Bum
Dum, dum
They're coming!
We cannot get out!
Dum, dum
They're coming!
We cannot get out!
•._.•'´¯`'•._.•'` MORIA `'•._.•'´¯`'•._.•
Khazad-dûm | Dwarrowdelf | Casarrondo | Hadhodrond | Phurunargian
~~~~~~ Stage 2: Idea collecting and fine planning ~~~~~~
Project Leaders:
Despot666
Finrod_Amandil
I don't think I need to overly highlight what significance this project has in our community. In early 2011 our first Moria was finished, long before even most of the current staff members joined MCME. Regardless the, in terms of today's builds, poor quality of structures and terrain (due to limited experience and limited means) Moria stays to this day among the most popular, most overwhelming and most often toured locations, and most important: Most anticipated for a revamp.
Someone once said, that back in 2011 when Moria was first finished, it was so exceedingly outstanding, that the server could well have been renamed to "Minecraft Moria".
Let's make sure we can say that again.
General Timeline
[Stage 0]
- Idea collecting among Project Staff (done)
[Stage 1]
- Idea collecting among Staff (done)
- Sorting out technical details for teleporting and similar (in progress)
- Developing Dwarven Resource Pack (in progress)
- Developing Build styles (on hold)
- First rough layout finished (done)
[Stage 2]
- Publication
- Idea collecting among community and implementing into rough design.
[Stage 3]
- Definitive Layout with fixed distances and sizes. (on hold)
[Stage 4]
- Construction (on hold)
Lore
Here's a full collection of layout-regarding lore from LotR (Silmarillion and Hobbit don't include more information.)
- (The West Gate I already made lore-accurate, the greater surroundings (Hill where they fight against wargs, Hollin Ridge, high moor of Rivendell will be fixed in the next Misty Mountains section)
- West Gate opening: Gate wings open 180° degree each, so that they lie right on the wall when open. Assumingly the gate wings were bigger than the drawing on the door.
- Steep stairs behind the gate.
- Only the first few steps of the stairs could be seen through the darkness.
- "The wide stairway was sound and undamaged" ('sound' meaning "intact")
- 200 steps, broad and shallow
- Arched passage with level floor at the top
- "There are many streams and wells in the Mines" - Gandalf
- Distance from West to East Gate at least 40 miles (65 kilometres) in direct line, "and the road may wind much", 3-4 days marching
- "The passage twisted round a few turns, and then began to descend. It went steadily down for a long while before it became level once again."
- Many passages to the sides: "Frodo caught glimpses of stairs and arches and of other passages and tunnels, sloping up, or running steeply down, or opening blankly dark on either side."
- Many points where they need to decide which way to take (often even Gimli is not of much help), "The Mines of Moria were vast and intricate beyond the imagination of Gimli"
- "There were not only many roads to choose from, there were also in many places holes and pitfalls, and dark wells beside the path in which their passing feet echoed. There were fissures and chasms in the walls and floor, and every now and then a crack would open right before their feet. The widest was more than seven feet across [...] The noise of churning water came up from far below, as if some great mill-wheel was turning in the depths." (7 feet = 2.1336 metres)
- Those dangers get more and more requent towards the Crossroads.
- Crossroads: "Before him stood a wide dark arch opening into three passages: all led in the same general direction, eastwards; but the left-hand passage plunged down, while the right-hand climbed up, and the middle way seemed to run on, smooth and level but very narrow."
- Wide chamber with stone door to the left of the archway, hole in the middle (aka "Pippin's well"): "Before his feet they saw a large round hole like the mouth of a well. Broken and rusty chains lay at the edge and trailed down into the black pit. Fragments of stone lay near.". Gimli suggests the room was a guard room to guard the three passages. The stone fragments were the lid of the well.
- Pippin throws stone into well --> After couple heartbeats the sound of the stone falling into water is heard.
- They take the right passage (up)
- "The passage they had chosen wound steadily upwards. As far as they could judge it went in great mounting curves, and as it rose it grew loftier and wider. There were now no openings to other galleries or tunnels on either side, and the floor was level and sound, without pits or cracks. Evidently they had struck what once had been an important road;" Length: 20 miles (15 miles straight west-east)
- They reach the "21st hall of the North Side" - "'I chose the right way,' Gandalf said. 'At last we are coming to the habitable parts, and I guess that we are not far now from the eastern side. But we are high up, a good deal higher than the Dimrill Gate'"
- 21st hall: huge, empty hall, vast roof, many mighty pillars, black walls, three other entrances (black arches), together with the entrance of the fellowship theres one corridor on every side (4).
