Spill The Tea

Minecraft players are recreating the world at a 1:1 scale on the popular video game, and Singaporeans are partaking in this massive project by constructing all man-made structures, virtual brick by virtual brick.

Cool. Where can I view this?

Key tourist attractions like Marina Bay Sands and Singapore Flyer are being built as seen in a video livestreamed on YouTube on Saturday (26 September).

Reddit user ‘Unfair-Bike’ shared on that the team had managed to create most of the Central Business District (CBD) area, from Shenton Way to the Singapore River, as well as Gardens by the Bay and Marina Barrage in a single week.

Can anyone join in?

Yup. Under the Build The Earth (BTE) project launched by player PippenFTS, this reconstruction of the planet cannot be undertaken alone. Hence the organisers have called upon Minecrafters from all over the world to select a city or territory and build infrastructures within it as close replicas of the actual buildings. Map editors will then stitch each area together to form the collective masterpiece of everyone’s work.

That’s impressive.

The project is considered the largest and most expansive build project to ever have been attempted in Minecraft. A world map on the BTE website reveals what has been built thus far, so viewers are able see all the places these gamers are working on.

A group formed on Discord, an online meet-up space for collaborations, have accumulated 131,000 Minecrafters who are interested in contributing to BTE. The lockdown situation in many cities may be a major reason players are attracted to the project — one such gamer commented, “Literally a week into the quarantine and we’ve already replaced the outside world.”

The virtual project, which doesn’t yet have a completion date, hopes to “unite all of humanity’s greatest achievements into a single Minecraft world”.