources. Yet, I never had to farm once during my whole time playing the map. This is the only area where I actually felt like I was in a survival map, moving from island to island, gathering resources. Now, considering we’re cut off from our main base, and all our backup gear, it could be an incredible risk to have our last area be “bridging over void”. But it works. Why? Because the map gives you loot. Loot like there’s no tomorrow. All the loot you could want! Chests full of swords and armor! The islands have wood, coal, and iron deposits to mine! And better yet, this area also contains an item that totally changes things, my favorite item I have ever received in a CTM: The Void Net. As long as you hold it in your inventory, it will “catch” you if you fall into the void. The book that came with it implied it would wear out with use, and sometimes it would be buggy and fire off prematurely, but it saved my life several times over, and I didn’t even end up breaking it – though I got at least 40 uses out of it, many. It was the best.
That said. The area is long. REALLY long. Islands go off in both direction, and expand outwards for QUITE a ways. It took me several hours to beat the area. I liked the concept of slowly getting more and more OP resources while you moved from island to island, but if this area doesn’t strike you as fun, it can wear you down very fast. Also… it looks terrible. Bedrock and some blocks that aren’t bedrock sometimes. Definitely a bad aesthetics score here. This area has a lot of custom mobs, some of which are fun (a miniboss skeleton with a punch bow, but the skeleton can’t move), some of which are crap (“boomtown” creepers that instantly explode), but at least it keeps things feeling varied. At the end of it all, of course, you have the final black wool dungeon. It’s made up of multiple parts – a castle with too many enemies to beat any way other than sprinting through, a sewer section so easy it feels like a breather, and one final, last, desperate descent to the wool, on wooden platforms with blazes everywhere – and it all felt like a good, epic finish.
This was a good dungeon. I liked it. It could’ve been shorter, but I had fun. It was good. I want to see more like this.
Rating – 8/10
CONCLUSION:
Beneath The Void 3… is a good map. Is it a great, amazing map? No. Did it have some real effort put into it, and managed to be a cut above most of the maps I review here? Yes! It improves significantly on the previous maps – though the mob spam problems and wonky loot distribution haven’t been completely excised, almost every other area has seen some real improvements. The difficulty remains consistent throughout, rather than going all over the place. While the final area in a lot of maps of this type can be a disappointment, this map’s final area was actually a really good challenge! The one thing that was really hit-or-miss in this map would definitely be the aesthetics. Some areas, like A Dark Knight, looked fairly inspired, while other areas used simple, bland, trite block variations like the area I dubbed “Netherrack Zone” – it’s a meaningful name! But the effort of the aesthetics in any given area also indicated how much inspiration had gone into the area as a whole. Several of the areas could have been removed with very little lost, they were just so generic! I would have rather seen second wools in areas like The Dark Knight rather than the “Netherrack Zone” or “The Quarry”. In terms of functionality, there was about as much redstone in this map as there was in BTV2 – that is, plenty powering teleporters and intersections, but not much used to spice up the areas you fought through. However, all of it worked much better than the last map. I had few technical problems this time around.
So, overall… should you play it? Well, again, if you liked the previous ones at all, you’ll like this one the best. If you’ve played through all the “major” maps and are looking for a lesser-known one to fill your time, this one might be your jam. It depends. Soon, we’ll see how the FOURTH one in the series holds up…
Oh, and… in the end, I became one with the void.
OVERALL RATINGS:
Gameplay: +++++++--- 7/10
Aesthetics: +++++----- 5/10
Functionality: +++++++++- 9/10
Story: N/A
VERDICT: +++++++--- 7/10
Beneath The Void 4
9/8/17
Made by kkraft234
For 1.8.x
Link
Style: Area-based
Preface: Beneath the Void 4 – the final map in the 4-part series! Or at least, the final map today – though the thread for them has been dead for quite some time now. Considering the slow but sure improvement of the previous maps, you’d think the fourth one would have been where it all REALLY came together. But despite that… the map was actually very poorly received! Not a lot of people said they enjoyed it, as compared to Beneath The Void 3. Where did it go wrong? Did it improve or didn’t it? Well… let’s take a look through this review and walk through the areas. How does it measure up to the other maps? Maybe we can find out what happened.
