You’ve seen people use Minecraft to recreate landscapes around the world, like mountains and valleys, and you’ve seen people recreate well-known scenes from movies, like Middle-earth from The Lord of the Rings.
But it’s probably the first time you’ve ever seen someone use Minecraft to completely replicate a vast universe.
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Building my little universe with Minecraft like never before!
Minecraft is a well-known video game in which players can use various block props to create their own world without any restrictions.
Recently, an 18-year-old young player from San Diego, California, boldly used blocks to build a landscape that no one has ever challenged—the universe.
The player, whose name is Christopher Slayton, is a long-time Minecraft fan.
He spent nearly 2 months successfully recreating the solar system including Earth, new nebulae, super clusters and black holes in the game world, that is, the entire known galaxy.
The universe is so vast…
Slayton said he had never felt the vastness of the universe in the past, but after he worked hard to recreate the entire universe, “I deeply realized how beautiful the universe is.”
Slayton presents the entire creation process and end result on his YouTube channel and Reddit forum under the name Chris DaCow.
His work quickly attracted widespread attention, retweeted by Xbox’s official UK Twitter, and interviewed by The New York Times and The Times.
Everything is difficult to start, starting from the home earth
Slayton has always been a loyal Minecraft player, and his Instagram and TikTok posts are full of unique structures he built in Minecraft.
This time, taking advantage of the fact that he just graduated from high school in early 2022, he decided to set himself a new challenge—creating a universe.
Slayton’s first steps started with building a model of the Earth, and he believes “the only way to really appreciate our planet is to jump out of an airplane.”
To help him thoroughly understand the surface of the earth and appreciate the beauty of the planet, he decided to take the plunge and try skydiving.
Although that jump has yielded a lot, in reproducing the details of the earth, Slayton still relies on the most reliable tool, the globe, which helps him to scale in equal proportions and faithfully reproduce every continent on the earth. .
And Slayton believes that the biggest difficulty encountered when recreating a planet in space with Minecraft is how to make it in a game world without a light source,
Just use dark and bright squares to show the glow of a planet and the dark side of it on the other side.
Challenge Saturn, Uranus and the Sun, complete the solar system Get
After spending nearly 3 days to successfully reproduce the earth, the next challenge Slayton encountered was how to use the same method to create the planetary rings of the outer planets such as Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
The size and distance of these planets are also scaled proportionally according to the known solar system planets.
Slayton said that because all planets are tilted at a certain angle, he had to do the same when he created the rings.
In order to correctly present the angles between Saturn’s rings and Saturn, he even had to relearn the Pythagorean theorem. He said that it took him almost a day to build Saturn’s rings alone.
For the sun, Slayton draped all the brightest blocks in Minecraft, adding details like solar flares, just to make the sun look alive.
The Biggest Project: Building the Pillars of Creation
After completing the solar system, Slayton said he went on to build the nebula in the Milky Way. He also admitted that until he was ready to recreate the “Pillars of Creation” in the Eagle Nebula (Eagle Nebula) ),
At that moment, I was truly amazed at how huge these interstellar gas and dust turned out to be. The existence of the Pillar of Creation turned out to be 1,175 times larger than the previous solar system.
The most difficult black hole, inspired by “Interstellar”
Slayton then moved toward recreating the most bizarre objects in astronomy: black holes.
He refers to the huge “Gargantua” (Gargantua) in the 2014 sci-fi movie “Interstellar” as a model for creating a black hole.
However, he encountered the most difficult challenge of his nine-year gaming career in presenting the unique phenomenon of black holes – the phenomenon of light being bent by gravity.
Slayton explained that the giant black hole has three circles of refracted light, and it took him five hours to calculate how to use squares to construct the shape of this accretion disc on paper.
In the actual assembly, it took him nearly 8 hours to make the light of different sizes in each circle refracted and connected together perfectly.
In the end, he suddenly realized the solution, and finally managed to accurately represent the bending of light.
He said that the work of creating a black hole has given him a lot of achievements.
Finally, Slayton added other spiral galaxies one by one, and added a thread-like web structure to the entire universe—the cosmic webb—to make the work look more realistic.
Slayton said that all the engineering is done by the Minecraft game itself, and he uses two additional tools, OptiFine and WorldEdit, for the modding.
Taking Minecraft to a new level
In an interview with The Times, Slayton said that in the future, he hopes to use Minecraft to explore more cosmic themes, such as plans to build a fourth dimension, a multiverse, and more.
“I don’t want to do what other people have done in the Minecraft community or in the gaming community, I want to tell a story that’s really interesting and exciting for people, and I kind of want to raise the bar for Minecraft creation a little bit more,” he said.
What are the Pillars of Creation?
In October 2022, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released the magnificent spectacle of the “Pillars of Creation” captured by the James Webb Space Telescope on the 19th.
“Pillars of Creation” refers to giant columns composed of interstellar gas and dust such as hydrogen gas clusters with extremely low temperature and high density.
The Eagle Nebula (M16), located about 6,500 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Serpentis, is home to many young stars that are forming.
What is Pythagorean Theorem?
Pythagorean theorem, also known as the Pythagorean theorem, the Shang-high theorem, and the Pythagorean theorem, is one of the important mathematical theorems discovered and proved in the early days of mankind.
Pythagorean theorem states that the sum of the squares of the lengths of the two right-angled sides of a right-angled triangle is equal to the square of the length of the hypotenuse;
Conversely, if the sum of the squares of the lengths of the two sides of a triangle in the plane is equal to the square of the length of the third side, then it is a right-angled triangle.
