Introducing: Always Building

Minecraft is always growing - with new features, new platforms, new ways to play! Our community’s getting bigger, too, with players in every corner of the world! And those players themselves are always inventing new ways to express their creativity - with minigames, with megabuilds, with mods and with each other!

To celebrate the ever-expanding, globe-spanning joy of Minecraft we thought we’d invite some of our favourite build teams to contribute their skills to a single map and ask you to vote on what they make.

Every couple of weeks, we’ve lined up a different team to build a floating island based on a theme decided by YOU, the community, making an amazing community-made archipelago of Minecraft fun. You can check this very website for timelapse vids of the teams building, or, if the teams choose to broadcast their efforts, livestreams of their work in progress.

After the first five teams have done their work, you’ll be able to download the full map containing all their islands!

Watch out for the first vote on our Facebook page on Monday!

We’re launching the campaign today with the first build team’s creation. That team is the amazing Blockception and they made this:

“Blockception was founded in late 2015 during a project called A Christmas Adventure,” says Alex Bellavita. “We worked well together, so myself and Jonathan Black created the team. Many of the builders that helped with that map are still with us today!”

Though they have a pretty wide-ranging style, Blockception’s main aim is to make each map as fun to play as it is striking to behold. You can see that philosophy at work in their amazingly ambitious Marketplace debut, Annie: The Rise of Londinium, an adventure that sees you travel to London at different points in its history. “It was a struggle to get working,” says Alex. “It was full of bugs and really hard to actually test, but this is probably the build we are most proud of. All the odds were stacked against us, yet we still managed to find a way to get it finished.”

But what about their contribution for Always Building? In future weeks, the community will decide what the teams build, but because this was the first, we gave Blockception the choice.

“We were given two themes: Treehouse or Lighthouse,” says Alex. “We were unsure which one to create, so we made both of them into one map! At the top of the tree, you can see a giant crystal lamp that shines brightly. And then there’s a viewing deck surrounding the tree which acts as the Treehouse. One of the main challenges during the build was trying to avoid making the island look like a giant ice cream cone. The other was recording the actual timelapse of the build - it took a lot of time to create and get the shot that we wanted for the video.”

So, what’s next for Blockception?

“We have a few projects coming out in the next few months,” says Alex. “Something very colourful and something spooky. We don’t want to give away too much information - but check our stuff appearing in the Marketplace soon. For people that are more creative, we have a few competitions planned for the month of November which everyone can get involved with. Just stay tuned and check out our website and Twitter for more information closer to the day!”

Thanks, Alex!

Keep your eyes peeled for the vote for our next theme, and the reveal of the next build team, over on Facebook!