There was a light shaft in the 21st hall, and the light from the Chamber of Mazarbul could be seen through the northern entrance. - Gandalf tells from early Moria: Full of light and splendour, carven throne, many pillared halls of stone with golden roof and silver floor, runes of power upon the [East] door, shining lamps of crystal; Forging ("hammer on anvil", "forged was blade"), Sculpting ("chisel clove"), Engraving ("graver wrote"), Other parts of Weapon making ("hilt was bound"), Mining ("delver mined"), Building ("mason built"), beryl, pearl, opal, metal; buckler (kind of shield), corslet (armor), axe, sword, spear; music (harps, trumpets, singers); Durins Tomb in Moria
- Jewels and similar plundered by orcs (in the upper halls)
- "'And since the dwarves fled, no one dares to seek the shafts and treasuries down in the deep places: they are drowned in water – or in a shadow of fear.'"
- Only mithril was of real worth in Moria, everything else could have also been obtained by trade, they would not have to dig for other materials (they still did though)
- mithril: "The lodes lead away north towards Caradhras, and down to darkness."
- Durins Bane was awaken when digging too deeply for mithril.
- Northern entrance --> Wide corridor, high and flat-topped gate (with stone door, opening to the inside of the chamber) to the right --> Chamber of Mazarbul aka Balins Tomb
- Chamber of Mazarbul: "Large square chamber"; wide light shaft in the eastern wall; 2ft high oblong stone block with white stone lid (Tomb); second, smaller door on the other side of the room; bones, swords, axes and similar on the floor; recesses in the walls with large iron-bound wood chests, broken and plundered, one damaged book beside one of them (Book of Mazarbul)
- Book of Mazarbul: Balin and company arrived at Moria 30 years ago, (2989 T.A., Balin gets killed by an orc five ears later, rest of the dwarves die soon after); "upper armouries of Third Deep"; barred the [East] gates
- Gandalf suggest taking the eastern exit of the 21st hall, there go right (south) and downwards, but proceeding orcs prevent them from leaving the chamber of Mazarbul through the same way they came.
- The 21st hall is on the 7th level, 6 above the gates. Thus the gates are on the 1st level.
- Passage on the eastern chamber door: 7 flights of stairs down with around 50 steps each, there are other side corridors to both sides; the main corridor they take is facing east, and in the end facing south. It goes into the 2nd hall of the First Deep through a low archway
- The First Deep is the level immidiately below the gates
- 2nd hall: Loftier and far longer than the 21st hall. They enter it near it eastern end. Double line of huge pillars like stems and branches of trees, black. Close to the feet of two pillars a great fissure has opened. Smooth floor.
- The main road (from the 21st gate) would have entered the 2nd hall beyond the fissure
- Great chasm at end of hall.
- Bridge of Khazad-dûm: Narrow (only single file walkable), no stairs between bridge and gate.
- Beyond door: wide stairs, wide passage, 1st hall, Great Gates
- 1st hall: windows on east side
- Gandalf fell long down the chasm and in the end fell into water, the bottom of the chasm is "beyond light and knowledge" and never was it measured.
- Balrog fled into tunnels, far below the deepest delvings of dwarves, made by "the nameless things"
- They went up until they reached the endless stairs, which are rather a legend than a fact to dwarves: "'It was made, and it had not been destroyed,' said Gandalf. 'From the lowest dungeon to the highest peak it climbed, ascending in unbroken spiral in many thousand steps, until it issued at last in Durin's Tower carved in the living rock of Zirak-zigil, the pinnacle of the Silvertine."
- Durin the Deathless' Tomb is in Moria
- After the end of the First Age the wealth of Moria increased, due to many dwarves from the destroyed Belegost and Nogrod joining it.
- "[...] for though Eregion was destroyed and the gates of Moria were shut, the halls of Khazad-dûm were too deep and strong and filled with a people too numerous and valiant for Sauron to conquer from without. Thus its wealth remained long unravished, though its people began to dwindle."
- (side fact: Erebor was founded by the dwarves the fled from the Balrog in the middle of the Third Age, thus it is far younger than Moria)
- "secret tombs of the kings" (speculative place where the dwarven rings of power may be)
- "Moria for long remained secure, but its numbers dwindled until many of its vast mansions became dark and empty"
- 1980 T.A. A Balrog appears in Moria and slays Durin VI
- 1981 T.A. Náin I slain, dwarves flee from Moria
- around 2480 T.A. Sauron begins to fill Moria with his creatures.
- 2790. Thrór returns to Moria and gets beheaded by Orcs, Dwarves gather for a war of vengeance.
- 2799 Battle of Nanduhirion at Moria East Gate. Death of Azog, However dwarves dare not go into Moria yet due to Balrog
- 2898 Balin leaves Erebor and enters Moria with a dwarven colony. 2994 he and all others are dead already.
Layout
This is what you're probably interested in the most: The layout of New Moria. A very important thing to us was, that it shall be much less linear than old Moria, no more side corridors that just collapsed and lead nowhere, and of course, walking through it shall be much more complicated than it's now.
However, the highest priority had the lore we had given: We wanted to include a path through Moria that correctly represents the route the Fellowship had taken. Unfortunately that route is rather boring, and we interpreted the words of our dear Tolkien always that way, that the result is as interesting as possible. But you still may rather prefer another route (there will be plenty of those).
