Video Game: Super Hostile

Before Minecraft had ruins to explore, bosses to fight, and hunger to manage, the community wanted a challenge. They were tired of the great expanse of Minecraft, tired of building and wandering aimlessly. They looked for a goal to work for, a challenge to be had, and they found the architect of that challenge in a player named Vechs. And what a challenge they found.

Super Hostile is a series of Minecraft custom maps, ranging from challenging to insanely difficult. Each is built with a different theme in mind, a multitude of traps and monsters, and a single goal: Collecting every color of wool and every mineral blocknote .

Every wool is found in a chest inside of a brick box, and is bound to be surrounded by traps. Wool boxes are either placed around the landscape or in a dungeon, depending on the map style. The maps are divided into either Open-World gameplay, where wool boxes are scattered around a large area, or Linear-Branching gameplay, where many branching paths with wool boxes are spread out between several intersections, which progress linearly into each other. Lethamyr introduced Continental, a map style focusing on exploration and travelling, featuring realistic-scale biomes.

As you may have guessed by the name and description, these maps are very difficult, some more than others. They provide a heightened challenge from regular Minecraft, because of the traps, density of monsters, and resource management. If you play Minecraft, and are looking for a challenge and a goal, these are the maps for you. All of the maps can be downloaded from their thread on the Minecraft forums. Also worth noting is that the Minecraft Forums thread is the longest and most-viewed thread in the "maps" subsection of the forum.

There are also multiplayer "Race for Wool" and "Capture the Wool" maps with competing teams, Mini-Hostile maps that are short but still as tough, Hostile Trails maps that involves keeping pigs in minecarts alive throughout the map, and Super Docile maps which have similar ideas to the original Super Hostile maps, but are more relaxed, and have a casual, easy attitude.

There are 13 Super Hostile maps:
  1. Sea Of Flame II
  2. Fallen Kingdom
  3. Infernal Sky II
  4. The Kaizo Caverns
  5. Black Desert II
  6. Canopy Carnage
  7. Legendary
  8. Nightmare Realm
  9. Sunburn Islands
  10. Spellbound Caves
  11. Lethamyr
  12. Inferno Mines
  1. Waking Up

Super Docile currently has 2 maps:
  1. Hills Of Moo
  2. Canopy Basic

Mini Hostile currently has 2 maps:
  1. Ragequit Holidays
  2. Endless Deep II

Race for Wool currently has 2 maps:
  1. Hostilities Begin
  2. Direct Fire

Capture the Wool currently has 1 map:
  1. Fields of Glory

Hostile Trails currently has 1 map:
  1. Pigget Panic

Lastly, there are Legacy maps:(Maps that have been rendered obsolete)

