The Weird Reason We Build Like This in Minecraft

Press the button awesome now you’re in an infinite world you notice immediately that you can hit the grass but by holding hit you can break the world around you pretty much anything actually grass leaves the wood not the stone though you’ll probably need a tool for that or something guess this wood will

Come in handy let’s fast forward a few hours you’ve figured out how to mine materials and have acquired so many items that you’ve constructed chests and in order to protect those you’ve built yourself a box of that awesome super hard stone that you figured out how to

Mine let’s fast forward a few real-life days you have houses built out of nice materials they have nice simple details and the inside of your homes are warm and lovely but are perhaps small enough to be mistaken for a minecraft village but the possibilities you’re starting to

See on the horizon are getting you addicted you are in an incredible world coated in candyland aesthetics that feels like it’s from the 90s era of another universe so you keep going you have no choice fast forward a few weeks you’ve got a grip on the fundamentals of

The game are expanding a town and have explored a majority of features minecraft has to offer maybe even unlocked the end dimension and beaten the dragon though knowing the time scales of beating the dragon during our first playthroughs not likely you cringe whenever you see that old box you built

In the first hour of playing and decide to tear it down to free up more real estate for your eco-friendly modern style that’s starting to take over your town scaling you have a basic understanding of what constitutes a pleasing building and have read some advice online over the coming months

You’ll learn the conventional advice that first hits you when you enter the building community to stay away from normal square shapes try something different over the next year or two you’ll try to implement that advice to the best of your ability always trying to beat who you were yesterday but it

May have never occurred to you or any of us to challenge all of your deepest beliefs every facet of the way we take on assumptions to proceed forward in reality or how the human mind comprehends beauty how we fabricate visual pleasure what is a square what’s the link between a circle the infinity

Of the number pi and the birth of the universe why do we consider certain things beautiful if aliens foreign to our biology and ways of thinking in every way arrived on our planet would there be any universal commonalities in consciousness would they see the beauty in architecture that we do minecraft is

Made of squares a square is a psychologically satisfying shape expressing strength stability dependability and when combined with a number of layers and textures can give a very robust and industrial feel and the square shape in rectangular polygons as you continue to scale in size and complexity can end up creating

Extraordinarily fantastic and beautiful arrangements that express those base emotions of solidity and safety psychologically tied to the concept of squares but squares can also represent rigidity inability to flow and an unmovable static pattern and a bastion against creativity there’s something almost politically conservative to the temperament of a square and i don’t have

Data on this but it seems that minecraft’s player base predominantly leans to the right of the political spectrum given that the concept of the square reflects the base aesthetic feelings to humans that echo cultural concepts like tradition and stability that lead to political principles of conservatism could minecraft’s aesthetic

Itself defined the pie chart of the beliefs and convictions of the player base it would attract since its inception based on its foundational geometry and did minecraft and all its squares have a net effect on the neurochemistry of its player base from a belief standpoint what i’m trying to say

Is is it possible that minecraft can slowly alter the way you think based on its visual appearance the implications of this question when taken seriously are potentially disturbing and it’s a question that even with thorough research and data polling we wouldn’t be able to derive a conclusive answer to the way we process

The input of reality from our five senses can have a profound effect on how we think and experience the world squares represent safety and strength but they also represent rigidity in our minds for a reason geometrically they’re very opposite to flexible applications due to their shape if you had plans for

Two buildings and you’re doing it on a square grid with square objects the alignment of the houses can be placed on any different number of coordinates but their orientation to one another must be perpendicular anything else including even a solid diagonal and you are off the grid outside of the lines and you

Might have to challenge your own thinking in order to get what you want when i first started building or rather struggling in build the earth this jagged outline i kept seeing over and over again just frustrated me why was it like this this looks so silly it’s

Ridiculous we don’t need this i guess what i was feeling most of all was that it was intimidating i’d never even considered building in such a way these serrated edges aren’t desired but they’re necessary let’s take a look at the city that we started the project in seattle this area

As you can see is oriented quite satisfyingly on a north to south axis that could be built in minecraft in exactly that way everyone has straight lines everyone’s happy but imagine if you kept building and eventually found yourself going south enough to find this change in direction matching the

