Hi, I just completed Pantheon: Epsilon. This have to be one of my favorite maps I've played thus far, and DEFINITELY the best when it comes to aesthetics (Colossus, Windborne, and Dormant Lake are my favorites). I only had one legitimate death, which was just a one hit one kill creeper blast in the intro area, right after you get all the F&S to light your way. (The other deaths being my game freezing for 15 minutes in the Corrupt Gatria at night, and my monitor unplugging while on one of the spires in Windborne, causing me to die due to a ghast I was trying to kill before that happened, neither of these being that map's fault xD) However, I can't seem to find two of the discs: Strad and Wait. I have everything else in the monument except for those two, so I'd like some clues as to where they are. Don't be vague, but don't be too incredibly specific either. Thank you for the awesome map and after this, I'm gonna play the Titan's Revolt Beta ;DD
Hi, I just completed Pantheon: Epsilon. This have to be one of my favorite maps I've played thus far, and DEFINITELY the best when it comes to aesthetics (Colossus, Windborne, and Dormant Lake are my favorites). I only had one legitimate death, which was just a one hit one kill creeper blast in the intro area, right after you get all the F&S to light your way. (The other deaths being my game freezing for 15 minutes in the Corrupt Gatria at night, and my monitor unplugging while on one of the spires in Windborne, causing me to die due to a ghast I was trying to kill before that happened, neither of these being that map's fault xD) However, I can't seem to find two of the discs: Strad and Wait. I have everything else in the monument except for those two, so I'd like some clues as to where they are. Don't be vague, but don't be too incredibly specific either. Thank you for the awesome map and after this, I'm gonna play the Titan's Revolt Beta ;DD
Just completed Pantheon and i gotta say is one of the best maps i've played, and im excited to play titan revolt, but can someone tell me what does the ending book says? cause when i try to read it just says "*invalid book tag*" Ty
I just completed Titan's Revolt and wow, that was a ride. Excellent design on the final intersection: it was the perfect blend of difficulty and challenge without feeling over-the-top. Random question (since I know this map is 2 years old at this point), what's the current state of Divinity's End? I had no idea it was even being made but after the ending book I thought I'd ask.
I just completed Titan's Revolt and wow, that was a ride. Excellent design on the final intersection: it was the perfect blend of difficulty and challenge without feeling over-the-top. Random question (since I know this map is 2 years old at this point), what's the current state of Divinity's End? I had no idea it was even being made but after the ending book I thought I'd ask.
I don't know the exact state of the project but I've heard there's a team working on it and there's been some progress. "Some" being very vague since that's how these collabs work saddly. If you want to ask them personally, most mapmakers are active on the CTM Community Discord server https://discord.gg/YjhZK8
Featuring first a general overview, followed by notes on each individual area.
[Overview]
I'm a pretty experienced CTM player, having completed ~all of Super Hostile and Uncharted Territory, plus maybe a dozen other independent maps, some several times. Most of my experience comes from 1.5, although I have played in later versions as well. It was cool to get thrown back to before the combat update!
I played Pantheon, but abandoned it midway through Intersection 3 due to the lack of balance in difficulty and area size. I saw that there was another entry in the series, though, and that y'all on the dev team had made strides in fixing the coordination problems that had led to a lack of balance in Pantheon. So I was excited to give it a try.
My overall impression: you totally succeeded; this is one of my favorite CTM maps of all time. It probably gave me more than a hundred hours of entertainment overall, and there were a lot of specific features that I simply loved. Most of all, I appreciated the amount of attention that must have gone into balance---with such a large map and different creators, it must be hard to avoid areas that are too big, or drag on, or are not up to par aesthetically, etc. None of that really happened; I'd say it felt just as cohesive as many maps that I've seen made by a single creator.
I found the use of newer mapmaking technologies very tasteful. Most areas had custom maps or even gameplay mechanics, and these were almost universally well-executed so as to add to the experience. This impressed me because generally I am a vanilla sort of person; for example, Inferno Mines is one of my least favorite Super Hostile maps due to the way in which custom spawners are used. I think that generally the custom mechanics in Titan's Revolt were designed with an eye to the tactical implications, rather than just "add difficulty".
Generally I found treasures and loot to be well-balanced and rewarding without being overpowered. There were a few areas which could have used more loot to make it worthwhile to explore them, and I've complained about those below. But this was largely not the case, and I enjoyed accumulating massive amounts of items and getting the most out of anvils and enchanting to build overpowered gear. My storage system ended up with about forty double chests by the end of the map.
The aesthetic design was consistently one of the highlights of Titan's Revolt; many of the areas are simply breathtaking. It can be difficult to make areas which are so epic in scope and yet don't feel like they are just a bunch of MCEdit brushes (see: SH#07 Legendary). That never really happened with Titan's Revolt. This is what Legendary aspired to be, in my opinion.
Perhaps my biggest complaint is in the last few areas. They are just not my style. I would have preferred more traditional fortress assault kind of things, like in the rest of the map. The "teleport in" gimmick is not my favorite, and makes me much less inclined to give the areas a fair shot rather than cheesing them.
I ended up making quite a few farms. I did a skeleton farm in Soulscar Citadel from the fast spawners, a zombie farm in the main room of Soulscar Citadel since I had trouble finding other unbroken spawners, and a creeper farm in Garden of Erebus. Once I had the skeletons and zombies, I traded for infinite steak, which is what I ate for the rest of the map.
I'm sure I could think of other things, but I'll leave that to the area commentary below. Again, overall: fantastic job, it is splendid to see such attention to great mapmaking still in the community, and I will certainly be first in line to play any further maps!
[Garden of Erebus / White wool / Kaladun]
Loved it. This was a great starting area. I think it looks really pretty, and the mix of vanilla and custom mobs worked quite well. The little wooden buildings are creative without being overwrought. Aesthetically, I particularly liked the overhead paths made of leaves, especially when I realized that I was crossing back over an area I had cleared but hadn't noticed there was an upper part before. The traps were good and fair for a first area, to set the tone. The small lake just before the final structure was a good mini-challenge that required some tactical thinking to take out. It took me a little while to realize that the flower patches gave you regeneration (and how wide the radius was), but after I realized that it added a lot to the area, by creating periodic safe zones (although not safe enough to hold off a lot of mobs). Super good mechanical tweak. The only thing I was annoyed about in this area was that there were just barely enough torches, so I kept needing to run around to make sure I collected all the coal from the chests. But it didn't turn out to be a problem. That said, I do really like it when coal and wood appear in the low-tier loot boxes, because then you can craft new torches as you go.
[The River Lethe / Intersection 1]
Not my favorite. It's nice and aesthetic, but in 1.8 boats are really fiddly and break if you look at them funny. So it often took me annoyingly long to get through the intersection from one area to the next. I bet this could be fixed pretty easily though by widening the rivers and getting the passive mobs out of the middle of them initially. Also having chests literally full of boats at each entrance would be great, since I kept needing to craft new ones depending on where I came from.
The trading system is great. It wasn't apparent to me initially that Acheron Quartz could be gotten from any of the I1 areas, but after I realized that it seemed very well-balanced.
I also quite appreciate the thematic consistency of "Rose Set" items appearing in all of the I1 areas.
[Shadow of Crete / McWeakSauce]
Pretty cool. It was a bit empty but that's not necessarily a problem, because it was nice to have a more chill area to explore in between the other more intense dungeons. The important thing is that enough coal and wood were provided that I didn't have to farm torches. So I think that was done well.
