Beautiful Madness

We've lost count of the amount of times we've tried to visit Wonderland in real life. But no matter how many looking glasses we try and force ourselves through, or rabbit holes we crawl down, we never seem to get there. We just end up filthy, humiliated, and forced to make a large donation to the rabbit sanctuary. Always nice to support a good cause!

Speaking of causes for good, talented build team NewHeaven have built a whole new way for us to enjoy the Alice in Wonderland universe. Loyal readers might recognise NewHeaven for their excellent small-scale build, 'A Normal Day for Bob', that we featured on the site recently. "That was the smallest project we've published as a team," explains Speedrus, NewHeaven's Community Manager. "Unlike the Alice project, which is probably the biggest project we have ever made."

"We really loved the Alice in Wonderland universe - everything is so fantastic, so to adapt that in Minecraft, showing something very colourful with a lot of unthinkable shapes. In the end it makes something wonderful!"

The result of "two or three months of hard work", the build is a great showcase for how bright and colourful Lewis Carroll's classic should be. But adapting a known work had both benefits and restrictions for NewHeaven. "There wasn't a particularly complicated part because we were adapting a universe that was already designed for us," says Speedrus. "Though the most difficult thing to make was the characters. They need a specific pose to tell a story, and needed to look exactly the same as they do in the movie. The vegetation and buildings weren't so strict but we couldn't change the characters' faces."

So what's more satisfying to work on - smaller builds that go big on detail, or large builds like Wonderland that go big on everything? "You need to have a balance between big and small projects. Smaller projects give you the satisfaction of doing a lot of things in a short amount of time, and on the other side, bigger projects give you the satisfaction of doing something great, something that can give sparkles in the eyes of your community."

As for the most satisfying part of this particular project, that was when everything came together. "For Alice we built everything separately," says Speedrus. "So at the end when everything was finished, the map was still not done yet, because we [still] needed to assemble it. This assembly was the most satisfying part to make because we finally saw our map done!"

Any advice for players who want to build on this scale? "Start small and get bigger and bigger over time," advises Speedrus. "We didn't make big projects at the beginning of NewHeaven. Get more and more experience and you will be able to make bigger things. And you must have a very big organization to make big things or you'll be lost!" Lost in Wonderland, perhaps? We can think of far worse places to be.