Coastline if we want to build this in minecraft both sides can’t share a straight axis along the block alignment in minecraft it’s not a 90 degree angle and it’s not straight something’s going to have to be diagonal and if we move it so that the southern region gets the

Block axis then the northern region is off minecraft block alignment and this simple little problem extrapolates to a global level many cities have north and south and east and west city block alignment but many of them don’t they point in every which way so many criss-crossed various directions that no

Matter which way you set the world in minecraft most cities are going to be off the minecraft block axes and layered on top of this geometric conundrum is the challenge of putting a sphere like ball of a world onto a flat square map it’s been attempted by cartographers and

Mathematicians for centuries with no possible way to perfectly do it without serious distortion the way build the earth figured out a projection for doing this is a story in and of itself but basically what we did was take the projection with the least amount of distortion that destroyed the concept of

North south east west and then restored that concept by taking the two land masses and pointing them upwards in order to give a visual appearance similar to the maps that we’re all familiar with in this projection hardly anywhere or anything is on minecraft block axis at all in order to get the

World in minecraft this cohesive with the least amount of distortion possible north and south as a concept is only recovered partially in the visual capacity north and south will not be aligning with minecraft’s block lines in any continent city anywhere and to even move in what’s typically understood as a

North and south line in the world in terms of the minecraft geography you’re going to be moving in these frustrating and disorienting curved lines this means if i were to challenge you to load terra plus plus teleport somewhere and just go north on the earth in minecraft without

Any special cartographic tool to provide you with direction it would be impossible to do and that’s how challenging and mathematically frustrating it is to get a spherical ball onto a flat sheet of paper turning a circle into a square that spiderweb of block axes we drew earlier yeah it’s

More like this actually a sphere is sort of the materialistic expression of the perfection of gravity a concept science doesn’t even fully understand yet turning the surface of that sphere into a flat square map is like trying to tame the chaos of pie nature is just gonna laugh at your efforts by making

Everything complete chaos and make absolutely no sense serrated block axes that has another chaotic layer of seemingly random curvature over larger distances nothing’s even straight in and of itself let alone straight in perpendicular alignment to minecraft block alignment no doubt when i first discovered the serrated building outlines i found it disturbing but

Remember what i said about questioning your base assumptions about reality i had never in my 10 years of playing minecraft even considered building stuff off the minecraft block axes to represent straight lines going in other directions when you get used to it it’s still trippy but it starts to become

Amazing it’s an additional layer of complexity available to you as a builder a spiked and surreal appearance that gives the illusion of the buildings pointing in two directions at once the minecraft block axis and its true direction moving towards it in spite of the minecraft block axis demanding adherence i think that holographic

Representation of the buildings adds an amazing depth to the buildings especially when a large area is completed and it all works against the fundamental directions of minecraft as an ensemble the roads buildings parking lots piers even park benches and street lights creating a two-pronged multi-orientational feel that adds so

Much more on top of what can be delivered with quality building the serrated lines may seem challenging at first but whether you’re purely a block placer or primarily a world edit user it can be done and handled with enough practice and just like me you’ll be

Converted to the cult of worship for off axis buildings they are so cool i’m glad that i resisted them actually because their fundamentals of what makes them interesting were robust enough in their visual appearance to surpass my skepticism this is just another thing that makes build the earth so awesome a

Square shape has geometric rigidity and limitations right down to its philosophy yes it confines the grain to run in primary directions but if you continue to zoom out those squares become smaller so small and granular that eventually anything can be drawn on its grid-like surface with any level of curves

Squiggles diagonals or straight lines going in other directions it’s a tapestry of infinite possibility you just have to expand your field of resolution whether that’s the size of a town to a city a nation or eventually the entire earth no matter what it is we can build it in minecraft

Okay now on to how i made this thumbnail this building existed in its jagged serrated state all i had to do was straighten it but after thinking about that really hard for a few minutes i realized that doing it by hand would be impossible the rotate command for world

Edit can rotate this structure to straight but it’s gonna be very destroyed so i did that took a look and decided fixing all the errors by hand was my only option it took a couple hours and was a lot of fun and the only time to my knowledge this has ever been

Done in the project i felt kind of dirty doing it if you enjoy buildings that aren’t straight we’ve got a ton of them on our patreon this one came from the seattle 1000 map that and a whole litany of maps from build it one to one’s two year history are available for download

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