One minor nitpick is that I died to the elevator in the entrance, because I didn't realize how it was supposed to work. The elevator in Garden of Erebus was really good and foolproof, so I might suggest just going through the whole map and standardizing the elevators. There's no real reason for them all to have different designs. (The one in Swamp of Lost Saints was similarly annoying, though less deadly.)
[Victory Monument]
The monument is very well-designed. Firstly, I really like the teleport setup. I think two-way teleports to each intersection and one-way teleports to each area is a great choice. It makes it nontrivial to go places, so you can't just pop back to base repeatedly, but it also makes traveling fast enough that I never really got annoyed about how long it took to get somewhere. (Except for I1 when my boat broke.) The aesthetics are great and I like the use of barrier blocks. I personally looted the base area upstairs and set up shop right next to the intersection teleports. I'm not sure why anyone would want to live upstairs when the teleports are downstairs.
Although food was conveniently not a huge problem after the first area or two, I ended up creating a massive potato farm in the monument area since I figured I would be spending the most time in those chunks. For the water I ran an aqueduct about 80 blocks from the pool in Shadow of Crete. That was a fun project.
FYI. There are little two-block-high crevices inside some of the columns where mobs can spawn. I'm guessing that wasn't intentional?
Another comment. I didn't find the ender chests in intersections and the monument to be of any use, mostly because they were only placed at locations that were right next to a teleport anyway, so it was always more convenient to just TP to base instead of putting things in the ender chest. Not sure if anything can be done about that.
Addendum. I didn't realize until very late in the map (midway through I5) that there was a record monument, or a reward system for the records. This is probably because I only looked around the "Base" area once, before deciding to set up shot at the teleport hub instead (as mentioned above). Perhaps it would be worth making it a little more obvious... I actually had to go back to get a second copy of one of the records, since I had tried playing it in a jukebox, which clears the NBT data.
Oh also, I'm not sure what to do with the jukebox I got from Tartaros. It cursed me when I put it in the dispenser.
[The Swamp of Lost Saints / Orange wool / Fangride]
Great area. The custom mobs worked quite well. The exterior part of the area was maybe a little empty, especially given the density of spawners, but I didn't mind too much since it was pretty apparent where to go so I could just clear a small path to there. (After getting the wool, I ran around to the back to see if there was anything there.) Maybe it would be more interesting if there were some more structures, or if there were fewer spawners, to encourage exploration.
The crypt, though, was absolutely top-notch. I'm a big fan of that style of dungeon crawl. It felt quite maze-like when I was exploring, but upon backtracking, it wasn't too hard to verify that I'd gotten everything, and I think those two things are the optimal outcome. I liked that the different rooms were pretty varied in layout and spawners, and I /especially/ liked the two places where you walked down a tunnel and might not realize that there was no longer any ceiling. It's like a trap that makes mobs fall on you, but you can only blame yourself for a tactical mistake. Very clever. It was also cool how there kept being more stuff deeper in the crypt, and it shifted as you got deeper. Really good for atmosphere. Finally I appreciated that there weren't too many creepers, because I got to admire the architecture more and because after Garden of Erebus I was a bit tired of everything being exploded all the time.
Minor bug report: after placing the white wool, I kept getting those rumble noises and chat messages randomly, like five or ten per hour.
[Echoes of the Styx / Magenta wool / TheXhen]
This was a fun area. Not as much going on as the previous two, but I thought it stood quite well. Boats were, again, a little annoying. But I liked that there were lilypad paths so that you could avoid the boats to an extent. I really liked the layout of the castle, what with the weird slime block as a secondary objective up top and then a sprawling dungeon with cute room designs down below. I'd say so far in the map all of the structures have been really well-built to be both functional and aesthetic. One thing I appreciated in particular was that right before the room with a poison potion spawner there was a room with a bunch of cakes. That was a nice gameplay setup, so that I didn't need to burn through a bunch of food on that room.
[The Forest of Asphodel / Light blue wool / Krose]
I enjoyed this area, although mostly the last two-thirds of it. One thing that bothered me about the first third was that the items in chests were pretty useless. It's not like I was expecting something amazing in every one, but there were a couple that just had nothing of interest at all, which didn't make exploring as fun. I thought the big castle was fun to attack, primarily because I had to think strategically about which angle to take (the number of zombies was a bit absurd, not that I am complaining). It was nice that there were explicitly multiple directions of attack (either from above or from below). And my concerns about loot went away for sure once I got here. One thing I'll note was that the ground floor area seemed weirdly peaceful despite the number of spawners. Was that intentional? Perhaps I already set them all off walking around outside and then got lucky when I later decided to go into the castle. I'll note that I particularly liked the basement area, which was a more standard dungeon crawl like Echoes of the Styx and Swamp of Lost Saints, and I thought the Guardians were a nice touch that I hadn't seen before in a CTM map.
[Soulscar Courtyard / Intersection 2]
Now this intersection I'm a big fan of. It gets the huge, epic feeling across with a great vista, while still making the actual intersection itself small and walkable. Not much to say other than that.
[Soulscar Citadel / Yellow wool / McWeakSauce]
Solid area with good gameplay and architecture, my main complaint was that it was long enough that it felt like a bit of a slog by the last room. First off, I really appreciated how close the area was to the intersection. I had to go back and forth to base a lot, and it would have been really annoying if it had been as far away from the intersection as the I1 areas were. The integration of the area into the Soulscar Courtyard was also very well-done.
The castle grounds were a good lead-in, especially the walls with ghast spawners, and I was quite happy with the castle interior main room. It was definitely an indicator that difficulty is stepping up in I2. I was able to clear most of it using singular strength, speed, and regeneration potions that I had retrieved from elsewhere, which was a lot of fun. I liked that there were different parts with different sorts of challenges, for example the cave spider pit which you could just dodge around at first if you didn't want to deal with it. The record upstairs was a good placement, and reminded me of Echoes of the Styx with the big slime cube on the roof. And I thought that the loot was well-balanced as a reward for the challenging area.
I didn't realize until after clearing the whole place that there is actually obsidian below the vault areas, and not just void. Perhaps that was intentional, but I was definitely very careful not to get knocked off. Providing pistons was a nice touch; I used some for bridging. Like I said, by time I got to the final room, I was a bit done, so I bridged across directly to the wool and then staircased down. I suspected there would be a boss mob, but unfortunately because I was in a tunnel, I didn't get a good view of exactly what was happening with that. I do know Anais said "Die!" upwards of 20 times simultaneously, which seems like maybe a bug? Anyway, I ran back and forth through my tunnel once or twice while deciding what to do, and then Anais died spontaneously. I never actually saw her. So... probably not the intended route. But I'm not complaining terribly much; I've never much liked bosses in CTM (Inferno Mines being not my favorite Super Hostile map, e.g.).
Thanks for the fast-trigger skeleton spawners above a huge drop in the second-to-last room, by the way. I don't know where I would have gotten my dozens of stacks of arrows otherwise
[The Oasis of Lemnos / Lime wool / Blade933]
Wow. I have no words for the aesthetic design in this area. I think it's the most beautiful I've seen in any CTM map I've ever played, which is over twenty. The foundry area is what Inferno Mines /should/ have looked like.
Gameplay-wise, I loved the foundry area, and I was actually quite sad that it was so much shorter than other dungeon areas in the map. The entrance area, while it played well and looked great, didn't grab me as much. One thing that bothered me a bit was how long it took to go up and down. After I got maybe 3/4 of the way down and couldn't find the path to go on, I dropped sand and ladders down from the top and used that as my base for attacking the foundry. Another thing that was a bit confusing was the dust mites. I kind of assumed that they would become more intimidating or a strategic threat at some point, but they never really did. Just an annoyance / way to set some traps?
