How One Player Is Building the Entirety of Breath of the Wild in Minecraft

After seeing The Legend of Zelda: Kingdom of Tears’ gigantic three-tiered world, it’s easy to forget that Breath of the Wild maps were once thought to be gigantic in both breadth and detail. When the game was first released in 2017, players spent hundreds of hours exploring every nook and cranny of the game, making amazing discoveries even years later.

Now, one player is revisiting the original Breath of the Wild map in all its glory by rebuilding it into a Minecraft tree.

meet grazy

Grazzy is a content creator on YouTube who filled his channel with videos from the mobile game Geometry Dash before his Hyrule building adventure, then played Minecraft in hardcore mode. After a few years he got bored and felt limited in what the format could do. On a whim, he tried out an idea he had been mulling over for some time. It started with the Great Plateau and built all of Breath of the Wild in Minecraft.

Fortunately for Gratzy, this was exactly the change he needed. His videos exploded and a surge of new followers inspired him to keep pushing forward. Gratzy had just started college, but he already felt he wasn’t for him. His YouTube success resulted in a perfect timeout.

“I was completely overwhelmed and stressed out,” Grudgey recalls. “And even without YouTube, I don’t know if I would have continued. I feel like if I don’t give it my all now, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, because I can always go back to college, but this may be the only shot I’ve ever taken on YouTube. After the first full week of college, I took one class off to go live, and after that I never went back to class.”

Grazzy had never built anything complex in Minecraft, and certainly nothing on the level of whole other game settings. He was building only what he needed in hardcore mode. That’s one of the reasons he hesitated to build all of Breath of the Wild in Minecraft, he was intimidated by the idea. However, during his experiments on the Great Plateau, he discovered a tool that could help him achieve his ambitions.

“I found this software that makes it easy to import Breath of the Wild height maps into Minecraft,” he says. “So I had the whole basemap done from scratch. I had to add all the extra stuff. It was a huge hurdle, so once I figured out a workaround it was pretty easy to get started because I don’t think I really realized how big a project this was. ‘s hope was to be completed by the end of 2022.”

Brick by Broken Brick

While running Breath of the Wild on a second monitor, Grazzy carefully builds crumbling walls, decaying guardians, wooden bridges, and stables all in Minecraft. He also uses some shortcuts such as creating basic trees and structures that can be copy/pasted elsewhere. However, some large landmarks like towns and divine beasts require him to inspect and build by hand one by one of his.

In fact, this is why Grazzy was not completed by the end of 2022 as planned. By mid-2023, he has completed the Great Plateau, Nekruda, Fallon, Zora’s Realm, Lanayru, and the Gerudo Desert. He still has Hebra and Tabantha, Korrog Forest, Death Mountain, and the regions of central Hyrule to tackle. According to him, all the work will take much longer than originally expected. Planning will take him a month, but it will take him more than two months to fully build.

As he explained it, I said the whole thing sounded so huge and overwhelming, but Grudgey focused on the short term and learned to understand it piece by piece. I say that. He’s releasing new videos slowly, roughly every month and a half he’s one at a time, and each video focuses on the huge landmark he builds around it. For those used to the way YouTube prioritizes content, such a slow upload schedule may seem counter-intuitive, but taking the time to do it works and viewers Grazzy says he remains interested. “If he were to split this up into a series of 60 episodes and upload every week, ‘Today we’re building this grass field here,’ it wouldn’t be fun,” he says.

Gratzy says Zora’s Realm is the section he’s most proud of having done so far, but it was also the hardest section he’s ever done.

“Based on my productivity and speed of construction, I thought Zora’s Domain would take a few days at most, but in the end it took about a month and 70 to 80 hours,” he says. says Grazzy. “The complexity of the domain itself, which was already difficult to reproduce in isolation, was slightly tilted in relation to its position on the map, so we didn’t build it on a canonical axis. , I just made it 30 times harder than it needed to be, it took me a while, but I think this is my favorite place on the map because…just look, just look. “

please look!

In the process of building Hyrule for Breath of the Wild, Grazzy also made some interesting discoveries. One of the things he finds most mysterious is that a small section of Breath of the Wild’s map was copy-pasted from another area. This is a detail that a normal player will likely not notice, but it’s noticeable when you have to build brick by brick.

“Between Kakariko Village and Hateno Village, there is a huge cliff. I just copied that part and pasted it on the beach near Lurelyn village.The whole mountain is pretty much copy and pasted.I made the first model and seven months later when I got to the second model, “This looks familiar,” I thought. I feel like I’ve made this before. ‘ And I realized, ‘Oh, I actually built it before, I just reused the same cliff.’ ”

another kingdom

Grazzy recently took a break from building Breath of the Wild to focus on another project, The Sky Island of Tears of the Kingdom. He really wanted to make something out of the new game right away and he’s glad he did, but I’m not sure if he’ll start making all of Tears of the Kingdom once he’s finished Breath of the Wild. told me no. . One of his reasons is that the new areas of Tears of the Kingdom, Depth and Sky, aren’t all that interesting from a construction standpoint.

“I wondered what would happen if I split it into three videos,” he says. “I do the surface, the sky, the depth. There is not a single passage that says, “I can’t wait to see this.” And it’s no different with Sky. There are some dungeons, but I think the most interesting part of Sky has already been completed. ”

But for now, Grazzy is on track to finish the Breath of the Wild map by the end of the year. He thinks he can get by with about three videos, but he’s not sure. The rest of the space is roughly equivalent to what he’s built so far, but he hopes there will be less work due to the lower density of the area. He intends Hyrule Castle to be something of a grand finale to the last video, with all the details of the inner areas.

One of the most impressive things about Grazzy is how far he’s come from having never built anything but a working hut in Minecraft before starting this project. I asked him what advice he would give to people who are intrigued by the idea of ​​architecture but, like he once was, daunted by its complexity. what is his answer? Watch others build. Then go ahead and try it yourself, even if it’s rough.

“When I went back and played the game, I already knew a lot of the techniques at a good level thanks to the architecture YouTubers and architecture videos I watched all the time,” he says. “I think it’s a good way to observe other people. People who study their little builds thoroughly. The more I look at it, the more he sees this similarity between the two, which is what they use Because you will become aware of your technique.

“And of course, basically build it yourself. This project keeps pushing me to make things I never would have made without it. Build a dragon. When I had to, I was like, “I’ve never tried to make a dragon, because I’m not good at it.” However, I am forced to try to improve from this project. So I’d say… try making a dragon. Now, I don’t know, but try to build a magical castle floating in The End. Keep trying new things. ”

Rebekah Valentine is IGN’s Senior Reporter. you can find her on her twitter @duck valentine.