These maps provide examples of:
  • An Interior Designer Is You: Of course, this is Minecraft.
  • Armor Is Useless: Averted. Though armor chests are quite uncommon in Super Hostile, any armor found will often be enchanted, significantly increasing your chances of survival by soaking up a lot of the damage. Notably, the Flak Vest, which is a chain mail chest-piece enchanted with Projectile Protection III, countering attacks from skeletons.
    • Played straight with the standard craftable armor in comparison to the map armor. Why would you waste your resources on craftable armor when you can find tons of the same stuff (but often times enchanted) contained in loot chests?
  • Ascended Fanboy: Many players, such as Zisteau and ZombieCleo are mentioned in the maps and have worked with Vechs. Zisteau gets a mention in most maps with the Zistonian Battlesign. Later maps such as Inferno Mines even have Zistykins wearing Leather Manpance and wielding Battlesigns.
  • Abandoned Mine: In many of the maps. Lots of resources can be found in them.
  • Awesome Yet Practical: Many of the enchanted items found in chests. The highest level of Zistonian Battlesign, for example,is basically an iron sword with huge knockback and fire damage added, along with being unbreakable.
    • As long as, in more recent updates, you don't try to block. note 
  • Backtracking: The Victory Monument is usually relatively early in the map. Not that bad because Vechs provides generous railways back home. And since teleports are possible in Minecraft in newer versions, the most tedious backtracking is eliminated.
  • Bad Ass: Anyone who is able to conquer at least one of these maps.
    • Moreso if they completed it without dieing.
  • Beach Episode: Sunburn Islands in a nutshell.
  • Bigger Bad: Vechs, the evil genius who keeps creating these maps.
  • Booby Trap: Large resource veins and some treasure chests will often have proximity bombs near them.
  • Bubblegloop Swamp: The Swamp of Despair in Legendary.
  • Check Point Starvation: The entire last Intersection of Legendary is set in the Nether, making it impossible to set up a base.
  • Clothing Damage: Normal for armor in Minecraft, though it can be slowed down if the armor in question has Unbreaking enchantments applied to it.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Getting trapped in a tunnel by several monsters and happening upon a chest of goodies can sometimes invoke this.
  • Darker and Edgier: Nightmare Realm. The entire map looks highly reminiscent of a Nether cavern, with several Ghast spawners placed at the very beginning, and a kaizo trap right above the beginning shelter. In addition, it's the first map to employ an additional rule that if you die without a bed to respawn by, you're placed in a "Game Over" room made entirely of bedrock, with no escape and no other choice than to restart the map.
  • Determinator: Often a personality trait required to complete a Super Hostile map.
  • Direct Continuous Levels: With the exception of Nether areas, there are no loading screens, since Minecraft doesn't have that "feature".
  • Disk One Nuke: The easiest way to defuse a spawner and/or kill large amounts of monsters is to pour lava over it from above via tunneling or bridging. In the linear-branching maps, lava is often accessible near the start of the map.
  • Early Game Hell: A lot of maps give players a minimal amount of wood to start out the game. Often, the player will have about 3-5 logs to use for tools, as well as a few leaf blocks for a chance to be able to grow trees.
    • According to the forum thread, Nightmare Realm "starts out brutal and stays that way".
  • Early Installment Weirdness: The first three maps, Sea of Flame, Endless Deep and Infernal Sky were originally designed as standard survival maps, to see how long players could last in a harsher than normal landscape, with the Victory Monument only featuring as an optional quest. From Kaizo Caverns onwards, all maps aimed towards the Victory Monument as a primary objective: one of the main reasons why Vechs revised the first three maps into Sea of Flame II, Fallen Kingdom and Infernal Sky II.
  • Easy Exp: Super Hostile throws so many monsters at you that you will gain much more XP points than usual. You will need them.
  • Elite Army: Inferno Mines and the yet to be released Super Hostile: Roguelike feature Zistykins as enemies. They are Zombie Pigmen wielding signs and wearing manpance
    • Inferno Mines also features three types of ghosts; Chars (burning, invisible zombies that set people on fire), Wraiths (invisible skeletons with punch bows), and Boomers (invisible, charged creepers with slower movespeed but a higher blast power).
  • Empty Room Psych: In the first Intersection of Legendary you will find a castle filled with mobs. You expect a wool block to be in there, but in reality you'll only find a stick. Zisteau had a hard time believing that, and digged up the entire fortress.
  • Everything Is Trying to Kill You: The monsters in the dungeons aren't the only things trying to kill you. Vechs is very resourceful with game mechanics to create terrain that seems peaceful, but is actually a deadly trap.
  • Floating Continent: Hazardous Training Environment, Infernal Skies I and II, and Nightmare Realm.
  • Foil: Several.
    • Sea of Flame to the Endless Deep, contrasting the risk of burning to death in a sea of lava, to risk of drowning to death in a sea of water.
    • Infernal Sky to Kaizo Caverns. Infernal Sky is a very wide-open map, high above any type of ground, whereas Kaizo Caverns is very closed-in, claustrophobic and linear, all taking place in a cave deep, deep underground.
    • Black Desert to Canopy Carnage. The Black Desert is literally a very dark desert, where very little life exists, and it never rains. Canopy Carnage starts off in the middle of a thunderstorm, and features several large trees and foliage.
