Marketplace is new to Pocket and Windows 10- for the first time it offers a way to browse, buy, download and playcommunity content from within the game itself. Over the next few weeks we’ll beshowcasing some of the cool stuff people have made for the launch! You can gocheck it out right now by clicking here!

       QwertyuiopThePie is a name legendary amongMinecraft creators, having authored a number of much-loved adventure maps andminigames, each built upon intricate redstone workings, and, more recently,command blocks. Qwerty, as he is more pronounceably known, has appeared onthese pages before for his amazing team Capture The Flag map, Valley of Kings.Now he’s back, bringing another elaborate team deathmatch map to Pocket andWindows 10: Space Battle Simulator.

       He broadly compares the concept of SpaceBattle Simulator to the game FTL - a ruthless spaceship management game, whereyou micromanage variously skilled crew members as they survive an onslaught ofinterstellar peril. Of course, here, each crew member is controlled by aseparate player.

“The idea is that there’s two teams of players that are on these twobattling spaceships,” says Qwerty. “They can use the spaceships’ systems tointeract with the other spaceships - to do things like taking down the enemy’sshields, fire ship-to-ship weaponry, or beam onto the other ship and fight themhand-to-hand. The goal is to destroy the enemy’s spaceship.”

       The ships are a mass of interactingsystems, which have to be managed, protected or exploited to gain theadvantage, as Qwerty explains: “You’ve got the ship’s weapons, a couple ofminor systems like a couple that boost the weapons’ power, airlocks, a scannersystem which shows you the state of things on your ship, shields, oxygen, thetransporter room, repair room and then, the most important one: the FusionCore. It takes five hits to destroy but once you destroy it, the ship blows upand you win. Either you destroy the Fusion Core or eliminate the enemy team.”

       You’ll need keen coordination with yourteam to plan your attack, while intercepting and rebuffing the enemy’sstrategy, though. An example Qwerty uses is to target the enemy’s oxygensupply.

   “Teams rarely actually check to see if the oxygen system has beentaken out,” says Qwerty, “If it’s out for more than five minutes they’ll runout of oxygen and lose, so it’s really a good starting point while you’retrying to distract them by taking down their shields and shooting up parts oftheir ship. Of course, you need to board the ship in order to take down theirshields, but once the shields are down you can use your on-board weapons toshoot their oxygen system and take it down that way.”

       Parts of the ship actually get destroyed bythe ship-to-ship weapons, killing those within them, and disabling systems.“The room also gets sealed off, so you can’t use that as an access way,” saysQwerty. “So you can use your ship weapon to sort of strategically shut offhallways and cut off access to parts of their ship, which can be useful in somesituations.”

       And if you’re on the receiving end of suchbombardment? “You’re going to want to repair your ship by using the repairroom,” says Qwerty. “But that means the enemy is going to know that you’regoing to want to repair your ship - so they’re going to be beaming in andtrying to kill you and stop you from repairing it. So you have to defend therepair room until you’re in a situation where you can go on the offensiveagain.”

       You can imagine that, with so manyinterrelated elements, there are many different strategies open to the player -but all require a fair bit of cooperation to be successful.

    “你必须提前制定计划，” Qwerty同意道。“一个成功的团队经常需要互相交流.所以如果有人登陆了你的飞船，你知道登陆者在哪，知道如何拦截他们，以及要使用什么应对策略。我认为五对五是一个理想的小型交流玩家数量。”

   “You have to plan ahead of time,” agrees Qwerty. “A successful teamwill always have to communicate with each other. So if someone boards yourship, you know where the boarder is, you know how to intercept them, and whatcounter-strategy to use. I’d say five versus five is the ideal number ofplayers for that sort of communication.”

       Qwerty’s not done with the map, suggestinghe’ll continue to improve it after launch. Nor is it the last thing we’ll seefrom him: he plans to bring an updated version of his classic Prison Factorymap to marketplace in the future.

   “Command blocks are pretty new to Pocket Edition which means that youhaven’t really seen that many maps of this kind of complexity until now - itshould be interesting to see how the Pocket Edition community reacts to it!”

       It certainly will! In the meantime, beamyourself over to Marketplace to check out Qwerty’s amazing work - and theoodles of other cool stuff you’ll find there!