3. Crafting a Super Maze

What You’ll Be Doing

Watch Didgee and Coolcrafter10 plan additional security

Create your custom maze

Use online-convert.com to create your .svg file

Use Tinkercad to turn your 2D maze into a 3D maze

Import your maze into Minecraft

“This is unbelievable,” said Coolcrafter10. “It’s a real castle. On my land!” He turned and smiled at Didgee-Engie. “This would have taken me weeks—no, months—to build!”

The sun was up but hiding behind some rain clouds in the distance, and the temperature had dropped a bit. A storm was coming, but Coolcrafter10 wasn’t focused on the weather. In front of him, a new castle rested, its many towers disappearing high into the sky.

Didgee nodded. “These days, I use swords for fighting and shovels and pick axes for mining. When it comes to building, I always look for digital tools like Tinkercad and MCEdit to help me.”

“I cannot thank you enough for showing me how to do this,” Coolcrafter10 replied. “You are welcome to stay in my castle anytime you’re in the neighborhood.”

Didgee laughed. “Thank you. I may be taking you up on that if that storm starts moving in this direction.” She pointed to the east and frowned.

Coolcrafter10 looked at the sky between the small mountain range to the north and the dense forest to the south. “I was hoping to do some gardening today, but you’re right.…That sky doesn’t look friendly.”

“Well, the storm hasn’t arrived yet. Why don’t we take a look around, and I can make some suggestions for improving your castle?”

“Oh, yeah! That would be great. Where do we start?” asked Coolcrafter10.

“Well, your castle can obviously use some torches right now, but are you familiar with redstone?”

Coolcrafter10 shook his head as he followed Didgee around the inside of his castle. “No. What is redstone?”

Didgee grinned wide. “You’re going to have so much fun, I can promise you. Redstone is a special block that you can build with that carries electricity. With electricity, you can add switches to control lights in different parts of your castle. Torches are great, but it’s nice to be able to turn on lights when you need them and turn them off when you don’t. Oh, and once you get really good with redstone, you can even use it to build weaponry to defend your castles against any baddies that might try to attack.”

“Is there a fast way to build with redstone? Something like Tinkercad that can build all these lights and switches for me?” asked Coolcrafter10.

“Unfortunately, no. Redstone is a material and a skill that you can only learn by doing yourself. I’ll give you some websites that you can read on your computer to learn how to use it. That should give you plenty to do in the evening.”

Coolcrafter10 frowned. “Well, I wish there were a way to defend my castle now while I start to learn about redstone. I think…”

CRAAACK!!!!!

Coolcrafter10 jumped as a lightning bolt hit a tree in the distant forest. The wind had kicked up, and a light rain began to fall.

Didgee scanned the sky. “I suggest we get back to your house while this storm blows over. I wish we could stay in your castle, but it doesn’t have any rooms yet, and until you carve a few out and add a large door to that entrance, it’s just not safe enough.”

CRAAACCKKK!!!! Another lightning bolt popped in the distance.

Coolcrafter10 nodded. “Let’s hurry.” He ran back to his house and closed and locked the door behind them after Didgee ran in.

Didgee shook the rain off her shoulders and looked over at the computer. “You know, while we’re stuck inside, I could show you something we can do right now that can add some extra security to your castle. Are you interested?”

“Are you kidding?” said Coolcrafter10, as he pushed a chair in front of his computer. “Please sit here and show me. Please! And thank you for all your help.”

Didgee pulled out the chair from the desk, sat down, and turned on the computer.

“So, what do you have in mind?” asked Coolcrafter10. “A moat filled with giant squids? No! A pit of lava that spills down onto any attacking zombies?”

Didgee laughed. “Those are good ideas, but I’ve got something better in mind that won’t take as long to create. How are you at solving mazes?” she asked with a wink.

“Uh, you mean the kind you solve with a pencil?”

“Not quite,” replied Didgee. “Sit down and let me show you.”