Spawn:
Alright. The previous maps had an above-average number of command blocks compared to most maps I play, and this map REALLY goes whole-hog with it. The spawn is powered by a lot of command blocks, with options rooms, and appearing/disappearing corridors. At the very end of the third map, you were given a choice between completing the monument or becoming one with the void – and this map actually has a very interesting continuation of that, starting you in the final choice room from BTV3! That said… if you hadn’t been playing the maps up to that point like I had, it probably would have just been confusing.
Once you got all the the options set up, the map teleported you to a… class selection area? In the map’s description on the forums, it mentioned that it was a very “experimental” map, and this certainly qualifies. The choice of the classes is set up with a book philosophically waxing about the choices we make, and whether they’re bad or good (I’ll talk about this “choice” theme throughout the map, and how it’s totally forgotten about). You have 3 chests, and inside each one was a book with a class name. Now, the map very much has multiplayer in mind with its design – not just here, but at other parts of the map, too. This class system supports up to 3 players, and the clear intent is to have different players fill different “roles”. Despite that, the classes don’t mean all that much – all you get is a book that lets you use specific raw materials to craft various items – some aren’t worth it, or replaced entirely by what you get in chests. A few later on may have been useful – though, I didn’t see them all, we’ll get to that later.
I grabbed the Alchemist book, expecting there to be a class description inside. Nope, that was my choice! We’re Alchemists now! Other than that, though, the setup for this map is very well-done, very cool. It looks nice and flashy and does do a good job of getting you excited for what’s to come. Now, for the actual map to start…
Rating – 8/10
Starting Area(White wool):
This place is interesting. The map definitely kicks off strong, throwing you into a strange environment with nothing but your class book, useless on its own. It gives you wood and coal and other materials you need to beat the area, and it feels like a really nice, “lite survival” starting area. The main threat throughout is natural spawns, which can be frustrating in their large numbers, but they’re hardly impossible to beat. There’s even a fairly clever touch, in that parts of the area contain some of the materials you’d need to make a few basic recipes with your class book hidden in the environment. Once you reach the white wool, you’re immediately teleported out of the area forever, which surprised me. There isn’t anything irreplaceable there, but I’d still like to be able to go back… all in all, it’s a good starting area. It sets a nice tone for the rest of the map.
Rating – 8/10
Monument/Dimension Cube:
This functions as the map’s “intersection” – standard intersections are completely abandoned, replaced entirely by teleporters. As you beat more areas and get more wool, you’ll unlock different “versions” of the intersection, with different teleporters. It’s a neat idea, and not a bad one, either. It works fine and isn’t particularly clunky. The monument is also interesting – every time you place a wool down, you’ll receive a special item to commemorate your achievement. These ranged from “good useful items” to “random crap”. For example, White wool gives out “White Wooly”, a Smite 2 stone sword.
Each version of the intersection save the last also contains a side area – the first one is a lush place full of trees. Attempting to farm here reveals that the tick speed has been sped up – that means that when you chop a tree, the leaves decay almost instantly, and crops/trees grow almost immediately, too!
Despite everything that this place has, the one place it lacks is a major, useful base. Since there’s a lot of block replacement here, if you aren’t careful, chests you placed could get overwritten! Knowing this, I built my base in the side area of the first version of this place… but not everyone going into the map will know this. It should have been made clear by that map that you have to be careful where you build your base!
Other than that, while not perfect, this intersection definitely feels… unique. I haven’t seen much like this before – and that’s probably something I could say for a lot of this map.
Rating – 7/10
Peaceful Valley(Orange wool):
This place… almost felt like it was designed to serve a story purpose, rather than a gameplay one. So let’s talk about the story. It spends most of its time following the “Bavarian” civilization and its people, and their journey through the world. I’ll tell you more as it develops, but for the beginning part, they settled in “lush lands full of resources” which serve as our starting areas. This area’s story is that it is the world before it was settled, devoid of both people and resources. For that reason, this area feels far more like an environment to gather resources in than an area to conquer – still no spawners, only natural mobs, and a whole lot of chests with useful items scattered about. It’s an interesting area to explore, but we sort of already did this with the first area. This area is even easier, with even less challenge! We haven’t been going on long enough to need a break just yet. The next area will hopefully make good on the promise made by the map’s spawn and first area.
