In a game where you can build almost anything, an 18-year-old spent two months creating and sharing the entire observable universe.
Christopher Slayton, 18, is a longtime lover of Minecraft, a game that lets people build castles, cliffs and other objects using old-school blocks. But Slayton overdid the effort.
He created black holes, Stars and galaxies with his desktop computer and shared the epic results on Youtube (opens in new tab) and in the Minecraft Reddit community (opens in new tab) Earlier this month and quickly went viral in the process.
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The family-friendly Minecraft is in no way a traditional space game, but the mods implemented and shared by Slayton on Patreon (opens in new tab) seems to place it under the The best space exploration games out there.
“What am I doing with my life?” Slayton said in the YouTube video, which now has nearly a million views. “I’ve been sitting in this tiny, sweaty room for eight hours trying to build the curve on a black hole.”
According to Statista, Minecraft, which was first released in 2009 and brought to a wider scale in 2011, now has more than 141 million active users worldwide (opens in new tab). It’s attracted its fair share of small space mods over the years, like this Baby Yoda in an official Star Wars DLC in 2021. But the universe? That’s a whole different challenge.
“Everyone freaks out about the power and vastness of the universe, which I’ve never really understood that well,” Slayton told the New York Times (opens in new tab). But after six weeks of working on the Minecraft universe and two weeks of creating the YouTube video, he added, “I realized even more how beautiful it is.”
The first problem Slayton encountered was trying to replicate the dark and light sides of planets like Earth in a game that doesn’t even have a light source. He manually inserted light blocks and dark blocks, a process that took days only to find new problems with ringed planets like Saturn. “It took me a whole day to spread and flip all of his rings,” he said in the video.
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Traveling to galactic-scale structures pushed Slayton to his limits as he pursued ventures such as skydiving to see Earth from above and advanced mathematics to accurately recreate a planet’s continents.
He built solar flares, the famous “Pillars of Creation” in the Eagle Nebula, and galactic-scale structures, all to scale and all with numerous engineering challenges to overcome. The big reveal at the end of the video shows a true journey that feels like flying through galaxies.
Slayton has almost 25,000 subscribers on YouTube. For now, he told the Times, he plans to earn a lifeguard’s salary and cut expenses (like living with his family) while continuing to grow his online business.
Over time, Slayton hopes to share stories about Minecraft to engage the community and try out projects like the multiverse, metaverse, and multiple dimensions.
“I want to tell a really entertaining story unlike anyone else in the Minecraft community or just the gaming community has done,” Slayton said. “I want to raise the standards a little bit.”
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