Using Real Ruins to Create a Castle in Minecraft

This video is sponsored and made possible by Xbox UK. [whispers] Thanks guys. In the 1.19 wild update something pretty significant was added to Minecraft. And oh look, there’s one right here. This is the enormous ancient city. And one can only imagine what this used to look like before it was ruins.

But maybe that’s a video for another day. To celebrate ancient cities being added to the game I’ve been tasked with recreating some ancient cities that existed in real life. Okay, they’re castles, not cities but you get my point. So here I’ve been supplied with a ruin of a very real castle

In my home country of the United Kingdom called Corfe Castle which is run by the National Trust. It’s a pretty accurate, to scale replication of the real ruins that exist. And I’ve actually been here and they are absolutely magnificent. So I’ve been tasked to recreate this

And bring it back to its former glory before its destruction during the English civil war. Now in order to do this, I need to get a bit more information on how to tackle this. So, I did a trip to London to meet up with a historian: Alice Loxton

Who’s going to give me a bit more information on it. I’m gonna pull the curtain back a little bit, when I got to London, there was this incredible set that was supposed to be my apartment and I actually did some of the building there in the studio.

Now I had an interview with Alice Loxton who took me through the majority of Corfe Castle as it stands. She introduced me to the term “gloriette”. Now this was King John’s favourite castle and he build this thing called the gloriette which is this kind of mini palace in the castle grounds

Which was- – I’ve never heard of a gloriette before. She also pointed out that the castle was actually built over many hundreds of years meaning the style would vary from section to section. She also pointed out the butavant tower which is octagonal and I thought would be extremely difficult to make

Or at least it would look circular at a small scale. [ALICE LOXTON] This is the butavant tower and this is an octagonal tower that’s three stories high and they would literally just put prisoners in there. And forget about them? – And forget about them.

Oo. This is gonna be exceptionally difficult to build in Minecraft. You know, Minecraft’s full of cubes, four sides, easy-peasy. Eight sides is not easy. Turns out octagons are really easy to make, I don’t know what I was talking about. I also got a really good look

At the National Trust leaflet for Corfe Castle and really got a deeper understanding of what this thing actually looks like. And I know that it looks like I’ve got a notebook and pen and I’m taking notes of all of our interview but I was actually just drawing a picture of my cats.

So I know that interview was done in a studio but it was genuinely very, very helpful for me for this particular build. There are things that I did not consider about the historical significance and the differences in when each part of this was built but now with that context,

I think I’m ready to get started. So as we can see, the ruins of Corfe Castle are a bit of a mess and it’s a little overwhelming and difficult to know where to start because I don’t know what is a foundation and what’s just rubble that’s fallen on the floor.

So I’ve had to kind of look at some reference images of Corfe Castle and there’s a problem with this, a big problem. Every single reference picture is slightly different. There’s a model village and there’s pictures from history online as well. But a lot of these have been embellished and

Had a lot of artistic license taken. So I’m gonna do the same. So if we look at these pictures. Look. This bit isn’t the same to this, this isn’t the same to this but they’re all fairly consistent in at least their layout and theming.

So we’re gonna take these references with a grain of salt and make our own Corfe Castle using our imagination. So during the studio visit, I actually did the keep part. And I started here because it’s the most obvious place to start. It has the most impressive part of the ruins still remaining

But it did come out a little bit stubby. I added some fake windows there, those aren’t actually meant to be windows but I needed some contrast. And here’s where we are at. So there are three main parts that need to be build from this point forward. We’ve got the keep done

And now we need to consider the gloriette which is probably the most difficult part so I might leave that for now. We’ve got our bu- buv- buv- the octagonal tower and then we’ve got our three tower gate entrances that I’m gonna have to build.

So now that the keep’s done, I’m gonna move on to the octagonal tower and try and get this section here complete and then move on and do this in parts. There is a slight issue with this one in the fact that it’s octagonal

And this section is not big enough for a proper octagon. So I’m probably have to make it a bit bigger. I don’t know why I thought an octagon was gonna be difficult to build ’cause it’s not. It has four straight sides and then just diagonals to cut off the corners.

I must have been thinking of a much more complicated shape, perhaps like a pentagon or something where the sides don’t include lots of straight edges so I was horrificly wrong, that’s probably the easiest shape I’ve ever had to make. It does look a little bit circular so I was right about that.