Rating – 5/10
Mysterious Mines(Yellow Wool):
Our very first maze area! The setting is fairly simple, a long series of interconnected mineshafts making up a giant maze which we needed to solve to reach the wool. Now, throughout many CTMs I’ve played, mazes of this type tend to fail in 2 different ways: One, they don’t put any loot in the maze so it feels unsatisfying. In this, the map does fine. The maze has plenty of good things in it to reward you for every wrong turn you take. Two, the entire maze is the same. And here… the map completely fails. See the picture up there? That’s the whole maze. There’s the occasional spawner, and the natural mob hordes, but nothing really challenging that actually changes up the gameplay. It’s just 15-30 minutes of the exact same hallways. It doesn’t even switch it up when you make it to the wool, it just has two spawners instead of one! That said, I do have to give the area some credit – it at least has the good courtesy to teleport you out once you have the wool. But that doesn’t change the fact that this area gets very boring, very fast. It should have either have different variations of rooms rather than the same cut-and-paste hallway, or be shortened down to a 5-minute jaunt.
Rating – 4/10
Jungle Chasm(Magenta wool, kkraft’s head):
This area starts out looking very… square. The MCedit brush strokes are fairly obvious here. It’s very similar to the last area, in that the main threat is natural spawns and some generic mob spawners. The regular spawners come in small numbers, only one or two at a time, and are un-primed, so I can usually destroy them before they have a chance to do anything. However… this threat is not equivalent to our gear level. At this point, my gear is full chain armor with some iron mixed in, enchanted tools, a power II bow, a Smite 2 Unbreakable gold sword… Basically, I’m ready to handle larger numbers of enemies and custom mobs. But these areas are quite in opposition to the mob spam of previous maps – in fact, they almost feel too empty!
The area does at least change the environment a little (descending a cliff, going through a cave…), but rarely changes the enemies you encounter or their numbers, making it feel like the same. The one exception is a brief fortress-type area at the back, with kkraft as a miniboss and some good loot. Still, the spawners there were unprimed, and kkraft is locked away in a little room, so it was still incredibly easy. I understand if the map is trying to make a really steady difficulty curve that starts off far on the lower end, but these earlier areas are so simple, they’re hardly holding my attention. It doesn’t need to be difficult, but we do need something to do or a problem to solve in the earlier areas to keep us engaged.
Rating – 4/10
Castle Sewers(Light blue wool, Casamuel’s head):
Deaths: 1 (Natural mob swarm, aided by witch poison)
Remember at the beginning of the map, there was that book I mentioned, playing up “choices” as the theme? This is one of the few areas where I felt like that was used fairly well. You have three different paths to choose from to attack the castle in the picture: Take one of the cliffs on opposite sides and fight through the castle, or attack head-on and enter the titular Castle Sewers. It isn’t really three options so much as two, since the cliff paths are more-or-less the same thing. Despite the good idea of giving you multiple ways to invade a castle, neither path is particularly interesting. The Cliffside paths have you smashing through barricades with spawners behind them, and it gets repetitive very quickly – it doesn’t last long at least. The sewer path is pretty much a straight shot through the forest to the sewers, but once you’re inside them, it’s ridiculously easy – there are spawners in the walls and floors, but they aren’t primed, so you can easily light up the 3x2 sewer corridors. Even if they do spawn, it isn’t cave spiders or silverfish or anything you’d expect in a sewer – it’s just regular zombies and skeletons. The sewers drop you off right at the wool and are incredibly easy to get through. Which is a pity, because the castle part you go to through the cliff options is probably the most interesting part of the area. It’s nice-looking, with all your standard castle fare – spawners under pillars, and all that. Still, we’re just too strong to have much trouble with only a handful of generic enemies. The only interesting or engaging challenge in the entire area is Casamuel’s miniboss fight, where he’s backed up by cave spiders – but it ends too soon. This entire area is repetitive and easy. It looks nice, and the basic concept is interesting, but that’s really it.
Rating – 5/10
Cavern of the Gods(Lime wool):
A very dark desert… chock full of natural spawns, too! In this area, we finally got a custom mobs: Zombies with stone swords and leather helm/boots. They’re hardly tougher than normal zombies, and since the spawners aren’t primed they don’t have much of a chance to spawn, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction! Aside from that, this area has little interesting. Lots of houses filled with loot, a handful of spawners, and a neat-looking but mostly harmless little pyramid at the end. There was a room with six spawners in it, but with none of them primed, I could simply smash them before they did anything.