With today’s digital devices—including computers, mobile phones, and tablets—it’s easy to move files back and forth between devices. But what hasn’t always been easy is changing files from one type to another (such as the change from .stl to .schematic that is done for you by Tinkercad). Fortunately, today you can usually do a simple Google search to find instructions on converting one type of file to another. If you have a need for a conversion, then someone else has probably already come up with a solution. In this chapter, you’re going to be introduced to an outstanding online application (that’s also free to use) that allows you to do even more amazing things with your Minecraft worlds.

As you work through the various projects in this book, you’ll discover that often you need to use more than one application or service to get a job done. If you ever hit a roadblock with a project, just know that there’s often a solution out there that’s already been created, and you just need to do a little investigation to find it.

Next you’ll see an example of another project you can do with Minecraft. In this chapter you’ll see what’s possible with this example, and then in Chapter 4 you’ll get a more detailed walkthrough for your own Minecraft world.

One solution is to create a giant maze. Think about it: You can memorize the path through the maze or have a printout of the solution in front of you, and with just a few fast left and right turns, you can quickly throw off any pursuers behind you. What’s great about a maze is that if it’s designed correctly, you can place it around your house (or castle) for an extra level of defense.

You can easily draw your own maze and then build it block-by-block inside Minecraft. Another solution is to grab a book of mazes, find a suitable maze in its pages, and then use that as the model. But I’ve got a different method that’s great for creating a maze and saving it in a digital format so I can quickly get it moved into Minecraft and avoid building it block-by-block. Just follow along and rest assured that I’ll provide more specific instructions in Chapter 4.

Figure 3.1 shows a maze I created by using a free maze generator (mazegenerator.net, a tool covered in more detail in Chapter 4) on the Internet.

What’s special about this tool is that you can use it to create circular, rectangular, and many other types of mazes. Even better, you can customize your maze in many ways; with this one, I’ve enlarged the center area so that a house or tower could be placed inside as a safe retreat.

Once I’m happy with my maze’s design, I need to save it as a file. While the maze generator tool can save a maze as an .svg file, there’s a problem: The .svg file it saves only retains the outside shape of the maze (circle or square) when imported into Tinkercad, not the pathways that make up the maze. For this reason, one more step is required before moving a maze to Tinkercad.

Instead of saving as an .svg file, I’ll save the maze as a .png file. You can see this file saved on my computer in Figure 3.2.

I still need to convert the .png file to .svg (and this conversion will make certain the pathways are retained). To do this, I’ll be using a free online tool called online-convert.com, shown in Figure 3.3.

Once the conversion is done, I have a matching file with the .svg file extension, as shown in Figure 3.4.

At this point, my maze is only two-dimensional. It has length and width, but no height. But I’m about to change that.

After opening up Tinkercad, I click on the Create New Design button to open up a new project. I use the Import tool and locate the MAZE.svg file. After I click the Open button, the maze appears on the workplane as shown in Figure 3.5.

As you can see in Figure 3.5, the maze is much larger than the workplane that is hiding underneath it. I’ll shrink the maze down a bit by clicking on it once to select it. In the four corners of the maze, you can see small white boxes (sometimes also called Resize boxes), as indicated in Figure 3.6.

I need to shrink the maze’s width and length at the same time and at the same rate. To do this, I hold down the Shift key and then click on one of the four corner white boxes; it doesn’t matter which one, as long as it’s not the white box on top of the maze.

As I drag a white corner box closer to the center of the maze, the maze shrinks. Figure 3.7 shows that I’ve shrunk it down to fit inside the workplane. It’s not centered over the workplane, but that’s okay. I can simply click once and hold on my maze and drag it to center it on the workplane.

Remember from Chapter 2 that when you export an object in Tinkercad to Minecraft, it uses a 1mm = 1 block ratio for the size. As you can see in Figure 3.8, my maze is 192mm in length and width. (Hover your mouse pointer over a corner white box to see the length and width will displayed.)

To see how tall my maze will be, I hover my mouse pointer over the white box in the center of the maze, near the top. As you can see in Figure 3.9, my maze is 3.19mm tall, so it will be three blocks tall.

