Drehmal: APOTHEOSIS – the 10 months adventure in form of a Minecraft map

I don’t know about you, but when I think of a Minecraft map, I don’t think of almost year worth of adventure in a world full to the brim with well thought-out world building elements, gorgeous landscapes, enormous amount of lore, fast-travel system, custom weapon mechanics and all of that tied together with specially crafted soundtrack. Well, I didn’t think of a Minecraft map being like this until now.

Along with 6 of my friends in 6th of April 2024 we have ventured forth on the grand opening of new edition of my little Minecraft server that I tended to host since I were a kid. This time the server would host a special map called Drehmal: APOTHEOSIS. A few of us have already played it in the past, so we more or less knew what to expect. However the way we played was rather reminiscent of a speedrun than a playthrough that this map deserves. I wanted to make it right, so in April of 2024 we started a full playthrough, one day after official launch of the “2.0” version of the map. In 22th of February 2025 we’ve finally achieved the end of the main story line of the map, after playing it more or less consistently every Saturday since the start.

This is a review/love letter of/to Drehmal.

Drehmal

If I were to describe Drehmal as a whole - it’s a Minecraft map that doesn’t focus on flashy fights or over-the top mechanics. Its mechanics are not in-your-face, they are rather well-thought and sparse - showing up only where they need to be.

It’s an enormous map too – again, it took my group of friends 10 months to explore it in full, of weekly exploration parties where each week we were finding something new - something telling a story of the world we were playing in. All of that set in - quite frankly - breathtaking and incredibly diverse landscapes crafted using extended palette of blocks utilizing many blocks that do not naturally generate in Minecraft which compliment existing natural palette of the game. It’s the type of map where you find a gorgeous place to settle in and as you continue going you find an even better one within just 5 minutes.

In those awe inducing landscapes you find world rich and alive, with plenty of elements telling the story. Here is an abandoned cart laying in the dirt on a path between two settlements, here is a deserted village with a note inside one of the chests describing what led the settlers to abandon it, here is a flying balloon just hanging in the air and there is a shipwreck… On a tree high above the ground! All of those elements fill out the entire world letting you take it all in and making the world feel truthfully immersive and cohesive.

Story

Story in Drehmal doesn’t feel like a story written to justify important game mechanics or locations, to give a reason for fetch quests. Its story was written to describe and tell about a world first and foremost - to explore its rich history, characters, gods, mortals. Sometimes giving the reader hints about locations, inspiration and real world advice, sometimes making them laugh or cry (quite frankly it made me do both while reading lore). In a nutshell, it’s a story done right.

There are a couple of story telling devices in Drehmal. Story could be told by holographic text - in places touched by advanced civilization and its empire. World in Drehmal of course is a powerful story telling device on its own - each location has its own place, on your adventures you find countless ruins, cities, technology. Written books are of course a major source of knowledge about world. From poems, through detailed journey logs to fiction. But also other items. Countless artifacts could be found with lore attached as their tooltip. Rarely, there could be an opportunity to speak and learn with characters through scripted chat dialogue.

Drehmal is a story of civilizations, advancing technology and accompanying pitfalls of doing so. Player learns about the world from journals that survived, those are often fragments of whole story that the player has to piece together by themselves.

Organizing books

Since the start I felt like we needed to make the story of Drehmal accessible and readable at any time. To do that, I’ve established a special very simple directory structure on my website serving organized books and lore bits. After every exploration party, both me and my friend using a modification exported every book, item tooltip or screen and categorized it into those directories. This has made following the story a bit more accessible even when not in Minecraft. Each exploration has its date along with short description. After documenting lore this way, we went to a specialized building in our village where we preserved the books inside of many chests categorized by location.

In the „lore house” there was also a wall containing maps we’ve gathered and chests of absolutely useless junk loot we’ve found in many houses and special chests very useful trinkets passed to us by previous generations of adventurers and inhabitants.

Landscapes

Minecraft’s blocky appearance didn’t stop the creators of Drehmal to use it in its full potential to create stunning looking locations within a fictional world. I believe that Drehmal’s existence proves very well that Minecraft’s blocky appearance does not limit the game from having visual beauty. This is a conclusion that I didn’t arrive to easily, as I’ve had solid belief that Minecraft is severely limited to which level it can showcase „beauty”, Drehmal successfully proved me wrong in my assumption.