Rating – 5/10
Old Fountain of Youth(Gray wool):
This area actually put up a fight! Sure, it was mostly from the insane hordes of natural spawns, but it did put up a fight! There were more custom mobs here, though none of them anything special, just regular enemies with some armor. The odd thing about this area was that it was really short; none of the areas in the map so far have been particularly long, but this area stood out as especially small. At the end, we had the “fountain of youth” as a very brief water section with a few guardians. All in all, this area was fine. Not particularly bad or good.
Rating – 6/10
As our wool reward for this area, all recipe books were upgraded to a level 2 version. My old recipe book let me make instant healing 1 splash potions, and instant damage 3 splash pots. My new one lets me make all that plus a strength potion and a book that heals all players (I’m playing alone). I’m happy that I have a book to make potions, but the map itself has provided plenty of potions – I’m not at a shortage! I know that the warrior’s book can make weapons and armor, but the map has plenty of that, too. The enchanter can make books of enchanting, but we’ve found those in chests as well! By now, my main problem with how the classes work has become clear: There’s no real use for them, or rather, no need to use them! The map’s chests alone provide all I could need and more. I don’t need a book to help me craft extra supplies.
When a player hears the word “class” they generally think of gear or abilities, rather than crafting specializations. Crafting specializations is all the classes are at their core, so that’s what they should be called.
(Misplaced Picture :C)
Six Feet Under(Pink wool, Dinnerbone’s head):
This area was very, very tiny. A simple desert cave that went around a corner, had a building, then the wool was right under it. The weird thing about this area was, it was absolutely CHOKED with regular enemies. Just CHOKED with them! There were tons! I slaughtered more, but more just came! I didn’t stay too long, so I’m not sure whether they were all just extreme amounts of natural mobs, or spawners placed in such a clever way that I didn’t notice them at all. It looks nice, at least…
Rating – 4/10
Purple(Purple wool):
This area was very… purple. It’s a dark area filled with obsidian, lava, and cobwebs. It’s very hard to see, actually! The majority of this area didn’t have spawners, just the usual hordes of natural spawns… however, at some points, there were blaze spawners hidden in the walls. The… obsidian… walls. Really, it was just best to keep moving throughout the entire thing! The first part, progressing through caves like you see above, wasn’t particularly interesting. The second part, however, changed things up; it was a volcano! The approach and climb of the volcano was a good, tense fight, with lava and blazes and other enemies around the whole way. But once you reach the top, all that tension dissipates… I was expecting something to fight inside the volcano, but there’s nothing there except the wool. Overall, this area did at least have one interesting thing! If the entire area was a huge climb up a bigger volcano, then it would have been much more interesting. Venturing through dark, obsidian, cobweb-filled caves might be a little challenging but it isn’t particularly new or exciting.
Rating – 6/10
The Pillars of Creation(Cyan wool):
Deaths: 3(Charged creeper blasts)
The difficulty here increased significantly! For once, we had less natural spawns, but they were replaced with NEW horrible creatures…
The landscape was a very odd, not-good-looking block variation of ice, clay, bedrock, and obsidian. The setting was a giant plain with the titular pillars jutting up out of the ground everywhere. But the plains themselves contained nothing – nothing but holes in the ground leading to caves. In those (many) caves was loot, and deep down… the wool. I like the design of having lots of separate caves containing loot connected by a large main area, so that you can explore as much or as little as you care to. That said… the main area felt almost too big, and too empty. Like there was too much space between the caves which contained the actual challenges, making them hard to find. The caves were different and unique at first due to the crazy mix of custom mobs, and managed to even be a good challenge for once! However, after you’ve seen the first few, you’ve seen all of them – they don’t vary that much, and the cave with the wool is just a longer version of all the other caves. All in all, this area had a good challenge, but the caves still needed more variance, and the giant plain in the center could be cut down to size – just a little.
Rating – 6/10
Rising Waters(Light gray wool, Beto’s head):
This area… well, it did look fairly nice, for a stone cave with water. After the challenge of Pillars of Creation, this area was astonishingly easy by comparison. The enemies consisted of custom mobs, but it seems to be the same bunch of custom mobs we’ve been fighting from previous area. We have: Invisible boot-wearing skeletons and zombies, lightly-armored enchanted bow skeletons, and a few other ones – none of them really stand out, and a lot of the spawners they come from are on “rotation”, meaning they spawn a different random mob each time. Not only does seeing the same few custom enemies after a few areas get boring, none of them are even particularly challenging. They’re just… slightly more dangerous than your common fodder, that’s all. None of them have any real identity, so they all sort of blend together as a generic mass of random enemies.
