The Hangout Gardens

“Our small project was made to inspire others to build,” the team says, “and to be creative and confident in implementing new, fresh ideas.” Ever the considerate creators, Creative Ducks always build with the players at heart. Rather than experiencing the empty sandbox that is your standard Minecraft fare, this team wants you to step into something that feels - to me at least - more like an art gallery. Here, you’re treated to a kaleidoscopic world of ideas that the team hope will inspire you to create even more!

The Creative Ducks team isn’t the biggest, but this helps them to be friendly and personable while still keeping their core values - to inspire and create - at the fore. “We help servers make their worlds brighter, and this map is one example of that.”

What’s more, the team work together to find their specific interests and expertise. “Everyone’s doing something they enjoy,” they tell me. “Some do terraforming, some do decorations - we help everyone express themselves.” Together, they create something they’re all proud of.

This entire build took the team just seven nights of work, during which, they tell me, there was a lot of “nice tea” (I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure tea makes a build roughly 7% better per sip).

“The main idea with this build was to make a giant garden in the sky, with lots of tiny worlds so that people could come and build creative things,” the team says. With such enormous variation but so little space, the hardest part was just trying to separate the different areas into distinct and separate concepts.

When building, it’s necessary to consider each type of player that might see your work. It’s worth asking, will they understand what this is? Will they learn anything from seeing what we’ve done here - are there techniques that they can use in their own builds? If you can make your build captivating to people, you can help them create better things in the future - just like Creative Ducks are trying to do.

Something that can definitely be learned from the Creative Ducks’ garden is the importance of space and how it affects your build. Each segment has a particular theme or shape in mind, and although that limits what you can realistically create (no castles or gold vaults here!) it also gives you greater focus.

It’s easy to say, “I’m going to build a Greek temple!”, but having to do so while keeping it on a small scale and limited colour palette means you need to take a more thoughtful and creative approach to it.

But one final lesson comes from the Creative Ducks themselves: Don’t be afraid to experiment. “We realised that one shouldn't be scared to try new styles,” they say. “This world has so many cool ideas from games, movies, anime etc. We want to make them all come true!”