How To Download The Original Minecraft Survival Island World Map
Good news, everybody! The original survival island, the map that spawned the genre can still be downloaded. I've gotten a lot of comments on my original article claiming that this is not the case, that's for two reasons: one, the minecraft forum decided to restructure their entire forum and change servers to the Curse network after the original article was posted, which broke a lot of links, which was tedious enough. Two, the creator removed the orignal survival island files from mediafire, where they were being hosted. I'm not sure why, because demand for the 'original' map has never been higher, even though people continue to make great new survival island maps that arguably, are far better than the original. (It's very arguable, that point, I personally prefer the original in ways I elaborate on in the last part of the article.)
How To Download The Original Minecraft Survival Island Map
As mentioned in the above p[paragraph, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, the creator appears to have removed the original files, however they have been preserved by other users and if you check the original survival island thread, the end contains a post with links to the re-upped files, now hosted on a fairly spammy file sharing service that I wouldn't trust with my grandmother. In the interests of testing the downloads, I did download the original v.1 map and discovered that it really is the original. I also ran a virus scanner and there were no detections, so it seems to be legit, as far as I can tell.
What's The Fuss About The Original Survival Island?
Well for one, the original survival island was new and exciting and over 300,000 people downloaded the map, so it has something of a cult status.
For two, even though I've been playing this genre for a long time now, nothing quite compares to the original minecraft survival island map, there's something very simple and well balanced about it. I think that's mostly because the map isn't too austere, it doesn't deny you access to the ores beneath the soil, as do many recent maps. It's also small enough that animals don't spawn, which completely blew my mind when I first played the game. Working out how to get animals to spawn was massively fun (hint: animals won't spawn too close to you, you need to get a working distance away from grass, which in survival island, means expanding the island.)
The original survival island was about taming a small patch of sand, and taking a couple blocks of grass and turning it into a pasture. Unlike many other old survival maps, this one fortunately hasn't turned into a snow biome, so you can play it the way it was originally meant to be played.
