Lay of the Land

Part 25 ~ 11 January 2026

Played: 14 April 2025

Author's note:

So uh... it's been four months between posts. Things happened. Mental health, burnout, work, new multiplayer world that I played on instead of Indigo Empire. But I don't want to turn this into one of those "Where I've been" posts. I still have the world and I still have a backlog of posts. On with the show!

~ Lemming

So all this time I've been yapping about how great my world seed is, vaguely describing where locations are in relation to each other, and dumping screenshots of the scenery. But have you been DYING to know exactly how this all fits together? Well, you're in luck!

One thing you should know about me is that I LOVE maps! I have a town map in front of my gaming station IRL, I've been down countless rabbit holes on Google Maps, and of course, I'm a big fan of the cartography aspect of Minecraft. But not in the conventional "make a hundred maps and fly around for hours filling them all out" sense. Though I do have a wee map of Elaville that I update once in a while.

No, what I'm talking about is a full-blown image of the entire generated world! Back in Ye Olde Days (i.e. 2010) there was this great tool called Cartograph which would pop out a sweet isometric view of the neon-green Alpha terrain. These days, things are a bit more complicated – the worlds are deeper, there's more blocks in the game, and people have come up with fancy new ways to extract and present information from your chunk data. So I did a little research to find a tool that was easy to use and gave decent results. This led me to a program called uNmINeD. It's not perfect – it gives blank grey textures for some distinctly colourful blocks – but it's plenty good enough for now.

All right, mapping software in hand (well, on SSD), let's crank out a map! So as to avoid information overload, let's start with just the home area, consisting of Oak Coast and Elaville.

A map of part of a Minecraft world. The left-centre area contains a village with many player-made structures. The upper edge of the map is oak forest, with a small clearing and building in the centre-right. The lower-right is ocean, with a ring-shaped structure to the right.

A few features immediately stand out, like the Non-Binary Umbrella, the giant Ela statue, the storage chest, the Agricultural District, and Zero Atoll. At Oak Coast, you can see the compass I built to mark the spawn point, and my lovely starter house, plus the wide swathe that I cut through the forest. There's the sheep pen, chicken trap, a pier, and a couple of little farms along the coast to the east. Back in Elaville, we have the villager breeder, blacksmith and library, and the all-important iron and wool farms. In the northern part of the island is the stable, accompanied by the little apiary on the hill.

And now, let's check out the full map! For lore purposes, I've had a go at naming all the noteworthy places I've visited so far :) (Some of these names may be a bit basic – I'm not a fantasy writer! Also, any similarities to real life place names are purely coincidental!)

A map of a Minecraft world. There are plains to the northwest, large forests to the north, jungles to the east, ocean to the south, and mountains and mesa to the southwest. Farther away, there is desert to the east, snow to the north, and swamp in the extreme northwest.

Here's a rundown of all the named locations beyond the spawn area.

Villages

Rivermount: Plains village on a hill surrounded by a looping river.
Pony Springs: Plains village on a river; one of the houses is on the river. I found a horse with a good jump stat here.
Winterview: Plains village near a forest, with a snowy taiga in view.
Tallfern: Taiga village on a river. I found a large fern item here.
Westhold: Plains village near the stronghold.
Cactus Coast: Desert village near the ocean.
Cactus Cove: Desert village inland from the ocean but connected by a waterway.

There's a few more villages on the map, but I hadn't actually seen them in game at the time of mapping, so they remain unnamed for now :)

Forests

The Near Woods: Oak, birch and jungle bordering Elaville to the west and north.
The Spooky Woods: Dark forest a little further to the north.
Beanstalk Weald: Extensive tall birch forest a short distance to the northwest.
Floral Paradise: Large forest farther to the northwest, marked by two tall hills.
The Sleepy Woods: Spruce forest farther north, extending to Tallfern and beyond. I call it "sleepy" because of the snoozing foxes, and also because I find spruce forests boring lol
The High Woods: Large chain of high jungle hills to the northeast.
Temple Jungle: Vast expanse of flatland jungle east of Elaville, holding four jungle temples in total. Split by waterways into a few distinct blobs.

Other Land Features and Structures

Pillager Point: Savanna peninsula with a pillager tower, just south of Elaville
Peaceful Backwater: Small open river plain and savanna region east of spawn.
Cornflower Ridge: Meadow regions around Rivermount.
Keyhole Mountain: A high Stony Peak across the water west of Elaville, named for the forested depression in the centre.
Painted Peak: A high mesa mountain; excellent source of terracotta for building :D
Shrieking Hole: Cave opening with a waterfall leading all the way down to an ancient city.
The Ghost Mines: A series of abandoned mineshafts scattered across the mesa region around Painted Peak.
Equine Plains: Expansive plains region home to many horses.
Pink Sheep Plains: Small plain over the End Portal. Home to a naturally spawned pink sheep!
Snow Cap: Small region of snowy taiga near Winterview. Includes a small patch of frozen ocean.
Mitosis Swamp: Large swamp biome in the far northwest.

Oceans and Water Features

Shipwrecked Sea: Huge ocean south of spawn, containing many sunken treasures (which I promptly cleared out).
- Allay Bay: Small bay just west of the pillager tower, named for the allays held at the structure
- Cobweb Cove: An exposed portion of mesa mineshaft, including a cave spider spawner, on its own little island.
- The Chain: A line of rocky outcrops running from Pillager Point to Cobweb Cove.
- Painted Reef: An expansive coral reef off the coast of the mesa.
Sandy Sea: Ocean of unknown extent, bordered by Cactus Coast and the Temple Jungle.
- Cocoa Channels: River network through the Temple Jungle, connecting the Shipwrecked Sea to the Sandy Sea
Leafy Sea: Ocean of unknown extent, extending from the High Woods and the northern part of the Temple Jungle.
- Bamboo Strait: Narrow passage connecting the Leafy Sea to the Sandy Sea
Drowning Pool: Wide, deep river near Rivermount where many Drowned spawn.

And that's the extent of the Indigo Empire for now! Hopefully this makes for a helpful reference, at it's not so confusing in future when I say stuff like "I'm flying over Temple Jungle to Cactus Coast" :D

Indigo Empire