I'd like to call out specifically the lava waterfall pouring into a minecart with hopper, which is possibly the coolest aesthetic hack I've ever seen.
In my dream version of Titan's Revolt, the extra length from the end of Soulscar Citadel would be moved to the foundry area in Oasis of Lemnos, and there would be a fast way to go up and down the entrance column.
[The Palia Archi]
I'm not sure exactly what to think about Palia Archi. I guess I was a little confused about its function in the map, as a non-wool area. Just a transition? That's not necessarily a problem -- some feeling of confusion fit pretty well with the "jerk map-maker" aesthetic, which I thought was done splendidly. (The === TIP === formatting of the signs was absolutely perfect.) The aesthetic design was maybe a little rough in parts -- end stone is always difficult to use effectively -- but again that didn't seem entirely out of place. I appreciated the traps, although I didn't fall for any. (I turned on F3 to check biomes as soon as I saw the beds, even before I saw the tip sign or heard the pigmen. "It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.")
Was there something to do with the lamps and power stations? I was thinking maybe after turning on all the lamps, the power stations could be used to upgrade the armor that was in them. I never tested, though.
I totally skipped Supply Run after seeing how many forest sprite spawners there were on the floor. Ick. I cannot imagine how I would go about securing that without it being a huge pain. (Aside from setting everything on fire with a lava bucket.)
[Ruins of Elysium / Intersection 3]
Looks pretty, not too annoying to navigate, I approve. I'm liking the gradual evolution of the trading options for food. By this point in the map, I have massive farms for potatos, wheat, bones, arrows, rotten flesh, and gunpowder, and I like that I am being rewarded for that.
Although I am a bit unclear what the entry point from Palia Archi is supposed to be. I crawled around the side and came through the path to Hailstorm Brigade.
[The Lernaean Undergrowth / Pink wool / Ragirk]
Well, you certainly know how to make an impression. I think this takes the cake by far for the most blatantly horrifying thing I've ever seen in Minecraft, which I rather assume was the point. (I think the previous contender was The Nest in SH#14 Waking Up.)
All in all, I think it was a surprisingly well-balanced area, especially given how much was going on. I actually cleared out the entire place, more or less every single spawner. I thought it was neat how there were a bunch of special crazy spawners in the center and at the entrance, which certainly made an impression, but that most of the area was pretty uniform. With such a large area, it would easy for it to become dull, but I thought you did a good job at making different parts look and feel different, so there were landmarks and also different kinds of gameplay.
By the time I had gotten maybe halfway through, I had basically figured out how to tackle the main part of the area. The wide-activation wither skeleton spawners were a very interesting gameplay choice which I think neatly prevented the gigantic torrent of spider spawners from just being a chore.
I appreciated that the temple at the end was very short, because the exterior was quite long enough. But it was appropriate.
If I were to suggest something, perhaps adding a few more small landmarks or chests around the outside edge would be nice? It would make it a bit more interesting and rewarding to go through there, since currently basically all you get is the iron (plus a couple of very nice tools and weapons).
[The Remnants of Phlegethon / Gray wool / TikaroHD]
This area was very chill in comparison to Lernaean Undergrowth, which I quite appreciated. Nice aesthetics, unpretentious. I liked the branching layout with two different paths. I particularly liked that the filler items for the chests were wood, because I was getting tired of cutting down trees to make my torches. I'd say that more free wood and coal in loot chests throughout the map would be an improvement. It's not like it's a challenge to get the requisite resources; it's just annoying so perhaps a bit less of it would be nice.
I also appreciated how the loot from this area intertwined with the iron (i.e., anvil availability) from Lernaean Undergrowth to let you start getting some overpowered gear provided that you could avoid dying long enough to get the levels. (I never died in combat after the white wool area, so far at least, and ended up achieving a highest level of 64 before finally getting access to an anvil.)
All in all, I liked this area. The aesthetics are great and the gameplay was pretty solid. I just have a few complaints. The main issue is that there wasn't enough loot. There were a fair number of chests with very good items, but all concentrated in one place. Aside from those, there wasn't much reason to actually explore. What's to stop the player from just pillaring up to the wool room? Which brings me to my other issue, the layout of the area. It's really, really huge and takes a long time to navigate -- yet it seems like there's no good reason not to shortcut it.
I think this would be a fantastic area if there were more things of interest added to the bridges and tunnels.
I'll also note that this is the first area since Garden of Erebus where I actually died out of anything aside from pure idiocy.
[Frozen Fields / Intersection 4]
Great intersection, really cool design with the cobblestone fence lattice and it doesn't get in the way of gameplay. I approve. The felled trees were a really neat touch.
[The Lament of Acheron / Cyan wool / KillerCreeper55]
Man. What do I even say? This single area could be a map unto itself, and an absolutely phenomenal map at that. The Lament of Acheron raises the bar for CTM map design. The visual design was striking and attractive both from afar and up close. Custom mobs were themed after particular pieces of landscape (gravel deposit, lava lake, river, tiki hut, castle), which was really good for atmosphere. It was a bit choose-your-own-adventure, since there were multiple paths through the area, and I especially liked the bridges near the beginning. The custom mobs continued to challenge even as my gear scaled (being able to one-hit any vanilla mob does cut down on the menace that they provide). Unlike in Hailstorm Brigade, the loot was scattered throughout the area, yet there was definitely a reward for going after the harder targets. I might suggest a little bit more variety added to later chests, though (especially in Valley of Daedalus), since after I had gotten through most of the castle area I felt like I had seen everything the chests had to offer. Not that there isn't enough variety overall, but I think a bit more of a gradient over the area makes it exciting to see what new thing might come next. The amount of depth is really staggering -- it feels like there are secrets everywhere. It really draws a contrast with the large, empty-seeming areas in the Pantheon end-game. And congratulations on the cave trap; I think that's the only significant trap that I fell for in the map so far. [Edit -- okay, apparently I need to be more specific when I say "cave trap". I meant the one with the 27 spawners. For the one with the moss guys, I extricated myself from the situation by means of ender pearl, then was a bit put out that the potion lasted so long. I also wasn't able to find any loot, even in the underground room?]
The castle was definitely meaty and took longer for me to secure than I expected. I liked the ghasts gameplay-wise. The thing that presented real difficulty, though, were the defense turrets. They seem perhaps a little overpowered to me? Not because they do a ton of damage from afar, but because they are immune to arrows and they also never despawn regardless of how far you get from the area. Were these features intentional? I've never seen persistent mobs in a CTM before. Given how many there were sitting around, I concluded that any sort of direct attack was completely unworkable, and dropped a lot of TNT from above. Not sure if that was the intended approach. The thing that was really annoying was that the guardians and armor shells kind of spewed all over the place the entire time I was working on the castle, so there were a ton just walking and flopping around the village area. Was that intended?
I think the checkpoint system was great, except for it took a *lot* of effort for me to find the first checkpoint, despite seeing the "go left" sign. In fact I didn't find it until well after securing the second checkpoint.
[The Valley of Daedalus / Purple wool / ElRichMC]
I think in comparison to The Lament of Acheron, I found The Valley of Daedalus to be a bit underwhelming. It mostly seemed like more of the same. Reasonably solid gameplay for the most part, but, lacking in originality. I skipped over most of the end part of the area by dropping in TNT to break the spawners by the wool and then ender-pearling down and out. I was kind of disappointed to see that the same defense turret spawners were used here, because it wasn't anything new, and they were a real pain in the last area. I felt like I was rewarded for taking the cheap approach and eliminating them from afar, because anything else is way more difficult due to the lack of despawning.
