Maze Engine: Lost Civilizations [2026 ModJam Winner]

A fully procedural, highly-detailed maze generator. Every maze is carved fresh from a pathfinding algorithm at generation time, from an 11x11 closet up to a 256x256 labyrinth, and no two runs are ever the same layout (unless you use the same seed!). 
The temples and pyramids are for show, but the mazes are not! They're built to really, really hurt the player! Getting to the other side poses a real challenge. Watch the demo video below:

Main types of traps:
- Pit traps: at the bottom there is lava or a den of random hostiles, it is possible to parkour around most of the pit traps.
- Wall traps: Dispensers inside maze walls, sometimes hidden, wired to tripwires across the floor. Some fire arrows. Some fire potions. Some just summon something behind you, sometimes both walls fire at once.
- Hidden floor traps disguise dispensers under pressure plates, one of them might just spawn a bucket of lava beneath you, or potions of harming and poison, or worse...
- Skeleton cages tucked into open floor, just shallow enough for them to spot and shoot you. The bogged, strays, and parched can also spawn in these pits.
- Mysterious Levers: they're mysterious!
- Trapped Loot Chests
Each trap usually has several subtypes for increased variety (and danger!)

Find the dead ends, and you'll find treasures. Or simply challenge yourself to reach the other side... The maze is intentionally made to be difficult to navigate, with many false paths, and only one way out which is optimized to be hardest one. Every trap type rolls independently, can combine/stack with the others, and is placed with full awareness of every other trap and the terrain already generated.

The whole maze lives inside a tapering, terraced Aztec temple with a staircase to the summit shrine, or an Egyptian pyramid capped in solid gold. Both are generated with the same Maze Engine underneath – nicely-textured via 3D noise and use of stairs/slabs, the whole structure is also randomly weathered like something actually ancient with docrations inside. Entities that spawn in the maze also vary slightly based on the Egyptian/Aztec themes currently available.

All of this makes Maze Engine one of, if not the most, sophisticated procedural structure generators of its kind. The main advantage of procedural generation is that, unlike a fixed set of structures/jigsaw structures, these can be truly any size and unique every time they are regenerated down to the tiny details.

Runs at any size without freezing your world: the whole thing builds itself in paced batches over multiple ticks, so even a 256-block dungeon shouldn't trip a watchdog or lock up a live servers, you're also given the option to slow the generation down even further.

Activate the behavior pack in a world, and run the commands to generate the maze with your desired theme, size and seed!

Maze Engine Block

1.3.0 Update introduces the Maze Engine block, it acts as a conduit for generating mazes in creative worlds without having to go through enable cheats or executing commands. You can obtain it in one of the following ways in the image below.

After obtaining a Maze Engine block, click it, a user interface similar to structure/command blocks will open, here you can select the theme, size, as well as the position relative to the block. The maze is always generated towards the positive x/z directions. Click Generate for it to begin.
The block will destroy itself after the maze generation is complete, if the block is still there, it means the structure is still generating.

Maze Engine block is not usable by players who don't have Operator permission or are in Survival mode.

1.3 Update Video

Generate Command Usage Guide

If you wish to trigger the generation through commands or command blocks for more control via redstone, you can use commands.

Generate an Aztec temple themed maze:
/mazeengine:generateaztecan <position x y z> <sizeX> <sizeZ> [optional: maze seed]

Generate an Egyptian pyramid themed maze:
/mazeengine:generateegyptian <position x y z> <sizeX> <sizeZ> [optional: ticksPerBatch]

Example:
/mazeengine:generateegyptian ~16 ~ ~ 32 32
This will generate a 32x32 egyptian pyramid themed maze 16 blocks away from you, with the default (fastest) generation speed and a random seed.

FAQ & Troubleshooting

Q: Do these structures generate naturally in the world?
A: No, due to their sheer complexity and the time it takes to generate them, the structures are right now spawnable strictly via the Maze Engine block, or /mazeengine commands. See the sections above for more details

Issue: The structures aren't generating fully!
Solution: The structure is probably too large compared to your "Simulated Chunk Distance", set it to 12 Chunks under your World Settings ->Advanced tab, 12 chunks is a 192 block radius around the player, beyond that, the add-on won't be able to generate the structure.
Pro Tip: If you stand at the center of where the structure is going to be generated, you get up to 24 active chunks, that means even a huge 256x256 maze is possible as long as you're smart with where you're standing in the world relative to the maze while the maze is being generated. For example if you want to generate 192x192 maze, offset its X and Z origin by half that amount (-96) to ensure you're at the center, giving you the most active simulated chunks at once.

Q: Can I use this add-on to generate structures for my own worlds, servers, or as .mcstructures bundled with my own Add-On? 
A: Absolutely, feel free to, I'd appreiciate proper attribution though!

Q: What does the ticks Per Batch parameter in the command do?
A: It introduces a delay between each batch of structure generation, for instance, you can set this to 2 to slow down the generation, useful if you're using a device with a weak CPU.

Q: Are seeded maze runs always the same?
A: No, while a seeded maze run with the same size give you the same layout, the appearance of the structure above it, as well as the traps inside, are still fully randomized.