Devember | Minecraft Build Contest Finalists 2021 🏆

DEVEMBER | MINECRAFT BUILD CONTEST 2021 FINALISTS :trophy:

Video coming soon! As usual, I really struggled to pick finalists because you all did so great. But I finally got it. Here are the finalists for the Minecraft Build Contest!


05: MooseAire - Hunt For Red October :red_circle:

Submission Link:

An amazing atmospheric build with functional redstone missiles. My favorite part of this build was the location-- using the new nether atmospheres really adds to the vibe and makes you feel a bit intimidated when you see them come out of the mist.


04: Sausage - Boiler Snake Mountain :snake:

Submission Link:

We had a lot of great sculptural builds this year so this was a tough one to judge! But I really liked the skull with the lava coming out of it’s mouth, plus the gargantuan L1 boilersnake. Also all the cats chilling in the throne room. :cat:


03: Engle - Huge Port Town :anchor:

Submission Link:

The scale of this build is absolutely incredible, from the gates to the ship. I also loved the detail with your deaths being marked in the grave yard area of the town, that made me laugh! The telescope/observatory was awesome too.


02: Techisattva - Mushroom Temple and Village :mushroom:

Submission Link:
[Official] 2021 L1 Devember Minecraft Server! Vanilla Survival + Build Contest - #250 by Techisattva

I’m a sucker for villages, what can I say. This was also probably one of the most humane villager farms on the server haha. I really enjoyed the “eastern” styling of the mushroom blocks that we normally see in a european/fantasy context in minecraft. Also some of the smaller details on this build put it over the top for me, like the sound design in the temple (using the new crystal blocks).


01: Sprouts87 - Underwater Garden Dome :ocean:

Submission Link:

This is probably one of the more unique builds I’ve seen since we started doing the Minecraft build contest, and as such, I think it deserves to be our 2021 winner! It’s a giant spherical organic form suspended in the ocean; made largely of moss blocks from the new Caves and Cliffs update. There were also some really wonderful details throughout the caverns (including the archways) that I’m still taking notes on for my own builds. This is a really fun structure to get lost in!


HONORABLE MENTIONS

Too many to count! You guys made it ridiculously difficult to pick winners. Here are some of my other favorites:

  • Alani’s sculptures :magic_wand: :mage:
  • Verboten’s giant KFC bucket :poultry_leg:
  • RockerDaddy’s garden :chicken:
  • Skipp1’s “Devious Licks” piece haha :tongue:
  • All the incredible map art (SO MANY, did you guys show Bryan your version of his Wendell artwork?!)
  • All the communal infrastructure projects like roads, farms and nether portals

OK YEAH WHATEVER, WHAT ABOUT PRIZES?!

I believe Wendell is handling the prize handouts this year. From the main Devember thread:

If you’re a finalist, what sort of prize would you like? I have some hardware like motherboards, cpus, etc and level1techs store stuff. as well as the Linode grand prizes!

Message him for more details if you’re in the top five!


FINAL THOUGHTS

Big thanks to Linode and our great mod team for helping make this happen again this year! We’re already discussing some ideas for next year, mainly around the following two ideas:

  • Creative mode server (?!)
  • Back to one month of build time (December 1-December 31)

Tell us what you think below and let us know if you have any other ideas you’d like to see next year. And congrats to all the winners and participants! :smiley:

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Amazing work by all!

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Congrats everyone. Well done by all.

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Just want to post a good luck next year post for all of you who submitted. It was another good year on the server despite occasional problems.

Congratulations to the winners. I loved seeing all the builds myself. I dont have much time to play anymore but seeing other peoples ridiculously big builds lets me somewhat enjoy the game still.

I liked 01 and 03 the most personally. That and the submarines but thats my bias.

Yeah it will avoid conflict in trying to make a fair and challenging survival sandbox. I think creative will let them make trully massive builds but Kreestuh and @SgtAwesomesauce we are going to need more hardware given that (potentially). Im really not sure but if stuff gets trully creative level massive. There could be issues. IDK we would have to address that when it comes to it. I think the best way is to deload chunks quickly but Im not entirely sure?

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The entity counts were the majority of the stress on the server, from what I could tell. Creative would have fewer mob type entities, which would significantly assist.

We might be able to make it work.

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thats true. In creative we dont really need to worry about mob spawns as much as can lower it drastically. Theres no reason for farms other than aesthetic. Might take a good bit of tweaking but definitely think I like the creative idea. That and it really opens the potential.

Now given people are likely to use schematica and stuff in creative we should consider uplifiting the protections of block spam and stuff only to the level where it hurts the server. So say someone wants to use it to help them paint something they did on their person computer; I think they should be able to do this.

In creative mode the only way those restrictions make sense is to make sure the server doesnt crash. Outside of that its creative? so why limit it

True, entities and block updates produce 80% of resource usage (cpu/ram). Lots of chunk loading increases storage read use too, so creative with no mob-farms and some teleportation system will take less resources than one KFC bucket :smiley: ( you should check how it chugs if you have seeds in hand :slight_smile: ). Do some entity limit per build and you should be fine. (also if people need mobs for build having mobs without ai also helps lots)

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Unless we allow people to have mob farms.

Though I do move that we find a way to automate the log output to the systemD journal and we daemonize the Minecraft server. I’m not sure how to do this yet but it would automate crash recovery

There simplest way to automate MC recovery I know is docker-compose setup which has automatic crash recovery and easy upgrade path.

For more info you can check itzg/docker-minecraft-server and their examples on Github.

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Thanks for the drop. Maybe these could be adapted. We will take a look

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Yeah, docker is an option, but that’s a whole new layer of complication that I was hoping to avoid.

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No farms and mobs could be disabled would put a huge relief on the server

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You and I both know docker isnt that complicated to us? Plus its fairly easy to check the logs

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Yeah, but there’s hardening considerations and I leave that to Wendell because its his hardware, I want him to be confident I haven’t left a hole by accident.

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Ultimately hardening docker isnt a painful process just annoying. That said I guess the only way to trully harden a container would be to build it yourself and thats painful

IDK we need automation. We should be fixing bugs. The server itself should automate handling the restarts and crash handling

As I said it’s the simplest way, it drastically speeds up fresh roll up of new infra or just upgrade to new version :slight_smile:

You are correct there is first time configuration hurdle and if you upgrade regularly you will need to clean up old images. But as part of configuration if you use multiple containers you can limit resources you provide to each service/container and improve efficiency of system as whole.

I don’t see my build mentioned, not sure if people taking a look at the build missed it or maybe i was disqualified for some reason.
So, if I may ask, why this build was not mentioned? Part of Mordor for the build competition

Congratulations to all the finalists and honorable mentions as well. It was fun playing on the server this year.

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Yay I got a mention thanks.

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