About the Azerath Nations Project

Hello, welcome to the "about" section of this wiki. This page does not contain any lore and is strictly used to talk about the in and outs of my project, from easter eggs to facts!

I created this project around November of 2013. At the time, I was working on another project called the United Kingdoms of Minecraft. I had been working on UKM for a number of years before and the map really got me into building on Minecraft.

For most of my life I have been fascinated with building fantasy worlds. Before Minecraft I built on Roblox and before Roblox I used to write and draw hundreds of pages worth of materials for worlds I had created. Not until Minecraft did I unleash my potential and really that is due to the fact that Minecraft is easy to build on. Some people have asked me in the past why I don't build more complex structures like is seen in mainstream Minecraft videos. Honestly, my original building style as seen in the Azerath Nations was the best I had. But after a while I realized that I simply don't have the patience. I'd rather spend a week building a massive city with simple houses than spend a week building one structure and obsessing over every minute detail of the building. Today, I had looked more into building more complex structures due to the fact that many many many many years of building the same type of buildings kind of gets boring. But I found that the over complex building style really contrasts with the rest of the world, so I abandoned the idea.

Silly Inspirations and Weird Memories
Funny enough, this project came about because of experimentation with a new building style. My UKM project is a perfect look into the evolution of my building style over the years. Like, if you look at Falap, which was the first city I built on the map, you see that the buildings are simple, cookie-cutter with little variation. The you go to Devinshire, which was the last city I built, and the buildings have more detail.

While building Devinshire in UKM, I decided to start building something new. At the time, I was playing Skyrim for the second time and I LOVED the lore. SO I went onto YouTube and found a mountainous seed. At the time I thought that I would only build what would become Vulharenjiard then I would go back to the UKM project. It is clear that that was not the case.

Funny enough the first structure over built in the Azerath Nations project was the dam-bridge thing. I got inspiration for the dam-bridge from the weirdest thing, which was The Last Airbender movie. I remember watching it on Nickelodeon and loving the visuals. Specifically the Water Tribe, with the ice dam that blocked the water from entering the tribe below. So I built a dam-bridge while "inspired". Another inspiration from that movie comes in Herosblade Palace in Vulharenjiard, where there is a secret underground area that leads to a Nether Portal. I based that off of the underground area under the Water Temple. Now if you're reading this and are mad at me just know that, yes I had watched the cartoon before and no I did not like the movie adaptation. I just thought the visuals looked cool in the movie and I was inspired at the time. Pretty funny how much inspiration I felt to build things from that movie haha.

So like I said before I was very much into Skyrim when building the Azerath Nations so much of it has a Skyrim vibe to it. If you find some books in the AN, specifically Vulharenjiard and Jiarengrad, you will find these little "fact books" that were meant to be like the little loading screen lore explanations in Skyrim loading screens.

I built Vulkenrad Palace around November 26, 2013 and I know this because when I was building the palace, I was listening to Jeremy Jahn's review of the movie Frozen which just came out. I remember being shocked that he thought that Frozen was the best animated movie he's seen since The Lion King because I thought the movie was going to be another crappy Disney movie. It's one of those scenarios where I think something is going to be stupid then it turns out to be the biggest deal. The same thing happened when Call of Duty came out, I remember thinking: "man, not only is it just a cheap ripoff of Medal of Honor but it also has a stupid name... There's no way this is going to be a thing." and it became a thing.

The Tomb of Tenkannen, which is the statue carved into a side of a cliff just north of Jiarengrad was inspired by the massive statues in the Lord of the Rings. The inside of the statue was supposed to contain a quest, which the first part was completed. But scripting quests is hard work and I never figured out a system of "waypoints" to point where the quest wants you to go. This actually doomed quite a few quests I had begun because I could never figure out how to get the player to go to where I want them to. I always played my quest like a person who has never seen my world before. It's simple when the character says something like "Go find the mage in the College of Destructive Magic in Jiarengrad" because the player can just go to Jiarengrad and find the building with the sign that says "College of Destructive Magic". But it gets more difficult when you want someone to go somewhere outside the city limits. When the character says "Go to the ruins in the Forbidden Forest", I know where the ruins are but a player might not even know where the Forbidden Forest is.

That is why there was only one quest/minigame in this project. The quest was very linear, taking place inside an underground tomb (where you find Purlomas the Smart's tomb and have to vanquish his spirit that is stuck in his tomb... Funny enough I made another tomb for him after forgetting the quest's premise) and it took about 3 weeks to complete. The quest has since been deleted through corruption along with Haasperosia because I was a dummy and loaded the world into an older version because I wanted to use Optifine and it didn't exist yet for the newest version of the game... But honestly, it doesn't matter if the quest was deleted nor will I ever complete the quests I have started because Minecraft nuked all of my quests by updating the scripts...

I had one person comment that I should change the names of some of my nations because they are too close to a name that already exists. I replied saying that I did this on purpose because they are based off of names I think are cool. Well, I should've elaborated because that is only somewhat true. Most of the names that are similar, two examples being Azerath (Azeroth from WoW) and Draemor (Draenor from WoW) were completely by accident.

For Azerath, I have never played World of Warcraft and actually I came up with the word "Azerath" because I was thinking of the word Azkaban from Harry Potter was a really cool name. It's kinda funny how close I got Azerath and Azeroth completely by accident, same for Draemor. I kind of wish that I knew about the similarities earlier because I really don't like how close the two names are. Not only do I think that people might think I just made a WoW map but also when I google "Azerath" it comes up with "Azeroth". If I could change the name I would, but it's been too long and editing all that lore would be impossible, especially how I can't edit books in Minecraft.

But there are some names that I liked in the real world so I implemented them, the biggest example being Devinshire which is based on Devonshire, a county in England. I actually heard the name in Disney's Robin Hood, when the alligator announcer announces Robin Hood in disguise as the "spindle legged stork from Devonshire". Devinshire made its first appearance in the United Kingdoms of Minecraft as the last country to be built and I wanted to include a homage to it by including it in the Azerath Nations project.

Speaking on Devinshire, the whole concept of its totalitarian government was inspired by the game "Papers Please" which I was addicted to at the time. Devinshire is also the first mention of the Human religion of Devin because I thought that the nation was too different and isolated to believe in God-King Worship. Also, The Palace of Devin was the first palace that I actually liked more than Vulkenrad Palace.

The ship outside of Deleon was built because I had just began my tour aboard a Naval Destroyer and I wanted to build a ship based off of what I knew. Really, the only thing that reflected my experience when building the ship was the forecastle (the front of the ship) was sloped upward like my ship and the internals included a berthing, galley/mess and a brig.

Jaarjiadia, which is the desert Azerath Nation was my attempt at broadening the Azerath Nation's horizon. At the time, I was running out of space to build Azerath Nations and I decided that I wanted to make the Azerath Nations bigger and more explorable. So I built Jaarjiadia. Jaarjiadia also was my experimentation on developing a "learnable language". In Jaarjiadia, when you first enter the nation you cannot understand what the people are saying to you but if you go to Language School, there is a book inside a chest and when you open the chest to get the book it will change the language to English, meaning you "learned" their language.

Authorania. The dominant project of the Azerath Nations ironically. Even more ironic is the fact that Authorania was originally built to be a small city that deviated from the Azerath Nations, then I would go back to building the Azerath Nations after I was done. This is exactly how the Azerath Nations was made.

Capital City in Authorania was inspired by Balboa Park in San Diego, California. I also wanted Authorania to be like ancient Greece so there are some things that I built based off of ancient Greece.

From there I kept building and building and soon the amount of time I spent on building Authorania surpassed the amount of time I built the Azerath Nations.