For nearly 20 years, I have been constantly astonished by what people are capable of creating in Minecraft. Thanks to Creative mode, people have been able to build the most astonishing buildings, then towns, then cities, then countries. Maps like Newisle, Westeroscraft and, well, the entire planet Earth are breathtaking pieces of work, years in the making, but it turns out they’re being created in easy mode. At least, in comparison to YouTuber stan616, who took it upon himself to spend nearly 80 days building a spectacular recreation of One Piece‘s Marineford in Hardcore, using over a million blocks.
To explain: Usually, when people take on enormous builds like this in Minecraft, they play in the game’s Creative mode, which allows you to generate any number of any block type at will. Also, it lets you fly. This means that while still huge feats, people at least have the resources and dexterity to just crack on with constructing their masterpiece. But stan616 has opted for something far sillier. In Hardcore, every cube of every part of every building, ship, pathway and mountain has to be mined, harvested and crafted from scratch. Oh, and every tool used to do this, too. And if he wants to fly, that’s going to require vast numbers of eyltra and fireworks, and you can’t build while you’re doing that. Sound ridiculous enough? Because that’s the easy bit. That’d be how you’d do it in Survival mode. But in Hardcore, the world is also filled with aggressive mods spawning in and attacking, and should he die, the whole build is lost.
Heck, if he fell from a wall he was building and missed a bucket clutch, he’d be in big trouble. Yes, he did the whole build with a Totem of Undying in one hand, meaning death can be averted, but once that Totem’s gone he’s got to swap another one in damn fast or he could be done for. Anyone who’s fallen in Minecraft will know how horribly possible it is to pop your Totem, then fall again before you know what’s happening. (Never. Dig. Straight. Down.)
There are moments in the 90-minute edit of the 77 days this project took where he comes horrifically close to death. Like the time a Creeper sneaks up behind him as he’s building and blows itself up, popping his Totem and leaving him shaking in his chair. Or, far more stupidly, when he flew full-pace into a wall, narrowly missing the window, and nearly brained himself. Why do this? Why make it this hard? Because you gotta stand out.
The video is great fun. Despite the embarrassingly pompous opening narration, the rest of the hour is nothing like that, with stan616 including moments of humiliation (like when he realizes he spent a day working on the wrong template), humility, and good-natured humor.
You’ll note that when building in Hardcore, he’s working from schematics. This is a technique where elaborate crafts are designed in Creative, then the designs are exported with a mod like Litematica into the Hardcore world. These then appear like ghosts in the world, and builders fill them in with the appropriate blocks. It makes builds of this scale plausible, but as you’ll see from the video, doesn’t guarantee success.
The logistics here are phenomenal. The designing, the blueprinting, the mining, the networks of chests, the oxidizing all the copper, the smelting, the searching the map for Trial Chambers and amethysts and everything else, all before the build even begins, all of this while risking death at any moment. If you want to avoid all that for yourself, stan616 is selling the build on his Patreon for $55.50.
Just the thought of gathering the blocks required makes me want to go back to bed. In total, he used 1,187,773 blocks. But doing it in Hardcore? Dude. No. Just imagine. Absolutely incredible work.