There wasn’t anything particularly bad or good about this area – it wasn’t very interesting, but it did end fairly quickly, as most of the areas in the map do.
Rating – 6/10
I think I should talk about the story here. To keep you updated: The Bativian civilization had to leave the lush, fertile land they had at the start, because of a crippling drought. The areas so far appear to have been places they tried to settle, but failed… but I wouldn’t know, because the amount of lore books has been steadily decreasing! Dimension Cube/Intersection 1 had 4 areas, and 3 of them had lore books explaining about the area. Intersection 2? No books at all. And for Intersection 3, this is the only area with a lore book! We’ve also gotten one every time we’ve unlocked a new intersection, but that’s not a lot… I don’t expect a ton of story, I know it’s a nice bonus. It just feels bad to have consistent lore books for the first parts of the map only for them to suddenly dry up and disappear halfway through. Maybe the lore books dried up… just like the Bativian’s resources did??
On The Edge(Red wool, Grumm’s head):
At least this place wasn’t boring! The main gameplay of the area consists of a levels-type ordeal – you have layers of floating block floors, with so many holes you have to parkour constantly to stay on top, and you don’t want to be sent down plummeting to the floor because the good stuff and your way out are at the top. It’s a good concept with the potential for some exciting gameplay, and this area delivers… okay. The spawners spam huge amounts of mobs, with lots of projectiles (skeletons/blazes), and it’s VERY HARD to stay on top of anything. Many of the spawners seem to be sped up, and while you’re fighting on one level, you’re in range of spawners on the levels above and below you… basically, the mob spam in this area piles up VERY fast, and there’s almost no safe places to retreat to to clear out the mobs. Any platforms you want you have to build yourself. Expect to have to retreat several times just to not have too many blazes to realistically avoid. Furthermore, there isn’t really any penalty when you do fall down, save fall damage – the bottom is nice solid ground, and the mobs are the same on most of the levels – if each level had a differing theme and a different mob, with things slowly getting worse as you fell… that would make this area a lot cooler. As it is, it’s a lot of mob spam but the area doesn’t pack much punch.
Rating – 6/10
I should mention that around this point, I got the last upgrade for my class recipe book. How the command blocks work for the recipe book is, after unlocking the upgrade, when you hold an old recipe book, it will take it from you, and give you a new better recipe book. How it worked for ME is that it took away my old recipe book… but didn’t give me the new one. Turns out, when you lose your recipe book, whether it be to fire, lava, or glitch command blocks, you can NEVER get it back. Nobody knows why you couldn’t have just had a button that gives you the most recent one you’ve unlocked. But that’s how it is. Of course, I hadn’t been needing or using it before, and I didn’t need it after, either. Add it to the pile of reasons why classes aren’t really important at all.
On a Pedestal(Green wool):
Finally, we had an area a cut above the areas! This place’s gimmick was… fairly similar to that of “On The Edge”. This time, you have to navigate hole-filled bridges, dotted with pillars full of mobs. It’s manageable, but if you fall down, you’ll end up in a much worse place chock-full of tons of high-level custom enemies. It’s a good concept, and it could easily have been the entire area. Sadly, it’s only the first half, and the second half involves a lot of pillaring up while being fired upon by blazes and ghasts – something I’ve done before at least 5 times. One of which was in the “Netherrack Zone” from BTV3. I should note that for a lot of the later-game areas, while the gameplay gets more intense, many of the areas abandon aesthetics and are made up of insane nonsensical block variations. I mean… look at this picture. It doesn’t look good when it’s this dark, and it doesn’t look any better lit up with torches. It’s a pity, too, because the hand-crafted areas kkraft makes oftentimes look really good! Despite that, this area has had the best gameplay for a while.
Rating – 7/10
Main Street(Brown wool):
A neat troll area. It seems like just a road over void with too many blazes and ghasts, but… none of the enemies will ever move or attack you. A nice break before the final areas.
