Thanks to the BlockWorks team for all of their incredible work and a special thanks to Splekh and Nati for creating all the renders in the book
Contents 1 2 18 28 36 44 50 66 78 88 Introduction Fantasy Worlds The Builds of Tomorrow More Than a Game Sculptures Building a Place in the World Mechanical Marvels Re-creations Playful Design Landscapes
Introduction by James Delaney Since the release of Minecraft in 2009 players of all ages and from all backgrounds have spent countless hours using the game to bring their own imaginations to life They have made Minecraft the most popular computer game of all time But as Cody Sumter from the MIT Media Lab said Minecraft creator Notch hasn’t just built a game He’s tricked 40 million people into learning to use a CAD program Starting off in an almost infinite automatically generated landscape made entirely from blocks the player has the ability to destroy and place blocks with the aim of staying safe from the hostile creatures that roam the Minecraft world But that’s not the only way to play The player’s imagination comes to the forefront in Creative Mode where players can focus on building with unlimited resources and without fear of attack from monsters Soon after the game’s release stunning examples of Creative Mode marvels began to appear for instance a replica of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise scaled to the size of the Minecraft player all built by hand and undoubtedly the result of hundreds of hours work The sharing of such creations online played a huge role in the success success of Minecraft Mojang famously launched the game with an advertising budget of zero so community-made content and sharing were cen tral to the growth of the Minecraft phenomenon This book assembles some of the Minecraft community’s community’s most impressive work No collection could ever be considered definitive but my goal is to showcase a variety across a broad range of styles approaches and themes The sculptures and scenes in this book unlike the USS Enterprise were not entirely built by hand Custom Minecraft sculpting and design tools have been created to speed up the building building process adding functions such as copying pasting rotating and even painting much like the features of Photoshop Nevertheless some of the larger projects consisting of millions of blocks are still the product of hundreds of hours of work Many of these projects have been com pleted as commissions for a variety of clients including Minecraft servers film studios such as Disney and many other organizations trying to benefit from Minecraft’s young and enamoured audience What are the artistic possibilities of creating worlds in Minecraft This book aims to explore the furthest limits of this question and to let the artists themselves explain their motivations for creating art in this unlikely medium
