In late September of 2026, I became consumed with the idea of building a playable CATAN in Minecraft. I hadn't fully realized it before I began, but it quickly became the largest redstone project I had ever set my sights on. Over the next few weeks, I devoted all my free time and a substantial portion of my not-so-free time to the construction of this project. This is the type of ceaseless creative ambition that has characterized figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. My partner calls it a sickness; I call it passion.
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Unlike these historical figures, I do not have the benefit of being adopted by a wealthy elite. After a month of this destructive behavior, I began secretly wishing for my own Roman Patroni. Sadly, Rome fell long ago, and this drive has me operating beyond my own means.
In an effort to quiet the voices and put a temporary cap on this project, I am writing a Project Summary detailing all the functions I have built so far and outlining those I still plan to build.
The classic hexagonal layout of the original CATAN is integral to any recreation of the game. It was incredibly important to me that my version achieved its look.
The board is the place I began. I wanted to make sure all pieces and tiles stacked nicely on top of one another. I wanted to create something visually charming while keeping text and symbols consistent and legible. These values were the basics; if they were not met, the game would never be all I aspired it to be.
This came to fruition in the form of a five-layered megastructure designed to fill the 8 x 8 chunk, or 128 x 128 block, space depicted on a level-zero map. I imagine each player having their own handheld game board they can easily reference as they navigate the different areas of play. The decision to depict the game board on an unexpanded, or level-zero, map allowed me to use a 1x1 scale; every block placed is represented as one pixel. I felt this would give me the space to do detail work while keeping the game pieces small enough to easily modify and move around.
Let's get a brief overview of each of the five levels.
The baseboard itself became one of the last few board elements to receive polish.
The bottom layer is a plane of blue and light blue concrete arranged to mimic waves. For this, I designed a simple current on one chunk and then cloned it to the remaining sixty-three. I then went through and added an occasional swirl and a sprinkle of white stained glass on the crests of waves close to shore. I made an effort to consider how such a current would interact with the island's strange shape.
Above this sits the sand that forms this island’s base. The beach extends five blocks from the edge of the resource hexes and is outlined in brown mushroom to mimic the dampening of sand. An additional layer of white glass mimics waves crashing on shores facing the current.
Simple docks have been constructed connecting trading vessels to the vertices players build upon for access. I found that building directly on top of the baseplate’s existing blocks, ignoring elevation, created a much richer texture on the map than a flat strip of planks.
In the south-east corner, I designed a little swirly decal out of yellow wool. I think it looks nice on the map, but I fear expanding the design. The map has quickly become cluttered with detail the player is supposed to be able to read at a glance.
Another level zero element that contributes to the map's clutter are the functional dice-rolling.
Each die’s 7x7 face, as well as a 3x3 ‘rolling’ frame, is set aside as an individual structure, with a name such as ‘y6roll’ indicating its color and face.
While the button to start a dice roll is in the center of the player hub, underneath the map, the mechanics take place off the west edge. This decision is made out of necessity. Structure blocks can only load structures within a 48-block range. Keeping the rolling machines near the dice’s location on the map avoids this problem. I later realized this could have been avoided by skipping structure blocks altogether and using clone commands. But, hey.
The rolling is done using dropper-fed item sorters. Every occupied slot in a Minecraft dropper has an equal chance of dispensing when the dropper is powered. Six of these slots are filled with paper renamed to represent each face of the die. The Hub’s ‘roll dice’ button simply loads in both 3x3 rolling frames and powers both droppers.
Off the bottom of each item sorter, I’ve built a line of observers that send a signal for each individual result. These signals load the die’s face, then return to the Hub to play a note block. Low rolls get low pitches; high rolls get high pitches.
Level one is technically five individual levels of resource hexes.
This vertical staggering might reduce readability outside the play area, but it’s necessary to ensure every hex is generated intact and visible on the map.
Structure files, by nature, are rectangular prisms. If every hex is generated at the same elevation, each new tile would chip away at the ones that came before. This is because structure blocks save and load air blocks. I don’t know of a way to filter out a structure’s air blocks when loading, so I chose to stagger.
Structure Name: ‘forest’
Structure Name: ‘wheat’
Structure Name: ‘wool’
Structure Name: ‘stone’
Structure Name: ‘brick’
Structure Name: ‘desert’
I don’t know why the boats are all the way up here. Don’t ask. I went with these super-wide sails to fit all the necessary text and symbols.
Vessels that trade for specific resources are indicated by these simplistic 4x4 squares. Maybe someday I’ll randomize these alongside board generation.
The Gen Towers had been in my head since the beginning. These are towers of structure blocks that place every road, settlement, and city. These are my babies.
Each hex has its own Gen Tower, though no two are exactly alike. As a road is covered by one Gen Tower, the tower next to it, which would otherwise serve that road, no longer needs to and thus can lose that set of structure blocks. Depicted below is the Gen Tower of the center-most hex. I began with this one, so it kept all its structure blocks and thus generates every possible structure of the hex.
Each Gen Tower has a top layer of sandstone. This decision was made to support visual continuity, as they are the only machinery on the board that will be exposed during play. This occurs when the robber is first moved off the desert hex, as this hex generates without the number tile that would otherwise hide the tower.
The number tiles were one of the first things I attempted to design. I wanted to clearly convey CATAN’s number and ‘dice-combination dots’ while not obscuring the hex below. Working on a two-block center, the dots' readability took a hit, but I think it shows up well enough on the map.
During board generation, the structure files for these tiles are loaded sequentially onto a cloning tray.
From there, when appropriate, they are cloned by each hex generator into its corresponding space in the sky — centered on the hex and directly above its Gen Tower.
I thought it’d be a fun idea to include little color-coded outfits to indicate which player’s robber it is.
In some of my messiest redstone (the move-robber output), the outfit-cloning command blocks are swapped at the beginning of each turn. This allows outfits to be generated at the same time as the robber and to both consistently and accurately represent which player made the attack.
This section is still being written, but here is a sneak peek!
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