Dark Harvest Keep

The holidays are fast approaching, meaning ‘tis the season for joy and thanksgiving and Christmas. A time to gather your friends and family for celebration, food, and trapping them in a castle full of spider-people that want to suck their souls dry.

Before you ask, yes this is absolutely a time-honored holiday tradition, one observed by builder Bryan when crafting his horrifying home for the holidays, the Dark Harvest Keep.

“This place is home to a very rich noble family,” he tells me. “They’re spider people. Every year they lure unsuspecting people to their home with fancy invitations and a lavish party.”

All so they can suck out the souls of their unsuspecting guests? Meh. I've been to worse parties.

But why make a mansion full of mini-Shelobs when you could build other things with less spiders?

“This is different from my usual work,” Bryan explains. “I wanted to make a haunted manor. I started with some ideas but they weren’t working for me so I scrapped them. But the spirit of Halloween inspired me to keep going, so then I went to work. I ended up building this in four days.”

Four days of extremely hard work, running on a diet of “iced tea and podcasts.” Well, at least iced tea sounds a lot tastier than the concentrated soul juice these arachnids suck from their unwitting guests.

Like most players, Bryan didn’t start his Minecraft career building terror mansions for spider cults. “I started playing on the iOS version two years ago, but only casually, never as a builder. I hopped servers a lot, making a ton of friends along the way before I eventually settled and made my own server. It was supposed to be just a place for me and my friends to play, but I wanted something more. So I started building, working with builders in the community.”

Those friendships have really paid off for Bryan and he's learned a lot of lessons, both in Minecraft and life.

“In two years, the greatest thing I’ve learned is patience and how to wait until great things happen. If you have the passion to grow and improve: do it. It is daunting but you can make it. I was a rando a year ago and now I’m close friends with some of the most talented people in this community. To get better, it just takes a ton of practice and hanging around a bunch of talented people.”

Note to self: arrange a way to hang out with Serena Williams.

All that talent rubbed off on Bryan. “I mostly picked up my detailing style from my friends. After that, I decided to take what they’d given me and experiment on my own.”

In Dark Harvest Keep, those detailing lessons were put to serious work. “I constantly delete and redo structures until they are good enough to be posted,” explains Bryan. “My favorite part was definitely the main island; the mushrooms, the vines, the grass pads, and the rest of the flora.

“My least favorite would have to be the wheat fields. A WorldEdit hiccup would happen where the layer of wheat would cut into the next layer above and I had to manually fill in the broken areas.”

The devil’s always in the details! But in Dark Harvest Keep, the devil also walks on eight legs and wants to have you for dinner.

Wait! I meant have you over for dinner. Why are you running? We haven’t had dessert yet!

Renders by Splekh, Cmelvard, Nygma and Ivain