Glossary of guides

Building Middle-Earth is, you might imagine, a fairly complex task. As such, our build team utilises a wide range of guides to keep styles and quality consistent throughout the project. This article aims to catalogue all of the guides used on ArdaCraft, making them easier to find and use- no more frantically searching to see if there’s a guide that can help you! Some are used by all builders wherever they are working and others cater to a specific niche and may only be used by a small number of people. Whatever their size, these guides play an important role in making sure our work is the best it can be. Below is a collection of all of the guides we have in ArdaCraft, including a short description, their location and use. This is a guide to, well, guides.

Application guide

This guide is exclusively for guests wishing to join the ArdaCraft build team; it explains how to apply and become a builder. It can be found by following the signs at spawn or using the warp /warp howtobuild.

Gradient guide

Arguably the most important of all the guides in the project, the gradient guide outlines the basic tips on how to use block palettes to bring builds to life. Elements of this guide can be found in everything we make on the server, and the guide itself can be found by using /warp GradientGuide

Item frame guide

To add a further level of detail to our creation, we sometimes use invisible item frames- these allow us to place items where we wouldn’t usually be able to. The item frame guide outlines the dos and don’ts of the block and how to utilise them effectively.

Simply warp to /warp ItemFrameGuide to see examples, tips and tricks.

WorldEdit Guide

With a map as big as ours, it helps being able to do things quicker than one block at a time. WorldEdit, a widely used tool throughout the Minecraft community, helps us speed up the building process with features such as copying, pasting and deleting. This guide helps builders get to grips with this useful and quite powerful program, though guests can also use it on their plots. To access it, use /warp WorldEditGuide

Moria Guides

The current dwarven project on the server is Moria: the ancient and abandoned mountain kingdom of old, and we have created guides to cover all of the essential aspects of the massive build. The main guide is /warp MoriaGuide, but there are smaller, more specific guides such as /warp MoriaEpochGuide, /warp MoriaCaveGuide, /warp MoriaCorridorGuide and /warp MoriaHousingGuide.  

Gondor Guides

Similarly, Gondor is a large kingdom with various guides that help builders create our current project, Anorien. /warp GondorGuides takes you to the main Gondor guide area, which includes /warp GondorInteriorGuide, /warp GondorProfessionsGuide, /warp GondorRuralGuide and /warp GondorStylesGuide as helpful sub-guides. 

Paintings

ArdaCraft has a lot of custom paintings to add specific detail. These can be anything from large maps on a wall to a coil of rope, but each can be found in the huge repository of paintings, which can be found at /paintings.

Conclusion

That is all of the major guides that are used on ArdaCraft, with many more still in development. If you are a beginner, we recommend looking at the signs at /spawn, which will help you gain a better grasp of all the tools available to you on the server so you can enjoy the full experience.