Drehmal map follows the idea of having generally cold places in the north, you will find a lot of snow, ice and coldness there. The other side is hot - lakes of lava, warm colored deserts, fire, obsidian. Vast lands in between are varied, large passes of mountains covered with snow, dry lands, wet lands, jungles, volcanoes, forests, mushrooms, plains. There are some that I won’t spoil for you, but are extra special. Infrastructure stretches through entire map, connecting important story locations.

It’s beautiful how Drehmal can showcase countless architecture styles, to me one of the more memorable buildings I remember seeing were pagodas located on certain island with many sakura trees giving it very eastern/Japanese vibe. It’s funny to have cultural experiences like that on a Minecraft map.

However, Drehmal doesn’t have just one dimension, I won’t go too deep into this part because of spoilers, however inclusion of other dimensions allowed creators to create even more crazy and unbelievable landscapes worth admiring that perhaps wouldn’t exactly fit the main dimension.

Mechanics

There are bunch of mechanics, some already mentioned. For example, later in the story player receives Elytra that normally allows for quick transportation, however in Drehmal it’s… Painfully slow. Instead of quick dash towards the goal, player instead is forced to slowly hover at slow pace. It is my belief that this is a purposeful change to make the player slow down and take the sights in. To many, it might be an annoying change of basic game mechanic, though I lean towards understanding for this goal. It’s the authors saying - hey, this map isn’t supposed to be experienced this way, slow down, take it all in.

The map however, utilizes plenty of programming to make custom weapons, powers work. Many powerful artifacts that you find have some kind of special power, some are supportive, some defensive and some are usable for offense. They will not bring anime level of animations and fanciness – once again the authors show restraint, powers will have the necessary amount of particles and flashiness for them to be seen as special and not a bit more. Authors did think about utility as well, with mining tools having some powerups without being overpowered.

Other than that, there are other mechanics I’ll not mention for sake of spoilers.

Music

Drehmal is unique across many Minecraft map projects due to inclusion of its own – wholly commissioned soundtrack for purpose of use on the map. Composed by Chris Nesja, it completes the Drehmal experience by bringing the hearing sense to the experience. Drehmal soundtrack compliments landscapes and terrain letting the player feel locations. Making music is not an easy art to weld. Thankfully, Chris was able to match and bring to climax the vibe of countless Drehmal cities – from using heavy war drums inside a hostile city which residents give tributes to god of war and chaos, through relaxing tropical feeling of some tropical location to climatic eerie atmosphere given to some liminal spaces.

Every major city in Drehmal has its own song, same with major story locations as well as some events like boss fights. There are a few ambient songs as well. To let the player further enjoy those fruits of work mapmakers have created an item that can be found on the map allowing them to play any song from the soundtrack which they’ve unlocked when exploring.

Overall, while the soundtrack isn’t a masterpiece, I believe it is an essential part of Drehmal that fulfills its reasons for existence excellently. You can listen to its entirety on YouTube or in-game.

Server setup

The entire setup to make the server work for our Drehmal playthrough was dirt cheap, I mean, it costed me nothing, at least as far as operating costs of the server itself. I hosted the Minecraft server on my personal computer running Linux (EndeavourOS), players connected using my domain name (frisk.space).

Intel i7-4790K as well as 24 GB of RAM were utlilized with 8GB of RAM allocated to the server. While I can’t say the experience was always smooth sailing (for example, in one of the locations which we’ve dubbed “China” the number of entities caused performance issues), nonetheless it was in playable state at all times. I’m still wondering what was the main bottleneck for smoother experience, however it’s difficult to say.

Server was running a bunch of mods, including proximity Voice Chat which we tested for the first time ever, I’d say it was quite a success, though I think having a global chat works better for me in most of cases. We’ve also used Customizable Player Models as most of us are furries or other kind of creatures for whom default models are not enough.

Summary

Overall? Drehmal was a blast. While its true that the group of creatures who played with us slowly dwindled, the remaining 5 creatures said that they enjoyed the time together. To me this is the most important part – that in the end the experience stayed fun and continued exploration was able to keep the flames of curiosity lit until the very end. I’m very happy that a team of enthusiasts came together to create a world to tell story of their own though the world of Minecraft. I’m glad I got to experience what they created with my dear friends. To me Drehmal is an experience I’ll not forget in my Minecraft journey, as it was likely the most consistent and attention keeping experience I’ve ever organized, on a fabulous map.

