The Minecraft Middle-earth map is currently 29,000 by 30,000 blocks, which makes an area of around 870 square kilometres. That kind of stuff we haven't touched yet.' 'The Hobbit actually takes place in a different location, so we haven't built areas like Lake-town or the location where the Battle of the Five Armies happens.

Visitors would ask, do you guys have Erebor built? And then we'd have to tell them no or, do you have Mordor built? And we would have to say, not yet.' So of course, we had to disappoint a lot of people.

'But we hadn't really built anything that appeared in The Hobbit except for a couple of places like The Shire or Rivendell. Minecraft Middle-earth was live when the Hobbit trilogy released between 2012-2014, and I ask Vermeersch if the server got excited to see new parts of Tolkein's world visualised. 'When the first Hobbit got released, we saw a huge increase in visits for people,' he says. Minecraft texture packs: Transform the game's look The Middle-earth builders also need to apply their own creativity to vast parts of the map that Tolkien only alludes to. The references that the team use are the descriptions from the books and how landscapes are shown in the films, but Vermeersch also says that the group use their own fantasy concepts for parts of the world that don't work in Minecraft. Then we look around at the builds and find out what works and what doesn't work.' We give them guidelines and present them with pictures of like, for example, Roman architecture, as kind of a mood board.

We set it in a blank world and ask, for example, for houses in Minas Tirith and people begin building. 'We then organize built contests, basically, where everyone can be involved.

'The biggest, most iconic builds are usually handled exclusively by senior members or our best builders,' Vermeersch says. Read about how it took 10 hours of walking to retrace the Fellowship's journey in Minecraft Middle-earth. (Image credit: Minecraft Middle-earth / Mojang)Įver wondered if it was possible to walk Frodo and Sam's entire route in the Middle-earth server? Well, it is, and we did it.

Minecraft lord of the rings map