Spectacular Builds From Minecraft's _Floating Island_ Contest

At the start of July, Planet Minecraft began taking submissions for their ninth project contest, titled “Head into the Clouds.” Since then, players shared dozens upon dozens of quirky, beautiful, and just plain awesome builds. The contest is centered around Planet Minecraft’s own, basic (but still quite good-looking) floating island map. This is what it looks like: Players are tasked with building upon the map as they see fit, being as creative as they like, as long as they keep most of the map’s original structure intact—so demolishing that big mountain range would be a no-go, for example, but building a huge castle on it would be a-ok.cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({"playerId":"e3616d04-4972-4839-a63a-c6975e2e9731","settings":{"advertising":{"macros":{"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.kotaku.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"1613863894","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"uncategorized","SECTION":"","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"uncategorized","TAGS":"","NOP":"0"},"timeBeforeFirstAd":0}}}).render("cnx-player-main")}); The image up top is u31.com เข้าสู่ระบบ from one of my personal favorite entries. Done by the Pandora’s Blocks team, it’s called Heartveil – Lost in Thought, and it’s simply amazing with its statues and massive buildings. The flying whale, u31 ทางเข้า in particular, looks awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp4-2dx3a2Y The Elrinir team’s Wizard Academy map adds a huge, impressive castle: Ervinache’s Apheonis: The Heaven Project adds a massive, really cool temple to the map: Lockatz built an elven city, called Noh’ Danir, which still looks great despite its unfinished state: Another, rather good castle from Animan2, on the Guardians of Life map: Pvm_Cody’s Areadore is u31 เข้าสู่ระบบ a lush, tree-filled map that holds a very quaint and charming little town. I especially dig the floating crystal: An excellent-looking fantasy town with a huge castle and impressive statues from Team Absolute’s Nebulus: ElectrickPickle’s Celestial Isles map shows a temple just before it’s destroyed by a dragon: jduartemiller’s modern build, Sanctuary, contains a city devastated by rift energies: Foxy’s Symphony Sky City has a very unique, futuristic look: FreakSqueakTV’s Tower of Babel is quite impressively built and imposing: A Lunar Dream, from the MysticAbsents team, has a very obvious astrological influence (and an excellent castle, to boot): And finally, here’s TheOfficialNano’s Head Into The Clouds Airport, because no floating island is complete without an airport: You can click through the links to find more screenshots, and, in some cases, stories for each build. You can also check out the entries list for more great projects—the ones here certainly aren’t the only good ones! This is just a small slice. The “Head into the Clouds” contest ends today at noon, and the winners, picked by a panel of nine Planet Minecraft judges, will be announced in a week. Head into the Clouds: Project Contest #9 [Planet Minecraft] Questions? Comments? Contact the author of this post at andras-AT-kotaku-DOT-com.