Want to play Drehmal too? Recommendations

Convinced? Want to give Drehmal a try too? Wonderful! I decided to write up some recommendations for those coming after us.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer can be a bit of a hit and miss. I loved playing with friends and discovering things with everyone else, it was also a great help when encountering puzzle elements which I sometimes were too stupid to solve on my own. But at the same time, I feel like playing the map on multiplayer led to more chaotic gameplay where I wouldn’t be able to immerse myself in game world very well. Everyone has different expectations, wants to get some kind of loot.

This will of course vary from group of players to another, I’m sure there are groups of friends who take their immersive gameplay very seriously (anyone doing D&D parties?), I’m myself a mixed bag with it. But do keep that in mind when deciding whether to experience the map multiplayer or not.

Other aspect of course is how to progress through the map, we did weekly exploration parties where outside of them exploring new terrains was forbidden. This allowed everyone to have the same experience and be closer to scripted events of the game. I still think it’s the best way to go about playing Drehmal on multiplayer.

Pace

Don’t rush. It’s not this kind of map, it’s one where best you can do is to take it slow and just enjoy the sights. Generally there isn’t a single direction you need to go to (occasional story locations excluded). That’s kind of the beauty of the map. You should explore it at your own pace, in direction you choose. There are harder and easier locations for sure, but I still would say that the map is very well made in this regard and no matter the direction you choose, the difficulty scale is gradual from the spawn.

The single time I actually remember needing to go somewhere was when I needed some nether quartz for redstone or something else. You can’t get that via villager trading, and Nether dimension is not a thing. If you need quartz then north is where you go. But otherwise most of things you need for building and what not will gradually become more available to you.

Difficulty

If you are worried about map difficulty, how easy it is to pick up what to do next – I hear you. Usually the map is pretty explicit where you should go if you want to progress. You are given compasses pointing at given location. Though our group had some hiccups twice or thrice on what to do next, it should be okey. There is also a wiki (not on Fandom!) which you should try to use the least (and give yourself a chance to figure things on your own). When we played it was still missing a lot of information, today it’s probably better.

Nomads

One thing I wish we did when playing the map was to take more nomadic approach to experiencing the map. It is conventional to settle in one place, amass resources there and stay there while growing outside. However at beginning of our journey I’ve proposed to instead be on the move while playing, so we can make smaller settlements as we are experiencing the map. That didn’t work out, it’s too comfy to make a single settlement and stay there. Despite many Minecraft updates where moving storage has been made easier, it is not exactly straightforward to move large amount of items or even structures.

Drehmal offers beautiful locations all around, but it would have probably sucked to constantly move, and I need my stuff.

DLCs

You might be interested to hear that the community has created its own expansion(s?) to this map. One that I know of is Drehmal Apotheosis: Primal Journey. It includes additional mods and expands the map with some new mechanics. To us it was a hit on miss, and just as the project mentions, I’d recommend it only if it’s your nth playthrough.

Mods

I think mods have quite a lot to offer in expanding experience one can get from Drehmal, however I’d only recommend optimization/slight customization/QoL mods, generally - lightweight additions that will not add anything of their own to break the very specific experience offered by Drehmal. We think shaders are good fit. We played with aforementioned Customizable Player Models, optimization mods that are part of Drehmal, Quick Shulker, as well as few furniture mods for our houses.

Quotes

I’ve given players of this server edition ability to say something about the map, this is what they said:

It’s a bit of a shame, that they didn’t put all of that lore and mechanics etc. into some grouped catalogue (wiki for example). Sometimes it caused us trouble to figure out which items did what and what was their purpose, even after exploring almost whole map and ending the story. Awesome and cool experience nevertheless.

The puzzles were challenging and always had us gasp at how well-designed they were. When one of those conveyed that we had to acquire primal energy to proceed, it took us several weeks to ascertain that the primal energy was at all times inside of each of us, only revealing itself when the animal dons nothing to decorate its lustful body.

Gallery (visual spoilers ahead)

Here is a bunch of screenshots I’ve collected from my friends and my own game installation while playing the map.