Kings under the Mountain! 33 Enshrouded players spent 10,000 hours to recreate this iconic location from The Lord of the Rings

This is EREBOR in Enshrouded! - YouTube This is EREBOR in Enshrouded! - YouTube
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Above you'll see the efforts of Enshrouded players working collaboratively to recreate an iconic location from The Lord of the Rings. Erebor, the dwarven city built under Lonely Mountain, has been brought to life in the early access survival sandbox from Keen Games—and all it took was 33 players working for a staggering 10,000 hours over 74 days.

That's a lot of effort: 220,000,000 blocks mined and over 15 million blocks placed to bring the dwarven city to life.

Erebor, if you haven't tucked into The Lord of the Rings in a while, is where the dragon Smaug brought the smackdown, sacking both the city and the nearby town of Dale before making Lonely Mountain his lair and hoarding all its treasure. In the events of The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins and Thorin's party snuck into Erebor through a secret door and discovered Smaug's weakness, which led to the defeat of the dragon and reclamation of the city.

I never made it through the Hobbit movies so I'm not sure how accurate the recreation of Erebor is in Enshrouded—but who even cares? It looks magnificent in the video above, truly an underground city with massive carved canyons flanked with walkways, windows, staircases, and lanterns.

You can even walk through Smaug's hoard, a massive cathedral filled with treasure and an earthwork carved to look like the mighty dragon itself. This replica of Erebor is an astounding creation I doubt even the developers of Enshrouded could have anticipated.

I dug myself a small basement under my cabin in Enshrouded. It felt like it took forever and when I was done it just looked like a hole. BRB, gonna find 32 other players who have a couple months to spare so I can at least make it presentable.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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