- There's Almost Always a Solution
- Creating Your Own Hedge Maze
- Preparing the Maze with Tinkercad
- Landscaping for Your Minecraft World
- Exploring the Maze
- Up Next...
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Creating Your Own Hedge Maze
Have you ever been chased by a giant spider or zombie back to your Minecraft house? Or have you ever played a game of hide-and-seek with your friends (in Multiplayer mode) in Minecraft? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some method of quickly disappearing from anyone (or anything) chasing you?
One solution is to create a giant maze. Think about it: You can memorize the path through the maze or have a printout of the solution in front of you, and with just a few fast left and right turns, you can quickly throw off any pursuers behind you. What’s great about a maze is that if it’s designed correctly, you can place it around your house (or castle) for an extra level of defense.
You can easily draw your own maze and then build it block-by-block inside Minecraft. Another solution is to grab a book of mazes, find a suitable maze in its pages, and then use that as the model. But I’ve got a different method that’s great for creating a maze and saving it in a digital format so I can quickly get it moved into Minecraft and avoid building it block-by-block. Just follow along and rest assured that I’ll provide more specific instructions in Chapter 4.
Figure 3.1 shows a maze I created by using a free maze generator (mazegenerator.net, a tool covered in more detail in Chapter 4) on the Internet.
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FIGURE 3.1 I’ve selected to use a circular maze.
What’s special about this tool is that you can use it to create circular, rectangular, and many other types of mazes. Even better, you can customize your maze in many ways; with this one, I’ve enlarged the center area so that a house or tower could be placed inside as a safe retreat.
Once I’m happy with my maze’s design, I need to save it as a file. While the maze generator tool can save a maze as an .svg file, there’s a problem: The .svg file it saves only retains the outside shape of the maze (circle or square) when imported into Tinkercad, not the pathways that make up the maze. For this reason, one more step is required before moving a maze to Tinkercad.
Instead of saving as an .svg file, I’ll save the maze as a .png file. You can see this file saved on my computer in Figure 3.2.
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FIGURE 3.2 My maze is saved as a .png image file.
I still need to convert the .png file to .svg (and this conversion will make certain the pathways are retained). To do this, I’ll be using a free online tool called online-convert.com, shown in Figure 3.3.
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FIGURE 3.3 I’ll use online-convert.com to change a .png to .svg.
Once the conversion is done, I have a matching file with the .svg file extension, as shown in Figure 3.4.
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FIGURE 3.4 The .svg file is now ready to import into Tinkercad.
At this point, my maze is only two-dimensional. It has length and width, but no height. But I’m about to change that.