The skunk riders were really annoying, but I did at least enjoy burning down their forest in retaliation.
One thing I'll mention is that I still have *no* idea where the third checkpoint is, despite spending a long time searching. Those things need to be more obvious IMO; it was quite frustrating because the checkpoint system felt like it wasted as much time as it saved for me, due to how long I spent searching.
[Wynaria / Blue wool / Draco_Rogue]
This was certainly one of my favorite areas! I was only sad I got through it so quickly. This might have been in part because I actually forgot about it until after clearing the green wool area, and by that point I was able to one-shot basically everything in Wynaria and not really take any damage. But I didn't mind; it was a nice, peaceful break from some of the other areas that I had been dealing with.
I really liked the aesthetic design. The floating island as a whole is beautiful, and I was charmed by the sort of age-of-exploration balloon theme. The area was nicely paced, the custom mobs were interesting, and the combination of unique and basic useful loot was very well-done and much appreciated. I wish more areas had stuff like torches in their loot chests; it's not like you're ever not going to need them...
I'll also mention that I loved the inclusion of the little cave area. Made the whole thing feel more alive and complete.
The only thing I wonder is if I missed something in the castle at the end. I had to pillar up to get to the second level; was there a staircase somewhere? I looked for a while but couldn't find anything.
[Wraithshadow Hives / Brown wool / Drago]
This was an interesting area which I liked on the whole. The aesthetic design of the lab areas was absolutely top-notch; I loved that. The hives also were well-designed in the sense that the mid-sized one made me viscerally uncomfortable in its appearance. I'm guessing that not everyone might go into the basement of the first lab, though, especially since it's possible to miss the entrance if you're not thorough. Since the enchantment table is there perhaps it would be worth making slightly more obviously important?
Gameplay-wise I have not too much to say. I leveraged Efficiency pickaxes and used the provided diamond pickaxe to mine obsidian for the two beacons now resident in my base (Speed and Haste). I didn't find the temporary effects from breaking hives to be very useful; perhaps if they lasted for like 10 minutes or something, but attacking a hive certainly took more than one minute. I thought the blindness was an interesting mechanic; I used pistons to build a bridge across the void into the base of the large hive, and then tunneled to the core.
I'm not entirely sure what the point of the final part of the area, with all the little tent-like structures, was. The mobs are quite dangerous and I don't see any particular suggestion that there is actually loot or a hidden area. I skipped over by bridging, after finding the stick in the mushroom cave.
Great trap at the very end, by the way!
[Tartaros / Intersection 5 / Green wool / Xethyros]
Now this area had some absolutely top-notch aesthetics. The sheer scale of the cavern, together with the citadel, really delivered on the atmosphere. Especially after exploring the citadel for a long time and then seeing the chained Titan in the pit as well as the structures on the other walls of the cavern, realizing that there was even more.
Combat-wise, the nerf on fire resistance was a very interesting idea and I liked how it worked. I started carrying a water bucket around, which was helpful because I got to practice using it to cancel fall damage.
The use of slabs everywhere was very annoying since it made it finnicky to place torches. I surmise this was intentional, though. By this point I have basically acquired end-game gear, and I am a killing machine, easily able to whip in and out of rooms and massacre the inhabitants with incredible agility. Even the armored wither skeletons with swords fall in two hits. That's certainly not to say there was no challenge, though; I felt that the balance was good. I did appreciate the sheer ludicrousness of the skeleton tower in the center. I actually cleared that whole place, by the way. I broke the speciality spawners with TNT from above, then walked along each of the bars of skeleton spawners, placing torches on top of them. That was quite a bit of fun. I wouldn't have bothered, but I couldn't quite find the obnoxious very-wide-area spawners in the tower without clearing the whole thing. (I originally fetched the wool using sand and ladders from the ceiling.)
My main complaint with this area was the loot, namely, there was hardly any. Only one or two actually useful things, plus the two diamond ore blocks. I would have gladly swept the whole place, but there was just no incentive to slog through any more of than needed. I did like some of the hidden chest placements, but was disappointed that almost none of said hidden chests had "real" useful items, rather than just memes. (Why not have both?)
A thing that was well-done, I think, was the variety of threats, with the various types of wide-activation heavy mob spawners, the very-wide-area heavy spawners in the central tower, the blaze pillars, the wide-activation ghast spawners on the domes, and the legions of regular skeleton spawners (plus extra special sauce that I did not even investigate before blowing up, at the top of the wool chamber).
[Realm of the Sky Order / Red wool / Rock]
Well, uh, congratulations, I don't think I will ever see anything in a CTM map again that is so blatantly evil. I actually managed to do this whole area in a single run without dying, but, my god. I am somewhat shocked to say this, but the area felt pretty good on the whole. In my run, at least, there was a balance between straight melee combat, tactical bridging and tunneling, ranged combat, and desperately running for my life.
In addition to my usual gear, including water bucket, I brought along a whole heap of torches and blocks, plus speed and strength potions, and I think six ender pearls, of which I ended up using four (to teleport across various bridges, to get out of lava, to remove myself from the record disk chamber).
I'll note, amusingly enough, that I appreciated being able to anvil the One-Time Use pickaxe into an as-many-times-as-I-want-to-use-it pickaxe.
And I will admit that the anvil trap was pretty funny.
Addendum: Going through later in creative mode, I found out there were some pretty nifty things in the side rooms and towers outside and stuff. I kind of bypassed all of that because if I don't have a bidirectional teleport then I know I can't manage a prolonged assault, so my mind was only on getting to the goal as quickly as possible.
[Firestorm Citadel / Csillagvihar]
On the whole I liked this area. It was a pretty straightforward layout, and I did especially appreciate the section with the obisidian cores to break. One thing that I found annoying was that there weren't any shortcuts; I would have especially liked it if at the end there was a quick travel back to the beginning. Why not? It would save annoying time spent running.
I did manage to get into the broken portal room once (actually, both of them), and much appreciated the recovery procedure that was clearly well-planned-out. Only happened once as of the time of this writing. I did also manage to break the fire once. For some reason, during one of my sessions in the area, none of it appeared. No idea why. I was rather thankful, to be honest.
I liked the little bits of lore scattered here and there, the whole thing with Lord Vanaduke. I was kind of dreading another mob boss fight, which as I mentioned in Soulscar Citadel is not my favorite thing. So I was happy to see that there was no such thing here.
[The Core / Black wool / Wallcraft]
Sorry, I did not like this finale. I am generally not a fan of big open areas at the ends of maps filled with wide-area spawners and such. Same thing with Eternal Battle from Inferno Mines. And while the one-way teleport gimmick was cute for the red wool area, for the map finale I was looking forward to something I could tackle more fairly with the resources I'd accumulated over the map.
Gameplay-wise, the main issue was that the mobs were just way too powerful and there was no way to make any area safe, which made it nonsensical to try a direct attack on anything. I ended up doing the entire thing by bridging around the ceiling. I think I must have used several dozen stacks of quartz blocks for those bridges. It was a huge pain. But I really didn't see any other reasonable approach---and you're looking at the person who thinks a direct attack makes perfect sense for Null and Void: Revenge of the Void in Uncharted Territory II. (In fact, the latter might be my favorite black wool area of all time.)
