“That’s something I see with a lot of city builds - just these huge areas of flatness - whereas I wanted to incorporate the city into the landscape. “A big condition was working with terrain versus flattening everything,” says Oldshoes. The build isn’t just internally consistent, either - it feels like it’s part of the landscape. It’s something you might not pick out as you walk around Broville, but it’s something you feel instinctively: it all just fits.

Even the mountains are based off the size of that building.” So the first thing we did was create the main BroCorps tower in the downtown area, and that set the scale for everything that followed. A lot of city builds I find are all over the place - they’re kind of a mess. “That was something really important early on, was setting the scale for the whole map. What are the vital qualities in a would-be builder? “I usually look for consistency and an ability to keep to scale,” says Oldshoes. Then it just kinda happened! Two weeks after we said that we released the map.” But it got to the point where me and Golonka - who is second-in-command, so to speak - we narrowed it down and just said, well, I guess we’re almost there. “People were always asking me: how do you know when it’s done? You can’t really answer that. “It turned out roughly two times as large as I thought it was going to originally,” he says. (Admittedly, Pretzel didn’t contribute much to this conversation directly.) Did Oldshoes always know what a massive project this was going to become? I sat down with Oldshoes, Broville’s key creator, and his cat Pretzel, to talk about how the project came together. It’s an astonishing piece of work, not just because it’s big, beautiful and busy with brilliantly realised details, but because it so nicely fits the game it’s in - acknowledging Minecraft’s own terrain generation, simulation and scale, rather than flattening everything out to a blank canvas. Last week, version 11 - which by itself took a team of more than 60 contributors four and half years to build - was announced as complete and sent out to fend for itself on the wild internets.

This city build been with us in various forms since the early alpha, growing in ambition with every version release. Broville is something of a Minecraft institution.

Minecraft 1.7.10 city maps with npcs