Creativity Cubed

Cubed Community is a freebuild server with over 5000 members from all around the globe. Its aim: to build together as one, making light work of massive, meticulously-realised cities, each informed by real urban planning methods. Well, comparatively light work anyway - their ongoing modern city project, Westpoint, has been in the works since 2014. Rather gloriously rendered above by Droolie, Westpoint’s world file is currently a 5GB download - and growing.

I had a chat with Cubed Community owner Adam “Aequotis” Berry about marshalling such massive multiplayer talent and his love for urban design. Adam describes himself as “a bit of a city freak” - an obsession that many on the server share.

“There are quite a few of us on the team who have an education in geography and cartography, so we normally pull upon from that,” says Adam. The server tends to gravitate towards European cities, because of their more organic structure, and layered architectural history. To some extent, this goes against Minecraft’s strengths - the higgledy-piggledy growth of European cities doesn’t fit neatly into a grid. But it’s exactly that which appeals.

“It’s an extremely attractive prospect to make things fluid,” says Adam, “to work through a time period. So even with modern cities what we’d do is give it a little bit of a lore, some background and say, ‘This city was started in the 17th Century, so it’s not going to be organised on a grid system, it’s going to be much more fluid.’”

“We look at the landscape and we think – if we build a bridge here, what’s going to have to be around that bridge? And if there’s going to be a bridge, what type of bridge? Does it need to be for traffic, does it need to be for people? And if there’s a mountain, does it make more sense for the road to go around the mountain or through it? We decide what looks prettiest and what is the most functional.”

The most critical thing to get right is the road network - it's around these arteries that the rest of the city’s infrastructure is organised.

“Once the roads are done we start with the actual buildings,” says Adam. “Perhaps it’s got to have a certain architectural style, or it’s set in a certain period, so you’ll have certain kinds of cars on the road, and particular kinds of infrastructure should be present. Then we spread out from a central point and keep building and building and building upon it. With Westpoint, we’ve now got a full working infrastructure, we’ve got roads, we’ve got tunnels, we’ve got building interiors, we’ve got tram-lines – all things that you’d see in a normal city.”

But structure doesn’t mean being ruthlessly strict. Quite the opposite, in fact. “Sometimes if we’ve got a builder who’s not doing as well as everyone else, we normally take them out for discussion and then work on developing their skills – so we teach them, show them how to build, show them different styles and just mentor some of them.”

Adam calls Cubed Community a family - and it’s hard to imagine how such large projects could get off the ground without that sense of a shared, friendly purpose. What could be more in the spirit of Minecraft than that?