I did manage to find the massively wide area skeleton spawners, by the way, in the base of the central island. I was basically done with the area by that point, but if I weren't, I totally would have brought in a bunch of TNT and destroyed them through the corners of the bedrock, one block at a time. Screw those things.
To be fair, I will say that I thought the aesthetic design was pretty cool. Definitely makes for some nice screenshots, especially if you do use smooth lighting. I personally play always without smooth lighting and on maximum brightness, and didn't change that for this area, but I did spend some time looking around with the recommended settings.
Hi, I just completed Pantheon: Epsilon. This have to be one of my favorite maps I've played thus far, and DEFINITELY the best when it comes to aesthetics (Colossus, Windborne, and Dormant Lake are my favorites). I only had one legitimate death, which was just a one hit one kill creeper blast in the intro area, right after you get all the F&S to light your way. (The other deaths being my game freezing for 15 minutes in the Corrupt Gatria at night, and my monitor unplugging while on one of the spires in Windborne, causing me to die due to a ghast I was trying to kill before that happened, neither of these being that map's fault xD) However, I can't seem to find two of the discs: Strad and Wait. I have everything else in the monument except for those two, so I'd like some clues as to where they are. Don't be vague, but don't be too incredibly specific either. Thank you for the awesome map and after this, I'm gonna play the Titan's Revolt Beta ;DD
HEY DUDE, its HAYDENHAYDEN011
Hey dude, its haydenhayden011!
Just completed Pantheon and i gotta say is one of the best maps i've played, and im excited to play titan revolt, but can someone tell me what does the ending book says? cause when i try to read it just says "*invalid book tag*" Ty
I just completed Titan's Revolt and wow, that was a ride. Excellent design on the final intersection: it was the perfect blend of difficulty and challenge without feeling over-the-top. Random question (since I know this map is 2 years old at this point), what's the current state of Divinity's End? I had no idea it was even being made but after the ending book I thought I'd ask.
I don't know the exact state of the project but I've heard there's a team working on it and there's been some progress. "Some" being very vague since that's how these collabs work saddly. If you want to ask them personally, most mapmakers are active on the CTM Community Discord server https://discord.gg/YjhZK8
Review of Titan's Revolt
Featuring first a general overview, followed by notes on each individual area.
[Overview]
I'm a pretty experienced CTM player, having completed ~all of Super Hostile and Uncharted Territory, plus maybe a dozen other independent maps, some several times. Most of my experience comes from 1.5, although I have played in later versions as well. It was cool to get thrown back to before the combat update!
I played Pantheon, but abandoned it midway through Intersection 3 due to the lack of balance in difficulty and area size. I saw that there was another entry in the series, though, and that y'all on the dev team had made strides in fixing the coordination problems that had led to a lack of balance in Pantheon. So I was excited to give it a try.
My overall impression: you totally succeeded; this is one of my favorite CTM maps of all time. It probably gave me more than a hundred hours of entertainment overall, and there were a lot of specific features that I simply loved. Most of all, I appreciated the amount of attention that must have gone into balance---with such a large map and different creators, it must be hard to avoid areas that are too big, or drag on, or are not up to par aesthetically, etc. None of that really happened; I'd say it felt just as cohesive as many maps that I've seen made by a single creator.
I found the use of newer mapmaking technologies very tasteful. Most areas had custom maps or even gameplay mechanics, and these were almost universally well-executed so as to add to the experience. This impressed me because generally I am a vanilla sort of person; for example, Inferno Mines is one of my least favorite Super Hostile maps due to the way in which custom spawners are used. I think that generally the custom mechanics in Titan's Revolt were designed with an eye to the tactical implications, rather than just "add difficulty".
Generally I found treasures and loot to be well-balanced and rewarding without being overpowered. There were a few areas which could have used more loot to make it worthwhile to explore them, and I've complained about those below. But this was largely not the case, and I enjoyed accumulating massive amounts of items and getting the most out of anvils and enchanting to build overpowered gear. My storage system ended up with about forty double chests by the end of the map.
The aesthetic design was consistently one of the highlights of Titan's Revolt; many of the areas are simply breathtaking. It can be difficult to make areas which are so epic in scope and yet don't feel like they are just a bunch of MCEdit brushes (see: SH#07 Legendary). That never really happened with Titan's Revolt. This is what Legendary aspired to be, in my opinion.
Perhaps my biggest complaint is in the last few areas. They are just not my style. I would have preferred more traditional fortress assault kind of things, like in the rest of the map. The "teleport in" gimmick is not my favorite, and makes me much less inclined to give the areas a fair shot rather than cheesing them.
I ended up making quite a few farms. I did a skeleton farm in Soulscar Citadel from the fast spawners, a zombie farm in the main room of Soulscar Citadel since I had trouble finding other unbroken spawners, and a creeper farm in Garden of Erebus. Once I had the skeletons and zombies, I traded for infinite steak, which is what I ate for the rest of the map.
I'm sure I could think of other things, but I'll leave that to the area commentary below. Again, overall: fantastic job, it is splendid to see such attention to great mapmaking still in the community, and I will certainly be first in line to play any further maps!
[Garden of Erebus / White wool / Kaladun]
Loved it. This was a great starting area. I think it looks really pretty, and the mix of vanilla and custom mobs worked quite well. The little wooden buildings are creative without being overwrought. Aesthetically, I particularly liked the overhead paths made of leaves, especially when I realized that I was crossing back over an area I had cleared but hadn't noticed there was an upper part before. The traps were good and fair for a first area, to set the tone. The small lake just before the final structure was a good mini-challenge that required some tactical thinking to take out. It took me a little while to realize that the flower patches gave you regeneration (and how wide the radius was), but after I realized that it added a lot to the area, by creating periodic safe zones (although not safe enough to hold off a lot of mobs). Super good mechanical tweak. The only thing I was annoyed about in this area was that there were just barely enough torches, so I kept needing to run around to make sure I collected all the coal from the chests. But it didn't turn out to be a problem. That said, I do really like it when coal and wood appear in the low-tier loot boxes, because then you can craft new torches as you go.
[The River Lethe / Intersection 1]
Not my favorite. It's nice and aesthetic, but in 1.8 boats are really fiddly and break if you look at them funny. So it often took me annoyingly long to get through the intersection from one area to the next. I bet this could be fixed pretty easily though by widening the rivers and getting the passive mobs out of the middle of them initially. Also having chests literally full of boats at each entrance would be great, since I kept needing to craft new ones depending on where I came from.
The trading system is great. It wasn't apparent to me initially that Acheron Quartz could be gotten from any of the I1 areas, but after I realized that it seemed very well-balanced.
I also quite appreciate the thematic consistency of "Rose Set" items appearing in all of the I1 areas.
[Shadow of Crete / McWeakSauce]
Pretty cool. It was a bit empty but that's not necessarily a problem, because it was nice to have a more chill area to explore in between the other more intense dungeons. The important thing is that enough coal and wood were provided that I didn't have to farm torches. So I think that was done well.
One minor nitpick is that I died to the elevator in the entrance, because I didn't realize how it was supposed to work. The elevator in Garden of Erebus was really good and foolproof, so I might suggest just going through the whole map and standardizing the elevators. There's no real reason for them all to have different designs. (The one in Swamp of Lost Saints was similarly annoying, though less deadly.)
