A Most Sinister Structure

Today’s build, Nameless Castle, may not have a name, but it does have a rich and brilliantly sinister backstory. Any Minecraft player brave/foolish enough to explore this build will be taking part in an adventure, trying to find their way out of the castle’s dungeon and escape the clutches of the castle’s evil master. Meh, I’ve stayed at worse hotels. One once charged me for using the hand towels. True story.

“It’s a castle that’s been left abandoned for a long time,” says builder Leonarbre. The castle was once the home of a royal family, but when the family started practising dark magic, they angered the gods. “The gods teleported the mountain that the castle was built on into the middle of the sea, and the royal family died out because of this exile.”

Only one of the original inhabitants survived; the family’s personal sorcerer, who continued his work alone, creating monsters to inhabit the castle, protecting himself from nosy neighbours, irritating door-to-door salesman and (possibly most importantly) from the angry gods themselves.

As the player of this map, though, they’ll also prevent you from leaving, because you’ll have to fight these monsters to escape! At least that’s the plan - Leonarbe is still developing Nameless Castle, so you can’t download it and get trapped in it yet (maybe that’s a good thing?) But he has plenty of other nasty ideas in development.

“The player is one of the many guinea pigs that [the sorcerer] uses for his experiments,” says Leonarbre, not creeping me out in the slightest, no, no, no, of course not. “The adventure begins in a dungeon cell. The player has to explore and find secret passages to acquire things like potions and weapons.” You’ll also have to do all that while avoiding dangerous traps. On second thoughts, maybe the hand towel hotel wasn’t so bad?

Leonarbre learned how to use command blocks and Redstone for this build, so he could create the sort of traps you might have seen in an Indiana Jones movie; pressure plates that set off arrows, pits in the floor, and others that are probably much more ‘fun’ to discover for yourself.

Once you’re past all the traps and hazards in the dungeon, there’ll be one final obstacle waiting for you: one of the sorcerer’s demonic pets. If you defeat it, you’re out of the dungeon, congratulations! But now you’re in the castle itself - er, commiserations!

Unsurprisingly, it won’t get easier from there.

Leonarbre tells me I’ll need to – spoiler warning – “pierce it with several arrows.” Easy! Except once you’ve hurt the skull enough, it will summon a spirit version of itself to attack you. Oh super. But once you’ve defeated that, you’ll get the key!

“The story is very much inspired by Dark Souls and Bloodborne,” Leonarbre admits. “I was really inspired by the temples and castles in the Dark Souls series, notably the Archdragon Peak in Dark Souls 3.” This is a secret area in the game that’s fairly hard to reach: a ruined temple on top of a very tall mountain, with dead trees and a dragon and a king to fight. The king is known as the ‘Nameless King’, which might be where Leonarbre got the no-name inspiration from!

Leonarbre considers Nameless Castle an ongoing project. “For the moment, I’m building the dungeon, which is the starting area. I will then start to build the central hub and a new part of the castle.” Even though the castle is not yet done, it’s an exciting work-in-progress that everyone should explore!

Minecraft.net takes no responsibility for all the Minecraft players who will soon be trapped in Nameless Castles’ dungeon now that Kate has encouraged them to explore it. No, we don’t know how she sleeps at night either.