18-year-old YouTuber Christopher Slayton recently created entire planets, black holes, galaxies, and entire universes. And he used only blocks within his Minecraft.
More than a decade after its release, Minecraft has evolved into a creative powerhouse, with a strong community of millions working together to create a pantheon of block-based wonders, from Starship Enterprise to the gothic cityscape of Yharnam in Bloodborne. was built.
Recently, Christopher Slayton — who goes by the handle ChrisDaCow on YouTube — decided to take the sandbox’s creative potential to the biggest scale yet. try to recreate the entire universe…or at least the elements we are most familiar with.
Slayton began by painstakingly recreating Earth. Although this makes for a relatively modest start compared to what followed, it took Brock his artist a total of three days to measure the continents and adjust surface colors, clouds, and lighting appropriately. rice field. Lighting the earth proved particularly challenging, but by making the most of the tools that let him “paint with light,” Slayton was able to give his work immersive lighting gradients and effects. rice field.
Once Earth was complete, Slayton began creating other planets in the solar system. Some of these worlds orbit with a pronounced tilt reproduced in the nascent digital universe by drawing the planets at an angle. exacerbated by the fact that the three planets in , host their own distinctive ring systems.
Finally, Slayton was able to block build a sun with an apocalyptic number of solar flares with the help of Minecraft’s Brightest Blocks.
From here, the scale of the subject Christopher sought to construct became increasingly ambitious, with digital artists aiming to recreate one of the most iconic cosmic structures ever discovered: the Pillars of Creation. rice field.
This vast collection of interstellar dust and gas is actually the stellar nursery that forms part of the Eagle Nebula. At about 4.5 light-years wide, the Pillar of Creation is by far the largest pillar he has ever designed. For practical reasons, however, Christopher decided to keep the size of his Minecraft representations comparable in size to models of the solar system.
In a video posted by him YouTube channelSlayton explained, “Each time I made a build, the actual scale remained roughly the same, but the size of objects in the universe grew exponentially in light-years.
Impressively, in creating the pillars, he took into account their real-world positions with respect to each other and modeled the major stars sprinkled throughout images of the nebula taken by Hubble and other telescopes. did.
I posted a video of making the whole universe with Minecraft! It’s my best video yet!https://t.co/FWdQbVumLm
— ChrisDaCow (@Chr1sDaC0w) October 3, 2022
Christopher then set out to recreate one of the most exciting and awe-inspiring celestial bodies in the universe: a black hole. These cosmic creatures are somehow fairly common throughout our universe, and supermassive versions of them are thought to lurk in the centers of nearly every large galaxy, like the Milky Way. .
Slayton decided to base the film on Gargantua, the black hole featured in the 2014 science fiction film Interstellar. Although fictitious, this singularity and its light-bending properties give us an idea of what a real black hole would look like if somehow observed from orbit without being inexorably spaghettined by its intense gravitational influence. It is a good representation of what it looks like.
Unsurprisingly, figuring out the curve of a black hole is a difficult task when only square blocks are available. But Slayton uses lines of hundreds of blocks as a guide to create his curves of singularity lights, and is able to cast lights to look like his Minecrafted Gargantua, which is impressive. I made it.
He then painstakingly created clusters of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, eventually working on representations of the universe as a whole. Based on computer simulations, many astronomers believe that when viewed from a great distance, the universe looks like a vast cosmic web. There, filaments made up of glowing galaxies and clouds of gas are separated by voids of nothingness.
All in all, it took Slayton over a month to create the digital universe. This has got to be one of his most impressive and massive Minecraft builds ever. Time was very well spent in our opinion.
Anthony Wood is a freelance writer for IGN.