[Victory Monument]
The monument is very well-designed. Firstly, I really like the teleport setup. I think two-way teleports to each intersection and one-way teleports to each area is a great choice. It makes it nontrivial to go places, so you can't just pop back to base repeatedly, but it also makes traveling fast enough that I never really got annoyed about how long it took to get somewhere. (Except for I1 when my boat broke.) The aesthetics are great and I like the use of barrier blocks. I personally looted the base area upstairs and set up shop right next to the intersection teleports. I'm not sure why anyone would want to live upstairs when the teleports are downstairs.
Although food was conveniently not a huge problem after the first area or two, I ended up creating a massive potato farm in the monument area since I figured I would be spending the most time in those chunks. For the water I ran an aqueduct about 80 blocks from the pool in Shadow of Crete. That was a fun project.
FYI. There are little two-block-high crevices inside some of the columns where mobs can spawn. I'm guessing that wasn't intentional?
Another comment. I didn't find the ender chests in intersections and the monument to be of any use, mostly because they were only placed at locations that were right next to a teleport anyway, so it was always more convenient to just TP to base instead of putting things in the ender chest. Not sure if anything can be done about that.
Addendum. I didn't realize until very late in the map (midway through I5) that there was a record monument, or a reward system for the records. This is probably because I only looked around the "Base" area once, before deciding to set up shot at the teleport hub instead (as mentioned above). Perhaps it would be worth making it a little more obvious... I actually had to go back to get a second copy of one of the records, since I had tried playing it in a jukebox, which clears the NBT data.
Oh also, I'm not sure what to do with the jukebox I got from Tartaros. It cursed me when I put it in the dispenser.
[The Swamp of Lost Saints / Orange wool / Fangride]
Great area. The custom mobs worked quite well. The exterior part of the area was maybe a little empty, especially given the density of spawners, but I didn't mind too much since it was pretty apparent where to go so I could just clear a small path to there. (After getting the wool, I ran around to the back to see if there was anything there.) Maybe it would be more interesting if there were some more structures, or if there were fewer spawners, to encourage exploration.
The crypt, though, was absolutely top-notch. I'm a big fan of that style of dungeon crawl. It felt quite maze-like when I was exploring, but upon backtracking, it wasn't too hard to verify that I'd gotten everything, and I think those two things are the optimal outcome. I liked that the different rooms were pretty varied in layout and spawners, and I /especially/ liked the two places where you walked down a tunnel and might not realize that there was no longer any ceiling. It's like a trap that makes mobs fall on you, but you can only blame yourself for a tactical mistake. Very clever. It was also cool how there kept being more stuff deeper in the crypt, and it shifted as you got deeper. Really good for atmosphere. Finally I appreciated that there weren't too many creepers, because I got to admire the architecture more and because after Garden of Erebus I was a bit tired of everything being exploded all the time.
Minor bug report: after placing the white wool, I kept getting those rumble noises and chat messages randomly, like five or ten per hour.
[Echoes of the Styx / Magenta wool / TheXhen]
This was a fun area. Not as much going on as the previous two, but I thought it stood quite well. Boats were, again, a little annoying. But I liked that there were lilypad paths so that you could avoid the boats to an extent. I really liked the layout of the castle, what with the weird slime block as a secondary objective up top and then a sprawling dungeon with cute room designs down below. I'd say so far in the map all of the structures have been really well-built to be both functional and aesthetic. One thing I appreciated in particular was that right before the room with a poison potion spawner there was a room with a bunch of cakes. That was a nice gameplay setup, so that I didn't need to burn through a bunch of food on that room.
[The Forest of Asphodel / Light blue wool / Krose]
I enjoyed this area, although mostly the last two-thirds of it. One thing that bothered me about the first third was that the items in chests were pretty useless. It's not like I was expecting something amazing in every one, but there were a couple that just had nothing of interest at all, which didn't make exploring as fun. I thought the big castle was fun to attack, primarily because I had to think strategically about which angle to take (the number of zombies was a bit absurd, not that I am complaining). It was nice that there were explicitly multiple directions of attack (either from above or from below). And my concerns about loot went away for sure once I got here. One thing I'll note was that the ground floor area seemed weirdly peaceful despite the number of spawners. Was that intentional? Perhaps I already set them all off walking around outside and then got lucky when I later decided to go into the castle. I'll note that I particularly liked the basement area, which was a more standard dungeon crawl like Echoes of the Styx and Swamp of Lost Saints, and I thought the Guardians were a nice touch that I hadn't seen before in a CTM map.
[Soulscar Courtyard / Intersection 2]
Now this intersection I'm a big fan of. It gets the huge, epic feeling across with a great vista, while still making the actual intersection itself small and walkable. Not much to say other than that.
[Soulscar Citadel / Yellow wool / McWeakSauce]
Solid area with good gameplay and architecture, my main complaint was that it was long enough that it felt like a bit of a slog by the last room. First off, I really appreciated how close the area was to the intersection. I had to go back and forth to base a lot, and it would have been really annoying if it had been as far away from the intersection as the I1 areas were. The integration of the area into the Soulscar Courtyard was also very well-done.
The castle grounds were a good lead-in, especially the walls with ghast spawners, and I was quite happy with the castle interior main room. It was definitely an indicator that difficulty is stepping up in I2. I was able to clear most of it using singular strength, speed, and regeneration potions that I had retrieved from elsewhere, which was a lot of fun. I liked that there were different parts with different sorts of challenges, for example the cave spider pit which you could just dodge around at first if you didn't want to deal with it. The record upstairs was a good placement, and reminded me of Echoes of the Styx with the big slime cube on the roof. And I thought that the loot was well-balanced as a reward for the challenging area.
I didn't realize until after clearing the whole place that there is actually obsidian below the vault areas, and not just void. Perhaps that was intentional, but I was definitely very careful not to get knocked off. Providing pistons was a nice touch; I used some for bridging. Like I said, by time I got to the final room, I was a bit done, so I bridged across directly to the wool and then staircased down. I suspected there would be a boss mob, but unfortunately because I was in a tunnel, I didn't get a good view of exactly what was happening with that. I do know Anais said "Die!" upwards of 20 times simultaneously, which seems like maybe a bug? Anyway, I ran back and forth through my tunnel once or twice while deciding what to do, and then Anais died spontaneously. I never actually saw her. So... probably not the intended route. But I'm not complaining terribly much; I've never much liked bosses in CTM (Inferno Mines being not my favorite Super Hostile map, e.g.).
Thanks for the fast-trigger skeleton spawners above a huge drop in the second-to-last room, by the way. I don't know where I would have gotten my dozens of stacks of arrows otherwise
[The Oasis of Lemnos / Lime wool / Blade933]
Wow. I have no words for the aesthetic design in this area. I think it's the most beautiful I've seen in any CTM map I've ever played, which is over twenty. The foundry area is what Inferno Mines /should/ have looked like.
Gameplay-wise, I loved the foundry area, and I was actually quite sad that it was so much shorter than other dungeon areas in the map. The entrance area, while it played well and looked great, didn't grab me as much. One thing that bothered me a bit was how long it took to go up and down. After I got maybe 3/4 of the way down and couldn't find the path to go on, I dropped sand and ladders down from the top and used that as my base for attacking the foundry. Another thing that was a bit confusing was the dust mites. I kind of assumed that they would become more intimidating or a strategic threat at some point, but they never really did. Just an annoyance / way to set some traps?
I'd like to call out specifically the lava waterfall pouring into a minecart with hopper, which is possibly the coolest aesthetic hack I've ever seen.
In my dream version of Titan's Revolt, the extra length from the end of Soulscar Citadel would be moved to the foundry area in Oasis of Lemnos, and there would be a fast way to go up and down the entrance column.