Rating – 7/10
Platform to Platform(Blue wool, jeb_’s head):
Red wool had you fighting and parkouring on a sparse hole-filled field of blocks, on multiple layers. Green wool had you fighting and parkouring on a sparse hole-filled field of blocks, moving from bridge to bridge. Now blue wool has us fighting and parkouring on a sparse hole-filled field of blocks… immediately above void. Not only do most of these areas seem to be going in reverse difficulty as we move down the wool monument, the three non-troll areas of the fourth intersection all use the same basic gameplay concept! Is it a bad one? Absolutely not! But… it would be nice to see something different…
On its own merits: This area is really REALLY stressful and tense. Not from drawing you in with super-intense combat, but artificial tension added by having you only one finger slip away from being sent spiraling into infinite void. I count myself lucky I didn’t go into void once in this area. It was luck, and also the fire resistance potions I had on the entire time to protect against the blaze hordes. Those helped too.
As you can see, you have to parkour your way from safe-er obsidian platform to obsidian platform. Many of them have not-unwelcome loot on them, and also enemies. Such as punch skeletons. And spider swarms. And ghasts with buffed fireball explosion power. Also, there are potions randomly falling from the sky for no particular reason. Which would be fine if there was some way to predict or avoid them, but considering the position of parkouring over void this area puts you in, dodging potions isn’t very plausible. This place is by far the most difficult area in Intersection 4, and if you did the areas in the “right” order, it would be a massive difficulty spike from Intersection 3! It was really intense, and I had fun with it – though only because I managed to stay above the void - , but it feels like too much! Of all the areas, this one could stand to be toned down a little!
Rating – 6/10
The Final Area(Black wool):
This area re-used the same concept as Beneath The Void 3, but added a caveat: In addition to being cut off from your base entirely, it also put you in a different starting area depending on which class you picked – the areas reconnected, meaning you would “meet up” with your scattered allies as you moved forward. But… it only works if you’re playing the map with friends! People trying to play in singleplayer don’t get much love here. So I missed out on that aspect of the area, because I always play maps solo.
The actual area itself was probably my favorite area in the entire map. It’s a long, brutal trek forward, with you trying to make it to the black wool with every elite mob you’ve seen so far resisting you every step you take. Instead of bridging to void island after void island, you’re advancing through a variety of different environments. One bad thing I noticed is that there were a few TOO many natural spawns, especially around the place the map dropped me into. Thankfully, it ceased once I got further into the area. The area’s lowest point was definitely the final part – a redux of the very first area you entered, but with most of the spawners swapped out for elite custom mobs, and the loot left untouched. It would be interesting if only the original area’s basic structure was used and a lot was changed to add tons of new stuff to the area, but the only major thing changed was that the floor was removed for the wool room – meaning you’ll need to bridge the void while under fire from ghasts and blazes and things. Not fun, and I’ve done it before a million times. Once you make it, you’re teleported back to the monument, and… that’s it!
I liked this area. The ending was something of a disappointment, but I had fun with it overall, even without friends.
Rating – 8/10
Hall of Past Maps:
Unlocked at the third “dimension cube”, this place contains snapshots of some past areas. Such as:
Frozen Tundra
Mayan Ruins
Stairs to heav-Hell
Village Swamp
Void Walkway
Spider Cavern
Each one was unlocked as you placed more heads on the head monument. The area choices seemed rather odd – the majority of them actually codified some of the problems of the past maps, rather than being their best areas. In each one, you would be teleported through parts of the area in question – all while being held in a barrier-block cage, so essentially spectator mode. This seems to accomplish two purposes: One, advertising the other maps, two, giving nostalgia value. Since of course I’ve played the others in a row to get to this one, I should get the nostalgia value, but… I don’t think this place adds anything at all. It’s just letting you see some areas, but that doesn’t really tell you anything. Now, if it had let you play a short segment themed after the past area in question, and given a reward at the end, then it could have been something really cool. But the hallway in the map doesn’t even give you any sort of reward for finishing it! It just comes off as pointless.
This wasn’t an area, just one of the side-areas for the Dimension Cube, but I still wanted to talk about it, so I’m not going to give it a number rating.
Conclusion:
And… that’s the end! We’re done with every map of Beneath The Void! 1, 2, 3, and 4! As of writing, there aren’t any more… but if a 5 is ever released, you bet I’ll review it! Now, before we actually go and talk about how this map compares to 3 and all that… there’s a few things about the map I haven’t found a good place to mention, but would still like to talk about.