So that was a mistake on my part, this was surprisingly easy to build but it does need to be nice and tall. Right, so maybe we should talk the rest of this section through in a little timelapse. So during these timelapses I’m going to talk

A little bit more about the process that I went through while making this single-handedly and one issue that I immediately came across was the scale of the towers. So in order to make them look nice, I had to make them look quite large and they were immediately out of scale from the keep

And the rest of the build but I thought I’m gonna keep them enlarged. And you can see a couple of floating ones in the background and I pasted those around inside the walls. So a little untextured but we have got the structure for this section complete including the octagonal tower

Which was easier than I thought it was gonna be. So the next thing is to move on to the rest of the wall. The great news is because I’ve got a couple of towers that I’ve made I can just plop these in the locations that they’re supposed to be.

Now again, I’m gonna be taking some artistic liberties. I think there’s one more tower than there’s supposed to be but it’s gonna get a little bit cramped if I put these in. These towers are actually very much out of scale. They’re a lot bigger than they should be.

However I think for the sake of trying to make the castle look very impressive, I’ve made them a little bit bigger. So you can see the keep is probably a little smaller or the towers are a little bigger than they should be but you know what, it looks pretty good

And that’s what I’m trying to go for, a vague recreation of the whole thing. So we’re gonna hop back into timelapse mode and add in all of these towers including the front gate and make our way up to this section here, when we we will finally tackle

The hardest part of this entire build. So this part here was actually fairly easy as you can see, I can copy/paste the towers that I made previously and try and put them in the right place and then I can fill in the rest of the walls.

And because of the ruins and where they were, I was able literally sort of just lift them out the ground. So this was a really easy part of the build, it did involve a little bit of tidying up and I was pretty happy with how it came out.

So, we’ve completed the third part of the castle. We’ve got the keep done. I even made it a bit taller to try and bring it into scale as I talked about earlier. And I think that has done wonders. Now obviously I haven’t textured anything yet,

That will be the absolute last thing that I do to try and mix it up a bit and add some flags and all that kind of stuff. Now, I have to move on to the final part: the gloriette. The word I’ve never heard in my life before.

Now this was a Early Gothic style thing which again I’ve never really built. Now I’ve got to really try and use my imagination here because this particular part, no one seems to agree on what it looks like. It could look like this or this or… this.

The point is, no one seems to really know and I don’t either. So I’m gonna try and use the National Trust one as Corfe Castle is run by the National Trust and so, I guess we should trust them a little bit. So I’m actually gonna have to rejig some of these ruins

A little bit just to get the scale right. but at least we know some of it did look like that. So again, final timelapse for this build and then we’ll have the whole thing complete. So I obviously left this part to last because it was the most challenging

And it’s true, I really did struggle with this part. Purely because I didn’t know what an Early Gothic thing looked like. Even through extensive research I was struggling to find some examples so I kind of just went with it. It is still made of grey blocks

And that’s an issue we’re gonna deal with in a minute. I had to make an additional tower which I then moved into place. I’m not convinced I did a good job but when it’s in context with the rest of the keep

I think it actually looks okay, just don’t look at the gloriette. Here it is, the mostly complete castle. We’ve got our first ever gloriette. I still don’t quite know what it is. I had to use the reference images in this so small I couldn’t really see what was going on

But I’ve done my best. It’s kind of like a mixture between a village hall and a church hall, town hall, it’s basically just a hall is what I went for. And I’ve just kind of went a little bit Gothic and Gothic for me just means big windows with pointy tops.

I’ve done the best that I possible can. But the problem here is that the texturing is not complete throughout the buildings. You see here, it’s mostly just stone. And just stone on its own while it gives it the shape, it doesn’t give you much to look at. So what I’ve done over here

Is created a bit of a texture idea for the front. So what we’ve got is a bunch of tuff and andesite and cobblestone with a tiny bit of gravel in there. And then at the bottom we’ve got some basalt and this kind of gives the impression that

You know the rain has stained it.. I’ve also added some lichen and some leafs as vines just to try and break up the monotony of the stone. So I’ve now got the task of adding that texturing all over the build and try and get it looking a little less uniform,

Mix it up a little bit and try and bring in some different shades of grey ’cause at the end of the day this castle is a giant stone box. So how we make that more interesting in Minecraft is through the use of textures. So, that’s the final stage

And that’s what we’re going to do right now. So texturing by hand, if you’ve ever had to do this in Minecraft is a pretty lengthy process but overall it didn’t take too long in the grand scheme of things. And now it’s time to skip to the part

That everyone’s been waiting for which is comparing the real life drone footage with the Minecraft build. [CALMING MUSIC] So, that’s the end of recreating Corfe Castle into its former glory. I really enjoyed this project, it’s right up my alley.

And if you want to build your own Corfe Castle in your own way then there’s a link in the description that will grant you access to those ruins. And of course you can jump into the wild update on Minecraft for PC, Xbox and mobile. Thanks very much for watching and good-bye!