Topographical Colored World Map V3

Like so many of you I did not like the official Lego World Map (31203). So I went looking for alternatives... And found one!

The original design is from GooseWithBricks. While Pixlut made a more efficient version that uses less parts.

What Pixlut did was very smart, he used Blue baseplates instead of normal plates for the deep blue oceans. This removed an entire layer of Blue plates. However to cover the seems of the baseplates he used Dark Azure 2x6 plates. But this causes the issue of intersecting a deep blue ocean part that was not in the original design.
split those plates up and made some parts Blue to make the deep ocean continuous again and trying to get the design closer to the original where possible. Because of this it was also possible to add the Mariana Trench back into the design.
Also there were a lot of plates in the design that could be merged, like 2 1x1 or 1x1 and 1x2 plates next to each other, helping to reduce the piece count.

Biggest changes made in V3

• Reduces the total part count to 3026, (367 less than Pixlut's design). This was mostly done by merging parts where possible.
• I did not use Dark or Medium Azure 2x2 corner plates because they are relatively expensive.
• Fixed some small issues where sometimes a piece was 'hovering' because there was no stud underneath.
• Tried to reduce the number of 1x1 plates as much as possible.
• Sometimes a building step was too soon, meaning you had to place a piece somewhere but that the underlying piece would be in a building step yet to be done.
• Fixed the building instructions where sometimes the parts list was hovered over the positions those parts were supposed to go.
• Brought back the Mariana Trench.
• Used Blue plates to connect the baseplates in some places instead of just Dark Azure to get closer to the original design.