With its debut event at the end of August, Biome Battle has smashed its way into the event sphere, receiving strong praise from contestants and viewers alike. Could Biome Battle be the next big event in the Minecraft space? I spoke to the organiser and some of the players to find out…
It’s been clear from the first announcements that Biome Battle has had a lot of potential. Originally announced on X in May this year, the production value of the event has shone through in every sneak peek.
Biome Battle is a minigame tournament with a difference: every game is affected by the seasons. Each game and map comes with four variants: spring, summer, autumn and (you guessed it) winter, with modifiers for each of these that can dramatically change up how the game is played. For example, parkour race Runners Rampage features “boost pads” with different effects per season – giving elytras to players that run over them during the springtime, but transforming into camel pads (because who knew “camel pads” was a thing?) in the summer.
“I think that’s a really cool thing about Biome Battle,” BitSquidd, the event creator, tells me. “You might as well use what you have at your disposal. We’ve always said for Biome Battle that it’s going to be an entirely vanilla event – you’re not going to need to download any mods. I like the challenge of being limited by vanilla mechanics and seeing what you CAN do. So I think having a mob like the camel, which can automatically boost for you and jump over stuff is a really cool mob. We just need to tweak it a little bit, give it some extra speed and stop people riding it with you, and it’s a really nice thing to have some parkour for.”
So why did BitSquidd – or Bit for short – start making the event in the first place? “To be honest, I was bored,” he admits. “I study Computer Science at university and it was just before we started learning Java. I thought why not get a bit ahead of this course and start learning a bit of the Java for it? Why not do something else that I love and combine it with Minecraft?”
As it turns out, Biome Battle came together almost by accident. “I didn’t go into Biome Battle thinking I’m going to make a Minecraft event here,” Bit says. “I was just wanting to make fun games and practise my coding.”
Whilst Bit has covered most of the development side, from the plugins to the visual effects, he is also assisted by a surprisingly small staff team. “We’ve got one main builder, and someone who manages the builds. We have someone who works on our website, the hardware stuff. And then somebody who composes our music.”
It’s this composer – Deamoz or “DJ Deamoz” as Bit refers to him – whose work has seen some of the highest praise in the event. “The music was really cool,” TinyCaity, a member of Yellow Team in the debut event, tells me. “It made the event ten times more special and interesting! Specifically in Runners Rampage, I just zoned out and vibed.”
But developing and running an event like Biome Battle doesn’t come without its challenges. “Because of the seasons, there’s a lot of maps that have to be built. We have to develop a unique game four times. It’s a lot of work for our builder.”
Whilst the event has clearly had a lot of work put into it, and with more still to come, Bit has been masterfully managing the limited resources the team has. As just one example, the map for Sneak ‘n Seek – a hide and seek game featuring coins and useful items to collect around the map – is a modified version of a map Bit has previously used for hide and seek on his SMP. With a pre-existing map that had already been tested, and transferable code from Biome Battle’s Sprint! minigame, the bulk of the code was completed in an afternoon. This efficiency clearly didn’t hurt the game itself, with TinyCaity mentioning it as one of her favourite parts of the tournament. “I loved being small! Running around and hiding – now that’s MY type of game!”
There’s plenty more games on the roster, with eight in total. A minigame that has been particularly well received is Oppenslimer – an intense game in which players shoot slime guns to cover as much of the map with their team’s colour as possible. “It was SO fun – I enjoyed swimming around in the slime and the boosts you could gain,” Caity says. “It’s a simple concept, simple mechanics,” Bit adds. “Literally right click with your gun, and swimming in the floor.”
It’s clear that Bit’s experience as a streamer himself has guided his development of the event. “You get to know what sort of things you like in events, what sort of things are bad in events. Having empty space between games is not very fun for me, so we tried to reduce that. We have lobby games you can play – we have a mini version of Oppenslimer and Arena, we’ve got parkour, we’ve got Spleef. That serves a double purpose of learning the mechanics of the game when you’re in the lobby.”
Before the event began, the streamers were also provided with an overlay to use in their streaming software. This displayed the individual player’s Minecraft head, what team they were on, and total number of individual points earned throughout the event. “That something we did just because we thought it was cool,” Bit says. “We’ve got a lot of cool future plans for it, so we just wanted to test that it worked and it did.”
Those aren’t the only special features that Biome Battle has with players and creators in mind. Bit has added an alternative version of the texture pack that shows different shapes instead of colours, helping colour blind players to be able to differentiate teams in Oppenslimer. The main lobby has a sound check to avoid creators having to fiddle around with music volume during a game, and there’s a help command so that players can request assistance from the admins at any time. “Creators can just do /help if they need support during the event,” Bit explains, “and that immediately screams at all of the staff online saying that this person needs help, go help them. Obviously the first event was never going to be perfect, but that feature is definitely something we’ll keep for future events. So while there were bugs, we were able to react to them pretty fast.”
So how does Bit feel about the event now that the debut is done and dusted? “I’m going to hibernate for a bit,” he jokes. “Of course after an event you think about what went wrong, but realistically we couldn’t have prepared any better than we did. We’ve had a lot of constructive criticism which I love, because if everyone’s saying this is the best event ever then we’re not going to be able to improve on that. So I’m happy, I’m very happy and excited to see what Biome Battle has to offer.”
“We’re predicting about two to three months before the next event. We definitely want to do a festive special. Whether or not Biome Battle 2 is our festive special, or there’s an event between that, I don’t know yet. We also plan on doing Biome Battle Minis, which are a smaller version of the main event – nothing particularly changed from the previous event, but that anyone can play in. You don’t have to be a content creator, you don’t have to stream – it’s literally just fans of Biome Battle playing it. That’s going to be happening in a month or so once we’ve ironed out some of the bugs.”
Whilst there are currently bugs to fix and improvements that could be made, the whole admin team’s professionalism, creativity, and enthusiasm, as well as the generally positive reception from both players and viewers alike, are promising signs that the event will continue to grow and improve as time goes on. With Biome Battle’s future looking bright, I can’t wait to see where it goes next – and I’m sure we’ll have some more updates coming to Sphere News soon!
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