Hello you absolute legends.

LvL curates and presents the best Q3 map releases, but all levels are interesting to me. To that end, here's a torrent of every Q3 level I've ever managed to find. It's 145Gb and consists of around 15.5k levels.
This is a magnet link you can paste into a torrent client to download it: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:0218cc054f95eab157621bdd54475addbf509138&dn=Quake%203%20Level%20Archive&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce

It's probably missing many Defrag levels. Because there are so many and they're often low-effort I've not mustered up the patience to grab them all from Worldspawn.

Here is a list of all files in the torrent: controlc.com/abafc320

Here is a list of levels I know existed but haven't been able to find: controlc.com/5ddcf63f

If you have any levels on the missing list or otherwise not in the archive, please let me know!

Danke schön,
Foo

Edit: Jan 2025 - Refreshed magnet link, a few new additions.
Edited 640.2 days after the original posting.

Awesome, thanks for this!
i'd just wish you separated the defrag maps somehow.

Thanks @Gelenkbusfahrer!
Next version will have as many Defrag (and other mod-specific) maps separated out into subfolders as possible. It's pretty tricky, because some are not obviously labelled and even some of the maps flagged as defrag (containing a .defi file, for example) are actually playable levels in vq3 with regular pickups and such. Real hard to cleanly separate stuff.
So far I've managed to shuffle ~6100 levels into their own subfolders, and ~9400 are still in the main dir.

This thread is pure gold. Thank you for taking time and effort to collect this!!! <3

Its a small silly thing, but I remember it was either WCG 2002 or ESWC 2003/2004 that had a pk3 file that puts the
logo event on the maps used in the comp. Was a nice little touch back then.
To think, Q3 can reach 65GB just by maps alone. Not even counting all the demos from the comps backs then.

New version for September 2023. A lot more content sorted into subfolders and a lot of duplication stripped out (stuff like zip and pk3 stored separately, or two versions of a map that are actually identical just named or compressed differently). Largest addition is 5000 Urban Terror maps, all in a separate subfolder that you can exclude from the download if you don't want them.
Size is now 15.5k, 111Gb. New magnet link is in the first post.

Hi! I see the Torrent also has OpenArena maps, we've been wanting to preserve OA material for quite a long time. I have a lot of maps uploaded to a Mega folder.

Here are my maps and reworks: mega.nz/folder/7d5GAAxT
Here are the third-party untouched maps: mega.nz/folder/XUhSXTzT

I've also uploaded many OA maps to MapRaider as well as ModDB. Here are links to those too!
www.moddb.com/games/openarena/addons
www.mapraider.com/maps/openarena
Once again, awesome job!
Edited 15.15 minutes after the original posting.

Wow I just saw this and am downloading the maps now. My friend and I have approximately 3200 maps which we have inventoried into a db and built a website to rate and track plays. In 18 months we've played about half of these, and that's with a lot of extra playtime that dudes our age typically don't have...so completing all 3200 is going to take quite awhile, and I can't get my head wrapped around 15k maps but I'm gonna try lol.

..::LvL is the only place I really search for info on maps, and it's helped us attribute authorship, resolve bugs, find secrets, etc. But the ~12k maps not listed here are always going to be at least somewhat of a mystery.

Thanks in advance to you all for collecting and sharing this q3 history.

I've been trying to download this for almost a week now and the torrent is stalled. Can you guys re-seed for awhile?
@Gelenkbusfahrer
@Foo
@verg0a
@Neon_Knight

@sedawkgrep apologies for the slow response, I had a period where I couldn't access my storage and came off the torrent. It should be seeded again now.
Edit: Looks like a few others were way ahead of me. These old bones don't move so fast :)
If you have any maps in your stash that aren't in the torrent, please let me know!
Edited 8.97 hours after the original posting.

Thanks @foo! Once this is downloaded and sorted out I'll see what I might have and send them along.

I might be able to host this and seed for a "long" time 24/7, but the speed won't be super fast. I will see what I can do. 100 GB is a big thing to host though...
Edit: It's seeding at at least 2-3MB/s now and that server is suppose to be online "always". I can't seed too fast because it's going to be used for other things, but at least it should be up.
Edited 5.63 days after the original posting.

@Foo : I tried to download the collection but have failed on a number of fronts.

The controlc.com links are dead and the magnet appears to have no active seeders.

Just re-exported the magnet and confirmed my seed box is still seeding and properly connected. Also ran it through the WebTorrent checker online service (checker.openwebtorrent.com/) which is showing 6 seeds
I wonder if something was messing up with the magnet link as I had it here. This version is shorter (just one tracker), perhaps this will help.
Will try downloading from a seperate torrent box soon to verify.

I have most of the archive myself. I can put the seed box back online for awhile if need be.

Stupid server restarts sometimes, but I have seeded about 100GB at least, I try to make sure it stays up as much as possible.

@Foo do you intend to update the Torrent with new content? Because I saw the updated link and lacks the OA maps. 🤔

Yep intending to, although I'll need to do a sort out to get the OA maps into the collection (and a bit of checking to ensure they mostly work with Q3, if not I might either need to include some 'shim' PK3s that bridge in shaders and textures, or rethinking including them)

don't