The Scrolls: Throughout the map, you were given special books called scrolls. When thrown on the ground, they would activate a special effect. These effects provided a ton of functions, and the scrolls made up a good portion of loot in the map. These scrolls generally went into a few main categories: A select few scrolls have good, useful effects that I like (Book of Safe Keeping – summons an enderchest to store things in), several have good, small effects but come in large numbers and are generally useless after you have a few stored up (Book of Charm – grants 10 XP levels). Then, there’s everything else – almost totally useless scrolls. For example, a lot of the scrolls have combat use (Book of Instability – weakens mobs around you), but, for that reason, you need them on your hotbar to get good use out of them. The problem: You’re FAR better off with potions than you are with scrolls. Even the more powerful ones are dwarfed by the all-purpose utility of just having a potion of instant health II to use instead. For that reason, scrolls are an interesting mechanic, but there really isn’t a reason to get into them and use a lot of them.
The Head Monument: The head monument has been a staple of every BTV map. In 1 and 2, there were spawners that spawned minions with the heads guarding chests containing the heads in side-rooms. This mechanic was at its best in BTV3, with the head enemies being persistent mobs located in the middle of the areas as “minibosses” of sorts, generally being more powerful than the standard fare and making things more interesting when they showed up. In this map, all the heads are locked behind iron bars or in side-rooms, and they won’t fight you unless you go fight them. They’re still interesting encounters, but now they’re wholly optional, and I feel like that takes something away from them. This was the only BTV map where I actually managed to complete the head monument, though!
The Story: This map is the only map I’ve played so far with enough story to get a story rating that isn’t N/A! However, the story is just… forgotten about towards the end. For the fourth copy of the dimension cube, we have lore books in 2 of the 4 areas. They each describe how the Bativians were looking in holes in the bedrock – in the void – for places to settle, and how they had to fight through hell and back just to survive down here, and still couldn’t find a place to settle. And then? It just… doesn’t continue. There weren’t any lore books in the final area, at least no that I found. I wasn’t ultra-thorough but if it was hidden anywhere designed to be found by everyone, I would have seen it. We’ll never know what happened to the Bativians or their efforts to colonize the void. Nobody will know. It’s a pity.
Overall, this map… well, go back and look at my numeric ratings for a second. You’ll notice that for most of the areas, it’s a mire of 5s, 6s, and 4s, with the occasional 7 or 8. It doesn’t really go much lower or higher. There’s nothing catastrophically wrong with this map. No part of it is truly terrible or rage-inducing. It’s just… boring. A lot of parts of the map are boring. You have classes, but they hardly do anything. In the early areas, you only fight natural spawns despite your gear being far above their level, meaning they get slaughtered very easily. The custom mobs up their game as time goes by, but many of the custom enemies were repeated throughout the areas, and are never really “introduced” so much as just showing up. Many of the custom mobs are so random they feel more generic! Despite the fact that I fought the same ones so often, I can hardly remember any of them! On the aesthetics side, while there are exceptions, most of the areas are essentially just caves with weird block variations. They don’t look all that great. For functionality, most of the stuff in the map did work fine – the scrolls were even set up so that they wouldn’t all activate if you were to die and drop them in a deathpile – but the map taking my class recipe book away from me is a huge point against it.
This map’s main, core problem is that it seemed to focus on having unique command block mechanics over having a good, challenging to map to use them in. There’s no reason to use most of the scrolls – I’m fine without them. Same for the class system! The teleporters, dimension cubes, and the monument is all very cool… but none of it matters at all, because the areas they leads to aren’t interesting. There are a few exceptions, but at the start, the areas have their own identity but are generally boring. By the end, many of the areas have devolved into random block and mob variations to the point where it would be hard to tell them apart! The last intersection of the map almost felt like playing one continuous area, rather than many separate ones… and that area went on too long.
So, should you play it? It depends… I wouldn’t say it’s a COMPLETE waste of your time, but several of the mechanics – such as the classes, a few scrolls, and the final area – are really meant to be played in multiplayer. This map would be at least something of a fun ride with friends, but might not be the best use of your time if you want to play all alone.
OVERALL RATINGS:
Gameplay: +++++----- 5/10
Aesthetics: +++------ 3/10
Functionality: +++++++--- 7/10
Story: +++------- 3/10
VERDICT: +++++----- 5/10
Check out my bad CTM map reviews here.
The map is for MultiPlayer, too?