    • Additionally, the Super Hostile maps to the Super Docile maps. Super Hostile is specifically designed to give as hard of a challenge as possible to the player, enforcing the rule of "No dyes for the Victory Monument". The Super Docile maps still provide some challenge, but in completely optional areas, and are overall very calm settings, converting the previous rule to "You may use dyes".
  • Genre Savvy: Another useful trait to have when tackling these maps. If you see a tree, or some exposed iron or diamond ore, it's very useful to be at least a little suspicious.
  • Getting Crap Past the Radar: The Dumb Blast Zisteau Cavern in Inferno Mines.
  • Grave Robbing: It's generally a good idea to dig out any graves you see, there might be treasure beneath them.
  • Harder Than Hard: The Mastery Monument in the earlier versions of Kaizo Caverns. It featured as an optional goal to the Victory Monument. It required a grass block. Unlike the Victory Monument, where all the requirements can be found in chests or crafted, there is no chest containing a grass block, and the only grass block in the map would drop dirt if mined. The solution? An incredibly long trail of dirt leading from the sole grass block, to the Mastery Monument, with sufficient light and a lot of idling will allow the grass to grow from block to block. Sounds tedious enough, right? Wrong. The grass block is located at the very end of the map, whereas the Mastery Monument is towards the very beginning. Luckily, there's a shortcut between the penultimate area and one of the earlier areas, but it's still horribly tedious. The Mastery Monument was removed when the Silk Touch enchantment became available, where people could just mine the grass and take it with them.
    • The Head monument in Inferno Mines made you fight three boss monsters (Kamyu the Hidden, Codewarrior the Instigator, and Dinnerbone the Destroyer. All of the bosses were named as a tribute to Kamyu, Codewarrior, and Dinnerbone respectively). Codewarrior and Dinnerbone's areas are large and fairly easy to find. Simply finding Kamyu's without using a guide is a challenge in itself, due to the fact that Kamyu's area is hidden in a wall.
  • High-Altitude Battle: Infernal Sky II is set way up in the sky, void is your main enemy.
  • Home Base: The Victory Monument functions as this, a player will have to return here a few times if they want to win, and they are generally in places where it's safe to build a house.
  • Healing Spring: Upcoming maps will have healing potion spawners at the Victory Monument.
  • Heroes Prefer Swords: Zig-Zagged, while swords are generally the weapon to go with, there are alternative weapons like enchanted axes, bows or even enchanted signs.
    • Heck, quite a few weapons aren't even close to swords. Paper, Bows (hitting someone with a bow instead of firing arrows), and Boots have been weapons at one point or another.
  • Hope Spot: A horrid one in Legendary. There's a dungeon in which a maze of water exists. Completely covered by lava, meaning that you have to take at most 2.5 hearts of damage to regularly prevent drowning. After all this brutality, there's a chest towards the end of the maze, with TNT that'll blow up when the chest is opened.
  • In-Game Novel: Waking Up features the book Waking Up by Andi Buchanan
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Vechs makes Super Hostile maps to the point where some dungeons are almost overwhelming. Thankfully, he leaves plenty of chests in each dungeon, so that you're never under-geared.
  • Lawful Evil: This is what Vechs claims is his alignment as a mapmaker, when he talks to the players via signs. No lies, but will twist the words to suit his needs. invoked
  • Leeroy Jenkins: This can get you killed. A lot.
  • Level Goal: The Victory Monument where you place the wool you get at the end of the dungeons.
  • Mooks but No Bosses: None of the older maps contain boss fights. The more recent maps, on the other hand... In Black Desert II, the wool is obtainable only by killing monsters that are carrying the wool. Later monsters are incredibly difficult. Inferno Mines has "fleecy mob boss rooms" for a couple of wools, and also the three head boss mobs.
  • Multi-Mook Melee: The final area of Legendary, Face of Evil throws waves of monsters at you. The longer you idle, the more will appear. This area is basically impossible to finish by fighting them
  • Names to Run Away From Really Fast: Any dungeon with the word "Citadel" in it. Vechs lampshades this in Waking Up's Legion Halls area: he basically jokes about wanting a programmer to create a naming program.
    • The Citadel Courtyard from Sea of Flame II, which consists of several spawners under the floor and in the pillars, as well as a bedrock roof, to keep the area permanently untouched by sunlight. Furthermore, this area leads to three wools: one obvious one wool having creeper spawners under the floor, one in the central bedrock pillar with spawners that create falling creepers, and the final one being under ground, with several areas hiding groups of nine under-the-floor spawners altogether. Yikes.
    • The final area of Kaizo Caverns, which features several pillars, each containing four Zombie spawners and four Skeleton spawners, a huge diamond mine and a final showdown: a bedrock castle that floats above the void, with several Ghast, Blaze and Skeleton spawners.
    • Also, the final area of Sunburn Islands: a complete bedrock fortress, featuring several spawners for the four normal mobs, plus regularly spawning Nether mobs. There's also a chest containing 16 diamond and several stacks of unbreakable bedrock. There's even a warning for anyone silly enough to play with the bedrock .
    • The Black Heart Citadel from Spellbound Caves, featuring a full army of Blaze and Ghast spawners, a treacherous area above lava made mostly of obsidian, making tunneling less of a viable option, a small bedrock room with 4 creeper spawners and a blaze spawner. Completely concealed in the bedrock fog.
  • Non-Standard Game Over: If you die in Minecraft you can just respawn. Nightmare Realm instead puts you in a Game Over area if you die without having a bed spawn set. Playing Versions A, B, C or D of Lethamyr will force you to delete the world upon death, since they're all set to Hardcore difficulty.
