Big City (Monarch)
Overview
Monarch, formerly known as Big City, is a metropolitan city project, designed to showcase the best the server has to offer.
The city has been present in some form in every iteration of the server, from the original Classic map, right the way through to the present day.
Version 1 - Classic
Completed circa 2010, Big City was originally the showcase map of the Classic server. Anyone was able to view the city, but only those ranked AdvBuilder and above were able to edit the map.
Notable features of the city include:
- An underground sewer connected to many major buildings
- A power plant that provided buildings with "electricity" via wires
- A small airport with an enterable plane
- A port
- An F1 racecourse
- A freeway and tunnel
The city was founded by _andy and _specialk, with major contributions from TKPenalty and Kedji.
Version 2 - Survival
Upon launch of PCB's survival server, a second version of Big City was created to test the now larger palette of blocks available.
The most notorious change was the use of naturally generated terrain as opposed to the flat-map of version 1. Several buildings from version 1 were recreated block-by-block, including Kedji's apartment and _andy's skyscraper. Version 2 to date has been the only map to not utilize a grid-style road system.
Due to the limitations of Survival Mode, materials had to be spawned in for building. As this was before multiple maps were available, Big City was located on the same map as the survival area, but located extremely far away from the map spawn point, and accessible via a warp. During this time, there was no definitive way of knowing if materials meant for Big City were being used in players' survival creations.
Version 3 - Creative
General displeasure with the terrain used for version 2 lead to the creation of Big City version 3, with the return to flat-map as a terrain. This version of Big City was located in the Creative map, which was on a separate server to the Survival map at the time. This led to a few issues with players building very close to the boundary of Big City.
The city was later used as a lobby - the first location new players who entered the server would spawn at.
Version 4
Whilst version 4 of BigCity was discarded quite early into its creation, it is worth mentioning due to the switch to a larger building scale. This version of BigCity was started to fully utilise Minecraft's newly increased build height limit, which had recently been changed from 128 to 256 blocks.
Version 5 - Monarch
This is the current version. Big City was renamed to Monarch on the 17th of October, 2020, and all the warps were subsequently renamed.
Terrain
The map for Big City version 5 is a standard flat map. At some point the map reverted to standard world generation for an unknown reason, and towards the edges of the map, large areas of vanilla terrain could be found. This was fixed some months later.
The floor level has been artificially raised to allow for the construction of subways, sewers, basements, and other underground structures. The map also includes a coastline along the eastern edge, and a wide river to the south of the main downtown area. While the flat terrain is very convenient for building, the complete lack of height variation in the terrain does go against the realistic style used by the structures in the city.
Districts/Areas
East Shores
The coastal area of Monarch. The area is generally more modern, and abundant with food outlets.
Southbank
Confusingly on the northern bank of the river, this riverfront area is named as it was once the southern limit of the city. The riverfront is decorated with parks and a leisure centre.
Soho
Based on its namesakes in London and New York, Soho is filled with generally older, slightly smaller architecture reminiscent of 18th century warehouses and apartments. The area is filled with trendy shops, bars, and restaurants, and also hosted some of the 2023 Pride events.
Scale and Restrictions
The scale in Monarch is defined in the rules as a minimum of 5 blocks room height. Most buildings have 2 block thick floors/ceilings, although this varies.
Throughout the city, builds are required to meet any existing sidewalk, either by the building edge touching the existing sidewalk, extending the sidewalk to meet the building edge, or by inclusion of some kind of garden or other feature between the building edge and the sidewalk.
Large roads are not to be edited without permission, although small roads may be edited to suit player's builds.
The theme of Monarch is a modern city. It should be noted that this does not exclusively mean modern style architecture, rather any building which would not be out of place in a large modern day city. Monarch currently takes most of its architectural influences from Australian, North American, and European cities. In particular, Melbourne, London, New York, and Berlin.