[The Palia Archi]
I'm not sure exactly what to think about Palia Archi. I guess I was a little confused about its function in the map, as a non-wool area. Just a transition? That's not necessarily a problem -- some feeling of confusion fit pretty well with the "jerk map-maker" aesthetic, which I thought was done splendidly. (The === TIP === formatting of the signs was absolutely perfect.) The aesthetic design was maybe a little rough in parts -- end stone is always difficult to use effectively -- but again that didn't seem entirely out of place. I appreciated the traps, although I didn't fall for any. (I turned on F3 to check biomes as soon as I saw the beds, even before I saw the tip sign or heard the pigmen. "It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.")
Was there something to do with the lamps and power stations? I was thinking maybe after turning on all the lamps, the power stations could be used to upgrade the armor that was in them. I never tested, though.
I totally skipped Supply Run after seeing how many forest sprite spawners there were on the floor. Ick. I cannot imagine how I would go about securing that without it being a huge pain. (Aside from setting everything on fire with a lava bucket.)
[Ruins of Elysium / Intersection 3]
Looks pretty, not too annoying to navigate, I approve. I'm liking the gradual evolution of the trading options for food. By this point in the map, I have massive farms for potatos, wheat, bones, arrows, rotten flesh, and gunpowder, and I like that I am being rewarded for that.
Although I am a bit unclear what the entry point from Palia Archi is supposed to be. I crawled around the side and came through the path to Hailstorm Brigade.
[The Lernaean Undergrowth / Pink wool / Ragirk]
Well, you certainly know how to make an impression. I think this takes the cake by far for the most blatantly horrifying thing I've ever seen in Minecraft, which I rather assume was the point. (I think the previous contender was The Nest in SH#14 Waking Up.)
All in all, I think it was a surprisingly well-balanced area, especially given how much was going on. I actually cleared out the entire place, more or less every single spawner. I thought it was neat how there were a bunch of special crazy spawners in the center and at the entrance, which certainly made an impression, but that most of the area was pretty uniform. With such a large area, it would easy for it to become dull, but I thought you did a good job at making different parts look and feel different, so there were landmarks and also different kinds of gameplay.
By the time I had gotten maybe halfway through, I had basically figured out how to tackle the main part of the area. The wide-activation wither skeleton spawners were a very interesting gameplay choice which I think neatly prevented the gigantic torrent of spider spawners from just being a chore.
I appreciated that the temple at the end was very short, because the exterior was quite long enough. But it was appropriate.
If I were to suggest something, perhaps adding a few more small landmarks or chests around the outside edge would be nice? It would make it a bit more interesting and rewarding to go through there, since currently basically all you get is the iron (plus a couple of very nice tools and weapons).
[The Remnants of Phlegethon / Gray wool / TikaroHD]
This area was very chill in comparison to Lernaean Undergrowth, which I quite appreciated. Nice aesthetics, unpretentious. I liked the branching layout with two different paths. I particularly liked that the filler items for the chests were wood, because I was getting tired of cutting down trees to make my torches. I'd say that more free wood and coal in loot chests throughout the map would be an improvement. It's not like it's a challenge to get the requisite resources; it's just annoying so perhaps a bit less of it would be nice.
I also appreciated how the loot from this area intertwined with the iron (i.e., anvil availability) from Lernaean Undergrowth to let you start getting some overpowered gear provided that you could avoid dying long enough to get the levels. (I never died in combat after the white wool area, so far at least, and ended up achieving a highest level of 64 before finally getting access to an anvil.)
[Hailstorm Brigade / Light gray wool / The_Sketch]
All in all, I liked this area. The aesthetics are great and the gameplay was pretty solid. I just have a few complaints. The main issue is that there wasn't enough loot. There were a fair number of chests with very good items, but all concentrated in one place. Aside from those, there wasn't much reason to actually explore. What's to stop the player from just pillaring up to the wool room? Which brings me to my other issue, the layout of the area. It's really, really huge and takes a long time to navigate -- yet it seems like there's no good reason not to shortcut it.
I think this would be a fantastic area if there were more things of interest added to the bridges and tunnels.
I'll also note that this is the first area since Garden of Erebus where I actually died out of anything aside from pure idiocy.
[Frozen Fields / Intersection 4]
Great intersection, really cool design with the cobblestone fence lattice and it doesn't get in the way of gameplay. I approve. The felled trees were a really neat touch.
[The Lament of Acheron / Cyan wool / KillerCreeper55]
Man. What do I even say? This single area could be a map unto itself, and an absolutely phenomenal map at that. The Lament of Acheron raises the bar for CTM map design. The visual design was striking and attractive both from afar and up close. Custom mobs were themed after particular pieces of landscape (gravel deposit, lava lake, river, tiki hut, castle), which was really good for atmosphere. It was a bit choose-your-own-adventure, since there were multiple paths through the area, and I especially liked the bridges near the beginning. The custom mobs continued to challenge even as my gear scaled (being able to one-hit any vanilla mob does cut down on the menace that they provide). Unlike in Hailstorm Brigade, the loot was scattered throughout the area, yet there was definitely a reward for going after the harder targets. I might suggest a little bit more variety added to later chests, though (especially in Valley of Daedalus), since after I had gotten through most of the castle area I felt like I had seen everything the chests had to offer. Not that there isn't enough variety overall, but I think a bit more of a gradient over the area makes it exciting to see what new thing might come next. The amount of depth is really staggering -- it feels like there are secrets everywhere. It really draws a contrast with the large, empty-seeming areas in the Pantheon end-game. And congratulations on the cave trap; I think that's the only significant trap that I fell for in the map so far. [Edit -- okay, apparently I need to be more specific when I say "cave trap". I meant the one with the 27 spawners. For the one with the moss guys, I extricated myself from the situation by means of ender pearl, then was a bit put out that the potion lasted so long. I also wasn't able to find any loot, even in the underground room?]
The castle was definitely meaty and took longer for me to secure than I expected. I liked the ghasts gameplay-wise. The thing that presented real difficulty, though, were the defense turrets. They seem perhaps a little overpowered to me? Not because they do a ton of damage from afar, but because they are immune to arrows and they also never despawn regardless of how far you get from the area. Were these features intentional? I've never seen persistent mobs in a CTM before. Given how many there were sitting around, I concluded that any sort of direct attack was completely unworkable, and dropped a lot of TNT from above. Not sure if that was the intended approach. The thing that was really annoying was that the guardians and armor shells kind of spewed all over the place the entire time I was working on the castle, so there were a ton just walking and flopping around the village area. Was that intended?
I think the checkpoint system was great, except for it took a *lot* of effort for me to find the first checkpoint, despite seeing the "go left" sign. In fact I didn't find it until well after securing the second checkpoint.
[The Valley of Daedalus / Purple wool / ElRichMC]
I think in comparison to The Lament of Acheron, I found The Valley of Daedalus to be a bit underwhelming. It mostly seemed like more of the same. Reasonably solid gameplay for the most part, but, lacking in originality. I skipped over most of the end part of the area by dropping in TNT to break the spawners by the wool and then ender-pearling down and out. I was kind of disappointed to see that the same defense turret spawners were used here, because it wasn't anything new, and they were a real pain in the last area. I felt like I was rewarded for taking the cheap approach and eliminating them from afar, because anything else is way more difficult due to the lack of despawning.
The skunk riders were really annoying, but I did at least enjoy burning down their forest in retaliation.
One thing I'll mention is that I still have *no* idea where the third checkpoint is, despite spending a long time searching. Those things need to be more obvious IMO; it was quite frustrating because the checkpoint system felt like it wasted as much time as it saved for me, due to how long I spent searching.
