Community Chest series

The Community Chest series is a set of 32-levels megawads for Doom II created by the Doomworld forums community.

The idea originated from TeamTNT member Dale Harris (Cadman), who launched the first issue in the series under the name of "The Community Chest Project". The mapping guidelines were vanilla Doom features only, but with Boom's bugfixes; no new textures, sounds, or music. However, new status bar graphics were provided (which would remain throughout the series), along with TITLEPIC and level name graphics (CWILV**); and six of the maps did include a custom MIDI sound track. Music from Descent was also included for both the title and text screens.

It was followed by a sequel after Cadman took note of people's interest in contributing to a new issue. The second Community Chest allowed new textures to be used, and fully embraced Boom features, including an ANIMATED lump and two custom colormaps. More people issued custom MIDI songs with their map, replacing half of Doom II's soundtrack.

Andrew Stine (Linguica) attempted a third Community Chest, aiming to make it a collection of innovative ZDoom maps, but canceled the project on 6th of July 2005 after too few contributors had anything to show for the first milestone date.

The series was revived by Andy Leaver, who decided to hold a poll to let the community choose the kind of maps to make. This poll was won by the "old school Boom maps" option. A new CC3 project was then started, and eventually completed. Again, Boom features were fully used, including the sky transfer effect, which is actually an MBF feature. Also used were custom colormaps, SWITCHES and ANIMATED lumps, and an embedded DEHACKED lump (though an external .BEX file is also provided). CC3 was also the first entry in the series to contain a full custom MIDI soundtrack, with all songs replaced and full credits given in the accompanying text file.

The fourth Community Chest was organized differently, led by Eric Baker and Death-Destiny, the latter of whom soon left due to controversy from another project. Instead of allowing mappers to add new textures as they desired, a comprehensive texture pack was compiled first. While the CC4 project got progressively abandoned by the mappers despite measures taken to prevent it, a number of unrelated projects were released using the CC4 texture pack. Eventually, James Cresswell (Phobus) started a drive to finish the project's abandoned maps, which successfully revived the project and allowed it to achieve its long-awaited completion. CC4 also features three different MAPINFO lumps (variants are EMAPINFO and ZMAPINFO), an embedded DEHACKED lump, an OPTIONS lump to enforce one compatibility setting in Eternity Engine, and a MUSINFO lump used only by the Easter egg hidden map. Furthermore, the accompanying text file is also embedded as a WADINFO lump.

A spin-off for Doom 64 was launched by StevenC21 and later hardcore_gamer, called Community Chest 64, and was meant to encourage people to take up mapping for Doom 64. While not directly associated with the previous entries in the series, the project was still organized on the Doomworld forums and after seven months of development, produced 20 maps of varying length, meant to be played with the Doom64 EX source port.

Name	Start date	Completion date	Project leader	Contributors	New music	New textures	Engine
The Community Chest Project (cchest.wad)	2002-08-14	2003-06-13	Dale Harris	17	8 tracks	No	Limit-removing with Boom bugfixes
Community Chest 2 (cchest2.wad)	2003-12-28	2004-12-06	Dale Harris	26	17 tracks	Yes	Boom with segs limit removed
Community Chest 3 (failed)	2005-04-12	2005-07-06	Andrew Stine	—	—	—	ZDoom
Community Chest 3 (cchest3.wad)	2006-06-18	2007-11-21	Andy Leaver	27	35 tracks	Yes	MBF-compatible (officially Boom-compatible)
Community Chest 4 (cchest4.wad)	2008-06-05	2012-08-17	Eric Baker	43	36 tracks	Yes	Boom with segs limit removed
Community Chest 64 (d64cp1.wad)	2018-10-05	2019-04-15	StevenC21	12	None	Yes	Doom64 EX

Doomworld forum threads

• Anyone interested? (First Community Chest project launch)
• Looking forward to Community Chest Megawad? (Largest discussion thread)
• Community Chest Questions (Launch of the second Community Chest)
• Map Assignments and the such (CC2 sign-up thread)
• Community Chest 3 OFFICIAL SIGNUP (old) (Launch of the failed third Community Chest)
• Dumb milestone thread (Death of the failed CC3)
• any word on CC3 at all? (Launch of the successful third Community Chest)
• Map Slot Requests (CC3 map thread #1)
• Type of Project (Community Chest 3 poll)
• Rules/Guidelines & Other info. (CC3 guidelines)
• CC4 (Unofficial launch of the fourth Community Chest 4)
• CC4 Preliminary Sign-up (Mappers and Testers)
• CC4 Official Sign-up Thread (first sign-up thread)
• The New Community Chest 4 Sign-Up Thread (second sign-up thread)
• The Community Chest 4 Rules/Guidelines Thread
• Let's Finish Community Chest 4
• Community Chest 64
• Community Chest 64 EX release thread