The largest, most realistic Minecraft city
The largest, most realistic Minecraft city
The largest, most realistic Minecraft city
By Nate Crowley
May 20, 2020
Summary
This is a screenshot from Minecraft, and it is a view over the city of Greenfield, possibly the most impressive build project I've seen to date.
Managed by a committee of ten people, and built by legions of architects, it's now grown to a size of 20 million blocks, making it the largest Minecraft city build that exists at present and it's only 20% complete.
These quality assurance exercises are just one facet of a project management effort that seems almost unfeasibly competent: there's a whole workflow system for laying out new districts, construction codes to keep style and quality consistent among the swarm of builders at work on the city, and regular staff meetings over discord to co-ordinate the mammoth effort.
The result of all this is a city that doesn't just look as realistic as a minecraft city can from ground level, but from the air, too - it's got a layout that's totally convincing as the result of professional city planning.
To me, almost the most impressive part of the whole project is not the city itself, but the sprawling countryside around it.
In order to make land to build the city on, hundreds of people are constantly working in a vast area around it to terraform Minecraft's whimsical, jumbled pretend geography into the monotony of the real.
It's a surreal image: like a swarm of autonomous drones has been chewing its way across an alien landscape with perfect precision, 3D-printing a human city in its wake.
Of course, Greenfield has had its crises, NJDaeger told Reddit, where despite multiple safety measures, the city has gotten borked.
"Someone accidentally removed all oak logs on about 70% of the city." And who was the culprit of this wanton destruction? "It was one of our admins. He was using his laptop and was teleporting around the map doing some stuff for our train system, and he accidentally set one of his positions to one end of the map and the other was on the other end. He thought he was editing a small area and in fact, it was a monstrously large area that took some teamwork to fix, lmao."
Still, with daily backups, coreprotect, and offsite backups taken every few days, the city seems as safe as it can be.
Reference
Crowley, N. (2020, May 20). 400 people spent a decade building a 1:1 city in Minecraft. Retrieved May 22, 2020, from https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/05/20/400-people-spent-a-decade-building-a-11-city-in-minecraft/