Mendstone 2.1% | Fairkeeper Chest Behind the Scenes

Hello Conquerors!
Today, we are going to share our first behind-the-scenes for Temple of Duality! This month, we'll be showing off the main feature of the Temple of Duality, the Fairkeeper Chest, and how it was made.

The concept for the Fairkeeper Chest was born from the number "2" in DNL's update. We wanted to make the update somewhat correlated to the percentage of the update, and I thought "Duality" was the best option. I also wanted to make "Puzzle" work in Minecraft, but not in a simplistic way of outright preventing the players from placing/breaking blocks. So the duality theme fit the task perfectly, since it provided a "choice" to the player: either interact with the puzzle or engage in combat, preventing the dungeon from forcing a single playstyle.

Then I shared the idea with Callister Corvus, who joined the team right after the 1% video was released. The Fairkeeper Chest concept was first shared in a Discord post:

Because the Fairkeeper Chest concept was already solid and had no major issues, we started to develop the appearance of the chest. I replaced the trapped chest texture to quickly see what it would look like. Back then, we usually started with visuals and then coded the feature in once we had a decent texture/model:

We still start from visuals after coming up with a concept for a feature, but we now treat it more as a placeholder texture/model.

The Fairkeeper Chest went through several more iterations:

I kind of liked this iteration. The front side of the chest resembled an owl, symbolizing wisdom. But then we scrapped the idea, since there are no owls in Minecraft, and it also felt out of place because the structure generated in the jungle...

I don’t know why, but I had this weird obsession with turning everything puzzle-related into an owl. We even had an idea of owl boss fully modeled and textured, with fully planned movesets and abilities — but ended up being scrapped for the same reason. That story is for another day (the boss dev was chaotic, I’ll tell you that).

Even though this design didn’t make it as a final texture, I still liked it at this point, so I shared a vertical slice of the structure:

When designing a dungeon, I usually start by making a small room, fully decorated. Creating this miniature version of the dungeon is the first step in structure design. It is the most important step to convey the development direction of the dungeon to other developers, and how we want the dungeon to look when it is finished.

Also, the Fairkeeper Spawner looked like this:

...which was soon remade into a stone variant by Callister:

It stayed in these iterations for a while, and we moved on to creating a detailed document on how the Fairkeeper Chest works and interacts with the dungeon. We brainstormed and created a document on Lucidchart:

1. Temple Entrance Layout

   

   The 3-room tutorial was condensed into a single-room tutorial, since the first chamber of the dungeon mainly consisted of the easy puzzles and combats, which already acted as a tutorial.

2. Boss Arena

   

   The only thing that made it into the final version was the number of entrances and exits. Other than that, because we iterated through so many boss designs, everything changed from this initial idea.

3. Chamber of Duality

   

   Surprisingly, most of what we planned here made it into the final version (which is not common for us). The only thing that was cut was the Nanites, which were meant to be a new mob for the first chamber.

4. Fairkeeper Chest

   

   Although we went through many iterations of the chest’s appearance, the logic didn’t change much from the start (except for minor things like how we set up the Fairkeeper Chest).

5. Puzzle Fairkeeper Chest

   

   The Scarlet Redstone Shard was a magical redstone item you could use to craft things, but we decided we were cramming too many themes into this dungeon. Magic also didn’t fit the theme well.

6. Combat Fairkeeper Chest

   

   We moved the Redstone Catalyst to the boss drop, since the name felt like a boss drop.

7. Fairkeeper Mechanic Logic

   

   I made this to clarify some of the niche cases where players might place/break blocks inside the boundary from outside.

8. Redstone Chip

   

   The crappy drawings are all made by Hex (me).

9. Redstone Suppressor

   

   I don’t know why, but we had this weird obsession with making combat material out of bone and puzzle material out of wood.

10. Fairkeeper Spawner

    

    We were planning on releasing 2% on both 1.20.1 and 1.21, but 1.20.1 was still the popular modding version, and we ultimately decided we didn’t want to manage multiple MC versions on top of both Forge and Fabric.

These were very early ways of how we conceptualized the features, so they had a lot of missing information. Now, we plan out features in depth and iterate on ideas more often before starting development. With multiple people working on updates now, we need documents to be more detailed.

After procrastinating by working on decoration blocks for a few weeks, I came back to the fairkeeper chest and started implementing the logic:

In the beginning, the boundaries were outlined by redstone dust particles. Other than the boss, programming the Fairkeeper Chest took the longest out of all the features, both due to the complexity and my inexperience. This feature alone took me a month to implement. I still remember wasting a whole week trying to fix a bug caused by a spelling mistake...

After the logic of the Fairkeeper Chest was completed, we went back to redesign the look of both the chest and the spawner. I didn’t like how the spawner looked, while Callister didn’t like how the chest looked.

The first change we decided to make was to make the Combat and Puzzle modes of the chest more noticeable. We added an eye to the center of the chest:

At this stage, the iteration was becoming similar to the released version. From here forward, we mostly did minor changes to the chest. We went through around 20 iterations of tweaks, but the interesting designs were all from the major changes. Some of those included:

Green

Gray

Cake

And finally, we settled on the current design:

The Fairkeeper Chest was the first complex block I programmed, but I’m happy with how it turned out. It pushed me out of my comfort zone, taught me how to navigate a complex development process, and was the first feature I worked on as a team with Callister Corvus.

Thank you for reading my first behind-the-scenes post! If you have features or other behind-the-scenes topics you want to see, let us know!