Moonbase Shackleton

"Magnificent desolation." ~ Buzz Aldrin

I've always wanted to do a Lunar activity build, so when a Southern Ontario school district reached out about building a Moon build challenge lesson, I jumped at the chance. The lesson focusses on teaching students about surviving on the moon, and requires them to a build a sustainable Moon base, while locating and utilizing local resources such as water ice in the permanently shadowed, Shackleton crater near the Lunar south pole.

At the time, I had hoped to save some time by re-using a lunar surface map from the Minecraft Education Library, but none of the available worlds depicted the moon with anywhere near enough detail and accuracy to satisfy my purposes and I quickly got to building.

Moonbase Shackleton was my second major project; completed long before I knew about any of the developers tools that allow you to create entire landscapes quickly. It was therefore built entirely with code builder, commands, and a lot of block by block detailing... in all it took three months to complete. That said, it does offer a level of detail that even to this day, you won't find in any other Minecraft Lunar experience, and I think it holds up pretty well even with my later builds, seven years on.

Moonbase Shackleton is also the first world I created an addon pack for, as I required custom astronaut NPCs. Special shout out is due here to Stephen Elford for introducing me to Blockbench and showing me the ropes!

Lunar Gateway

At the time this project was planned and created, the Lunar Gateway station was still a budgeted NASA project, and as such, was the launching point of my activity. As of this writing, Lunar Gateway has been unfortunetly been cancelled.

Lunar Lander

In the interior of the Lunar Lander, you can see three of my custom NPCs in crew work jumpsuits. They are minor redresses of some of the existing Minecraft Education in-game NPCs. There are also plenty of buttons in this spacecraft that have various non-dangerous functions.

Lander

The Lunar Lander is a composit of various lunar exploration assets, past and present, both real, planned or imagined, with a little bit of my own creative immagination thrown in to the mix.

Lunar Surface

The Lunar Excursion Crawler came entirely out of my own imagination. In future additions to this experience, I'd like to add a drivable Lunar Rover.

Gallery of Lunar Exploration

The gallery is an "easter egg", hidden away somewhere in the lunar crater. The gallery covers a timeline of lunar exploration, and has a spotlight on the contribution of some of the women in the Apollo program.

Space Suited NPCs

These three astronaut NPCs were the very first custom NPCs I ever built. I used the existing player space suit skin and massaged it into three of the available default NPC texture files. I could do a much better job now, and will likely replace them in the future.

Easter Eggs Galore

Many of my worlds contain hidden spaces and "easter eggs", and Moonbase Shackleton has more than most. Here's one of the main characters of a classic sci-fi movie hiding out in a crevasse.

Detailed Surface

The majority of the time spent on this build was in detailing the cratered lunar terrain, to make it look as close to the lunar surface as one can in Minecraft. The crater is actually a composite of various features of several craters, and is not an exact reproduction of Shackleton crater. If you look closely, you may spot another "easter egg".

Moonbase Shackleton Fly-through

A fly-through of all the major features of the experience.

Moonbase Shackleton Trailer 2

A teaser trailer for the experience.

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