Additionally we added a movie route, which obviously is a route that features locations as seen in the first LotR movie, and that mainly means including the different design of the 21st hall.
Beside complexity and lore-accuracy we had a third important thing we followed and we used for the entire rest of Moria: Realism. This means that every single hall has a purpose, that Moria is not just a series of empty caverns and halls.
Furthermore, as already wished somewhere else before, we will include some Old Moria inspired locations, the most notable are (beside the lore appropriate locations):
- Chamber of Light
- East Deep
- Great Forge
- Shallow hall (aka dwarven school)
- Meeting hall (aka where everyone gets lost)
But, wait, there's another important bit of Lore: The eastern part of Moria features 7 Levels and 7 Deeps according to the books. 14 floors! And we also want to have a 2nd hall of the same size as old Moria has (600 x 250 x 80 blocks - L x W x H). Of course we have now 256 blocks height to build in, but a great part of that is already occupied by mountains!
It has already been addressed some times by now, and yes we definitely will do it that way: Moria will be placed in a separate world (like plotworld), that we'll maybe even use for other underground structures as the Kingdom under the Mountain (aka Erebor). That world is already available, but only accessible to staff so far, which will assumingly change soon. The biggest caves have already been made by @Credoo using WorldPainter. We'll hope that we can make the teleport to that world in the best case seamless, we'll have a talk with our developers about that in the near future.
Okay, we got the full 256 block range now, is that enough?
These 14 stories shall occupy a total height of 768 blocks. That does mean that we slice our Moria into three parts placed next to each other, connected by teleports. These teleports will most likely be made using command blocks with a new Minecraft 1.8. selector argument, read more about that below.
Regarding the other dimensions: Moria will be about 5000 blocks long, that's merely the same as old Moria (4700 blocks). The width will be around 1700 blocks (each layer), but that can still change, if YOU submit enough additional ideas (more about that below).
We made a roughly 1:10 model on staff world on freebuild. We will soon copy that model to public freebuild, and then you can explore it in all its glory. Do not destroy or add anything, the original model will stay in the staff world anyways.
Technical
As said, the teleporting from main to Moria world has still to be worked on, but I'm sure our fantastic developers can come up with a solution worthy of Moria.
For the teleporting inside Moria we will most likely rely on vanilla Minecraft commands. However up to MC 1.7 the region a teleport command can cover is always spherical (specifying a center point and a radius), thus we want to use a set of new selector arguments from 1.8: dx, dy and dz, with which it's possible to target a box shaped area. This is especially important for that one location in Moria that you all want to get a major update: The bridge of Khazad-dûm, and the chasm below it. In new Moria you will finally be able to jump down from that bridge, fall for an amazingly long time and at last end up in an area no dwarf has ever explored.
Furthermore we'll use relative coordinates, which means that if two players jump simultanously next to each other into the chasm, they will still be next to each other after teleporting.
With q we already made some tests on Plotworld, seamless teleports on the same world should be no problem.
Below an early test I made for the chasm teleoports with that new 1.8 mechanic:
Note: the clock will be a different one, which does not make any sound and also does not spam laggy particles. (FYI: I'm thinking of an area fill replace command block clock)
Furthermore we can already enjoy the presence of one of our first developers again, @doebi3d, and also have we heard again from ex-enforcer @Marozzo who will hopefully soon return too. As both of them were involved in the creation and maintaining of the long-lost Door/Animation Plugin, we hope that we can bring this back for Moria and all other MCME cities.
Dwarven Resource Pack
You may have missed the presence of @Despot666 sometimes in the last couple months, at least on the main server. Well, this has a very good reason: Beside that he made the major part of the Moria model, he did create an Alpha version of a Resource Pack that we're going to use for all dwarven structures. The special thing about this pack is, that Despot used the new 1.8. opportunity of making custom block models. What this means concretely, see for yourself in the few screenshots below.
And many many more new blocks you will find in the new pack. It will be submitted and published as soon as it's finished (still lot of work ahead).
Your Turn!
Now about the most important point of this post: I and Despot have used up all ideas we ever had, and thus we need you to activate your brains and search for more. Generally: Please submit an idea rather ten times than leave out any idea. Tell us what your vision of Moria is, and what has to be in it, to make you happy.
Submissions could be:
- Artwork / concept art
- Sketches (also gladly made by yourself) As detailed as possible
- Descriptions (again: the more detailed, the better)
- Concepts and models in Minecraft. (Use Freebuild - Lore-appropriate world.)
Credits
Special thanks so far go to the following community members:
@Credoo for WorldPainting the caves.
@q220 for setting up the Moria world and implementing the WP world.
@_Luk for the trailer video
@Fireinferno13 for the Resource Pack icon
FAQ
Q: Is this now serious?
A: Yes.
Q: When did the project start?
A: The first PM between me and Despot about Moria has been written on december 31st 2014.
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. Biggest one is the east one.
#swissstereotypes