One of my earliest builds, the Holiday Activity world started off as a build plate for students to create Christmas themed structures while creating narratives with NPCs.
As time went on, it became a frequently used special Holiday multiplayer workshop, where students built snowmen and decorated Christmas trees.
Every year since it was created, I've added new features: custom NPCs, unique ridable entities, candy cane currency, Santa's house, a Christmas "MarioKart" like race course, and plenty of others as well as hidden "easter eggs".
Special thanks to Steven Reid for donating his Christmas Coding activity, which I plugged into this experience as an added bonus.
It is freely available to anyone looking for a special Holiday themed activity for their students.
It's just not Christmas without a visit from everyone's favourite reindeer. He's ridable, and in future versions, I intend to make him flyable! Special "shout-out" to my friend, Nico Chiari for helping me with the riding behaviour on my very first ridable entity creation!
There's no "I" in "team". The rest of Santa's reindeer are all in this experience as well! It is of course, just a slight retexture of the Rudolf model.
It's everyone's favourite walking, talking snowman! Unlike traditional Minecraft snowmen, he won't throw snowballs at you, but will potentially offer you helpful advice.
The Ice Golem here is a slight re-modelling and re-texturing of our favourite Minecraft Iron Golem. He's mostly friendly... mostly... and shows up as an "easter egg" in a few worlds I've contributed to, but he's shy, so you'll only find him hiding out in ice caves.
Originally created for my holiday experience, I was looking for another suitable ridable entity for "Rudolf's Raceway". In reality, it would probably be a disaster on ice and snow, but I think it looks very festive!
This was my very first attempt at a texture animated entity, and I think it worked out rather nicely. It took several days to put all the parts of this model together, and probably still holds the record for most parts of any entity I've created. Special "shout-out" to Brian Dickman of Cleverlike Studios for helping me figure out texture animation!
The three presents were one of my later additions to the Holiday Activity World; unique blocks you can place and give to others in the spirit of the season.
One present was really enough, so I made three with some of my favourite wrapping paper designs.
Each present will drop Christmas cookies and candy canes!
The jolly old elf himself, Santa Claus! You'll note that many of the NPCs and custom elements I've created for this experience are at a more "Minecraft" texture resolution. This was a deliberate choice as I felt the lower texture density felt more appropriate, however, I have added others with more pixel density where appropriate.
It wouldn't be the North Pole without Mrs. Claus!
You will see a total of five elf NPCs populating the Holiday Activity World. They all have important information, advice, directions or services to provide you with.