  • Not the Intended Use: Almost every challenge can be avoided by tunneling through walls or building your own safe bridge. Vechs has started developing counter-strategies to make this more difficult.
    • Silverfish, Ghast Spawners in the walls, and Proximity Bombs are a few of these strategies.
  • Oh Crap!: For first time players, this applies for the entire map. For veterans, it only applies to the dungeon containing the Red Wool.
  • Only Smart People May Pass: Some areas feature almost impossible combat that requires alternate strategies to finish.
  • Oxygenated Underwater Bubbles: We all Float in Waking Up features these. They contain Creeper Spawners.
  • Player Versus Environment: This is the premise of all Super Hostile maps.
  • Player Versus Player: Vechs also created a multiplayer version of Super Hostile, Race for Wool, and a second one called Capture the Wool.
  • Poison Is Evil: So much. Even Vechs thinks it's a little too evil since he thinks it lasts too long.
  • Public Domain Soundtrack: Some of the maps are packaged with a small soundtrack of songs that can be played during game-play to enhance atmosphere, selected by Vechs. These same songs are completely safe for YouTube too, allowing some LP'ers to play the music in the background of their Super Hostile Let's Plays.
  • Random Event: Certain traps may never go off since they are based on proximity bombs that are semi-random (they WILL go off if you stay around long enough)
  • Recurring Element: Battlesigns, fortresses, rectangular area with pillars of doom.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: Super Hostile and Super Docile. The Super Hostile maps are rage-inducing, harsh, sometimes unforgiving maps designed to challenged the average Minecraft enthusiast. Super Docile maps provide a calmer experience, with the ability to use Peaceful difficulty, and with plenty of resources available.
  • Retcon: The Endless Deep originally held the position of the second Super Hostile map. It's now being moved as the second Mini Hostile, whilst Fallen Kingdom replaces it.
  • Running Gag: "I hate you, die in a fire" and "Tacos are delicious." There are also quite a few chests which each contain a single stick.
    • Played with, in Legendary. It's possible to find an Easter Egg sign that reads "I guess I can tell you the truth up here. I don't hate you. I hope you like the map. I worked really hard on it."
  • Run or Die: Vechs was the first to create a stable proximity bomb in Minecraft. If you hear a hiss, you better run.
  • Scratch Damage: You may feel overpowered or invincible, there are always ways to kill you. Especially when you feel overpowered or invincible.
    • Full Diamond Armor in a regular Minecraft world makes you basically unkillable, but with the high density of Elite Mooks and traps featured in certain areas of a Super Hostile map, you can still die incredibly easily, especially to Elite Mooks such as Zistykins.
  • Shout-Out: Several shout-outs featuring in most of the maps, normally towards Zisteau or some member of the Mindcrack community (considering most of them played at least one Super Hostile map before joining).
    • Zisteau gets one of the most common chests in the maps dedicated to him: the Zistonian Battlesign, in reference to his decision to break off a sign in Kaizo Caverns and use it as a weapon. These chests also contain manpance.
    • Zombie Cleo gets a mention in Sea of Flame II, as well as the Mining Feesh (it's very effeeshant!) in Canopy Basic.
    • Joe Hills gets one in Sea of Flame II.
    • Vechs makes fun of Millbee's Welsh accent in Legendary, referring to his pronunciation of "tacos" in Sea of Flame.
  • Suspicious Videogame Generosity: Near the end of most of his maps, Vechs gives the player huge loads of useful things, such as a massive cave filled with diamonds. Immediately following it is the hardest dungeon in the map.
  • Strictly Formula: Linear-Branching maps will have around 3 or 4 intersections, each leading to completely seperate dungeons: some lead to the next intersection, some will feature small detours. Open-World maps will drop the player into a large hub-type area, where a bit of exploration is required to find the dungeons. The first dungeon/beginning area will contain the White Wool, the hardest area in the game (not strictly the final area) will contain the Red Wool, and the area containing the Brown Wool will either be incredibly easy and/or a joke area. Lastly, the Victory Monument has the same requirements for each map.
    • In the case of the Victory Monument, averted in Black Desert II, Waking Up, earlier versions of Kaizo Caverns, and Inferno Mines. The Victory Monument for Black Desert II and Waking Up also requires a Redstone Ore block, which was used to give extra challenge to speed-runners, and can only be obtained by using a Silk Touch enchanted pickaxe in one of the final areas. Waking Up also had the Chapter Monument, which needed all 20 chapters of the book Waking Up, sealed away in random areas of the map. In the earlier versions of Kaizo Caverns, there was also the Mastery Monument. Inferno Mines had the Head monument, which required three heads (obtained from special boss monsters) and also three Eyes of Ender (to connect the pedestal to the head).
  • The War Sequence: The final area of Inferno Mines. At first, it looks no more than a small room with a button. Pushing the button drops you in the true final area, Eternal Battle, which is a giant, Nether-themed cave with spawners surrounding the small fence base you're given. Thankfully, Vechs was kind enough to put Iron Golem and Snow Golem spawners in the base to fend off monsters while you comprehend what just happened.
    • For people who have a weaker computer, they can choose to play Minor Conflict instead, which features less spawners (with stronger monsters), making it more framerate-friendly.
  • When All Else Fails, Go Right: The green wool in Waking Up is hidden in a maze that is hard, but not impossible to tunnel through. The wool is about 20 blocks in the right wall