Luscious Lands

They say it's the journey that matters, not the destination. While that's tragically true when we're skipping through a sunny meadow to get to the dentist, today we're featuring a build that nails both the journey and the destination. Sure, you could quickly click through the screenshots of 'Aseroth City - Part One' until you get to the main palace – but why would you do that when you can soak in the charming windmills and picturesque scenery that encompasses it?

This 'Aseroth' is the work of 'Riddeh' and 'Mirass', two talented builders who were heavily inspired by the works of J.R.R Tolkien. You can see it in the colourful hues and British countryside vibe of the scenery... although, how did they land on that name?

“We spent a while trying to decide on a good name for our city, mainly making use of elven name generators on the internet,” says Riddeh. “The final name came when Mirass forgot the name we had originally decided upon, and we had to make one up on the spot, seconds before posting it online.”

“I drew my inspiration mainly from the elven cities of Lord of the Rings,” says Riddeh, of the grand castle and serene village. “The elves have always been my favourite and Aseroth is inhabited by many elven families." Of course, there are no elves in Minecraft, so these houses are more likely occupied by Creepers and spiders. Lousy freeloaders!

Constructing a city for the far-too-pretty elves of Tolkien’s lore was indeed a task for the gods - but mere mortals Riddeh and Mirass managed it by smartly assigning themselves to the parts of the build they'd enjoy most.

“My favourite structure to build was definitely the elven palace,” Riddeh says. “That’s also why I put a lot of effort into it, I really like to build palaces. But I also enjoyed designing the small houses the elves live in.”

For Mirass, she preferred constructing the areas around the palace. “Personally, I enjoyed making the terrain. It was a real challenge to do and involved many hours of painting the terrain with placeholders and experimenting with colour themes, but we eventually settled on a realistic-looking banded rock look which we're very happy with.”

Riddeh got started with Minecraft pretty young. “Creative servers have always been my favourite. Staff members on servers noticed my builds and asked me to build stuff for their servers, so I gradually became [a] builder on a few servers.”

Mirass too, got bit by Minecraft’s creative Shelo... er, bug. “I began looking up some larger builds on the internet and decided to join a couple of creative servers to try to practise and see where I ranked against other people.”

Eventually the two came together and, like Legolas and Gimli or Sam and potatoes, Riddeh and Mirass make a great team.

“Riddeh and I are both highly ranked on a creative building server,” says Mirass. “We started chatting in messages, then showing each other our private projects, and wound up helping each other with little design issues we had. Riddeh had built the base of the large palace in Aseroth and showed it to me, and I offered to do some work in making some trees for the surrounding land. The idea came to me that we could have a larger city at war with another city, and the ideas started flowing from there.”

The duo aren’t done with Aseroth, with Riddeh hoping to expand upon it in the future. “We’re going to add a lot more to this project but this will probably take time.”

Well we look forward to Part Two!