What if I want a taller maze? Easy! Click and hold down on that center white block and drag up (slowly) but don’t hold down the Shift key. This way you will change only the height of the maze. Figure 3.10 shows that I’ve resized my maze to be 5mm tall, which means it will be 5 blocks in height once it’s imported into Minecraft.

I’ve played around with my maze, increasing the inside circle’s diameter and the outer diameter until I’ve ended up with a maze that is 239mm in length and width and 5mm in height. This information will become important shortly, when I find a piece of land to place the maze.

All that’s left to do in Tinkercad is to export the maze as a .schematic file. I click on the Design tab and select the Download for Minecraft option, as shown in Figure 3.11.

I’ve placed this .schematic file in the folder that holds my MAZE.png and MAZE.svg files, as shown in Figure 3.12.

Now it’s time to open up MCEdit and get this maze imported into a Minecraft world.

I’ve used MCEdit to import my maze, but as you can see in Figure 3.14, there’s a slight problem.

If you can’t see the problem here, take a look at Figure 3.15. Here you can see that I’ve dropped down (using the WASD and IJKL keys), and you and I can both now see that the maze is floating above the terrain. Not good. What I need is a lot of flat terrain surrounding the tower before I place the maze. Specifically, I need at least 239 blocks by 239 blocks of flat terrain (to fit the length and width of my maze).

Normally, you’d have to flatten a piece of land by mining it block by block by block. Yawn. Fortunately, MCEdit can come to my rescue.

There are a lot of things you can do with MCEdit, as you’ll discover in this book. One handy help MCEdit gives you is the ability to quickly and easily modify the terrain to suit your needs. In Chapter 2, you saw how easy it is to change one type of block to another; in Chapter 4, I’m going to show you how to use MCEdit to remove large numbers of blocks simultaneously.

I’ve already done this block removal in Figure 3.16. I’m high up in the air so you can get a good look at the flat terrain that is 250 by 250 blocks of stone—a perfect surface for planting my maze and my tower, although I could have filled it with grass or any other block material.

After placing the maze with a single click (but before clicking the Import button), I can see that it fits well in my 250 × 250-block plot of flat terrain, as shown in Figure 3.17.

Now it’s time to import the tower and place it at the center of the maze. You can see in Figure 3.18 that the tower sits in the center circle. I also converted the rock surface to grass (using the Fill and Replace tool covered in Chapter 2).

Before I go explore my maze in Minecraft, I click on the MCEdit menu and choose Save. After the save action is done, I click on MCEdit again and choose Quit. Now I can go check out my maze in Minecraft.

I’ve circled around and found the maze entrance. I can see that it’ll probably be helpful to build some sort of building at the spot shown in Figure 3.20 so that I can easily find the entrance.

The real fun begins, however, inside the maze. If I memorize the solution, I’ll be able to run through it super-fast, while any enemies chasing me will certainly get lost.

Figure 3.21 shows what it’s like to be running through the maze. If you don’t know the solution, it can definitely get confusing as you explore.

Before leaving this chapter, think about how long it would take you to build a maze of this size and complexity using simple mining and placement of individual blocks. It would take dozens and dozens of hours…maybe even hundreds.

Guess how long I spent on this entire process? Less than 15 minutes. Here’s a breakdown:

Creating the maze with the maze generator: 2 minutes

Converting the maze file to .svg with online-convert.com: 1 minute

Importing into Tinkercad and resizing the maze: 2 minutes

Exporting the maze to a .schematic file: 1 minute

Flattening terrain before maze placement: 3 minutes

Importing the maze and placing it: 2 minutes

Importing the tower and placing it: 2 minutes

It may take you just a little longer than this because you’ll be familiarizing yourself with the various tools, but once you become familiar with Tinkercad, MCEdit, online-convert.com, and other tools, the time it takes you to create these kinds of amazing structures will drop as well.

Instead of helping you create and add a maze, however, I’ll walk you through adding another fun element to a Minecraft world that uses the same tools and procedures you read about in this chapter.