[Wynaria / Blue wool / Draco_Rogue]
This was certainly one of my favorite areas! I was only sad I got through it so quickly. This might have been in part because I actually forgot about it until after clearing the green wool area, and by that point I was able to one-shot basically everything in Wynaria and not really take any damage. But I didn't mind; it was a nice, peaceful break from some of the other areas that I had been dealing with.
I really liked the aesthetic design. The floating island as a whole is beautiful, and I was charmed by the sort of age-of-exploration balloon theme. The area was nicely paced, the custom mobs were interesting, and the combination of unique and basic useful loot was very well-done and much appreciated. I wish more areas had stuff like torches in their loot chests; it's not like you're ever not going to need them...
I'll also mention that I loved the inclusion of the little cave area. Made the whole thing feel more alive and complete.
The only thing I wonder is if I missed something in the castle at the end. I had to pillar up to get to the second level; was there a staircase somewhere? I looked for a while but couldn't find anything.
[Wraithshadow Hives / Brown wool / Drago]
This was an interesting area which I liked on the whole. The aesthetic design of the lab areas was absolutely top-notch; I loved that. The hives also were well-designed in the sense that the mid-sized one made me viscerally uncomfortable in its appearance. I'm guessing that not everyone might go into the basement of the first lab, though, especially since it's possible to miss the entrance if you're not thorough. Since the enchantment table is there perhaps it would be worth making slightly more obviously important?
Gameplay-wise I have not too much to say. I leveraged Efficiency pickaxes and used the provided diamond pickaxe to mine obsidian for the two beacons now resident in my base (Speed and Haste). I didn't find the temporary effects from breaking hives to be very useful; perhaps if they lasted for like 10 minutes or something, but attacking a hive certainly took more than one minute. I thought the blindness was an interesting mechanic; I used pistons to build a bridge across the void into the base of the large hive, and then tunneled to the core.
I'm not entirely sure what the point of the final part of the area, with all the little tent-like structures, was. The mobs are quite dangerous and I don't see any particular suggestion that there is actually loot or a hidden area. I skipped over by bridging, after finding the stick in the mushroom cave.
Great trap at the very end, by the way!
[Tartaros / Intersection 5 / Green wool / Xethyros]
Now this area had some absolutely top-notch aesthetics. The sheer scale of the cavern, together with the citadel, really delivered on the atmosphere. Especially after exploring the citadel for a long time and then seeing the chained Titan in the pit as well as the structures on the other walls of the cavern, realizing that there was even more.
Combat-wise, the nerf on fire resistance was a very interesting idea and I liked how it worked. I started carrying a water bucket around, which was helpful because I got to practice using it to cancel fall damage.
The use of slabs everywhere was very annoying since it made it finnicky to place torches. I surmise this was intentional, though. By this point I have basically acquired end-game gear, and I am a killing machine, easily able to whip in and out of rooms and massacre the inhabitants with incredible agility. Even the armored wither skeletons with swords fall in two hits. That's certainly not to say there was no challenge, though; I felt that the balance was good. I did appreciate the sheer ludicrousness of the skeleton tower in the center. I actually cleared that whole place, by the way. I broke the speciality spawners with TNT from above, then walked along each of the bars of skeleton spawners, placing torches on top of them. That was quite a bit of fun. I wouldn't have bothered, but I couldn't quite find the obnoxious very-wide-area spawners in the tower without clearing the whole thing. (I originally fetched the wool using sand and ladders from the ceiling.)
My main complaint with this area was the loot, namely, there was hardly any. Only one or two actually useful things, plus the two diamond ore blocks. I would have gladly swept the whole place, but there was just no incentive to slog through any more of than needed. I did like some of the hidden chest placements, but was disappointed that almost none of said hidden chests had "real" useful items, rather than just memes. (Why not have both?)
A thing that was well-done, I think, was the variety of threats, with the various types of wide-activation heavy mob spawners, the very-wide-area heavy spawners in the central tower, the blaze pillars, the wide-activation ghast spawners on the domes, and the legions of regular skeleton spawners (plus extra special sauce that I did not even investigate before blowing up, at the top of the wool chamber).
[Realm of the Sky Order / Red wool / Rock]
Well, uh, congratulations, I don't think I will ever see anything in a CTM map again that is so blatantly evil. I actually managed to do this whole area in a single run without dying, but, my god. I am somewhat shocked to say this, but the area felt pretty good on the whole. In my run, at least, there was a balance between straight melee combat, tactical bridging and tunneling, ranged combat, and desperately running for my life.
In addition to my usual gear, including water bucket, I brought along a whole heap of torches and blocks, plus speed and strength potions, and I think six ender pearls, of which I ended up using four (to teleport across various bridges, to get out of lava, to remove myself from the record disk chamber).
I'll note, amusingly enough, that I appreciated being able to anvil the One-Time Use pickaxe into an as-many-times-as-I-want-to-use-it pickaxe.
And I will admit that the anvil trap was pretty funny.
Addendum: Going through later in creative mode, I found out there were some pretty nifty things in the side rooms and towers outside and stuff. I kind of bypassed all of that because if I don't have a bidirectional teleport then I know I can't manage a prolonged assault, so my mind was only on getting to the goal as quickly as possible.
[Firestorm Citadel / Csillagvihar]
On the whole I liked this area. It was a pretty straightforward layout, and I did especially appreciate the section with the obisidian cores to break. One thing that I found annoying was that there weren't any shortcuts; I would have especially liked it if at the end there was a quick travel back to the beginning. Why not? It would save annoying time spent running.
I did manage to get into the broken portal room once (actually, both of them), and much appreciated the recovery procedure that was clearly well-planned-out. Only happened once as of the time of this writing. I did also manage to break the fire once. For some reason, during one of my sessions in the area, none of it appeared. No idea why. I was rather thankful, to be honest.
I liked the little bits of lore scattered here and there, the whole thing with Lord Vanaduke. I was kind of dreading another mob boss fight, which as I mentioned in Soulscar Citadel is not my favorite thing. So I was happy to see that there was no such thing here.
[The Core / Black wool / Wallcraft]
Sorry, I did not like this finale. I am generally not a fan of big open areas at the ends of maps filled with wide-area spawners and such. Same thing with Eternal Battle from Inferno Mines. And while the one-way teleport gimmick was cute for the red wool area, for the map finale I was looking forward to something I could tackle more fairly with the resources I'd accumulated over the map.
Gameplay-wise, the main issue was that the mobs were just way too powerful and there was no way to make any area safe, which made it nonsensical to try a direct attack on anything. I ended up doing the entire thing by bridging around the ceiling. I think I must have used several dozen stacks of quartz blocks for those bridges. It was a huge pain. But I really didn't see any other reasonable approach---and you're looking at the person who thinks a direct attack makes perfect sense for Null and Void: Revenge of the Void in Uncharted Territory II. (In fact, the latter might be my favorite black wool area of all time.)
I did manage to find the massively wide area skeleton spawners, by the way, in the base of the central island. I was basically done with the area by that point, but if I weren't, I totally would have brought in a bunch of TNT and destroyed them through the corners of the bedrock, one block at a time. Screw those things.
To be fair, I will say that I thought the aesthetic design was pretty cool. Definitely makes for some nice screenshots, especially if you do use smooth lighting. I personally play always without smooth lighting and on maximum brightness, and didn't change that for this area, but I did spend some time looking around with the recommended settings.