In a game where you can build almost anything, an 18-year-old spent two months creating and sharing the entire visible universe.
Christopher Slayton, 18, is a longtime fan of Minecraft, a game that lets people create castles, cliffs, and other things using old school blocks. But Slayton doubled down on the effort.
invent black holesAnd the stars And the galaxies using his desktop computer and share the epic results with us on youtube (Opens in a new tab) and in Minecraft Reddit community (Opens in a new tab) Earlier this month, it quickly spread in the process.
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Family friendly Minecraft is not a traditional space game by any means, but Slayton mods made and shared on Patreon (Opens in a new tab) seems to put it between The best space exploration games Abroad.
“What am I doing with my life?” Slayton said in a YouTube video, which has now racked up nearly a million views. “I’ve been sitting in this little room full of sweat for eight hours trying to build a curve on a black hole.”
Minecraft, which was first released in 2009 and moved to a larger scale in 2011, now has more than 141 million active users worldwide, According to Statista (Opens in a new tab). It has attracted its fair share of tiny space mods over the years, like this one Baby Yoda In the official Star Wars DLC bundle in 2021. But the universe? This is another challenge entirely.
Slayton He told the New York Times, (Opens in a new tab). But after six weeks of working in the world of Minecraft and two weeks of creating a 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 aspects of planets like a land In a game that does not even have a light source. He manually placed the light blocks and the dark blocks, a process that took him days, only to find new problems in ring planets such as Saturn. “It took me a whole day to release and curate all of her episodes,” he said in the video.
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The trip to galactic-scale structures pushed Slayton to its limits, as he pursued projects such as skydiving to see Earth from above, and advanced mathematics to accurately recreate a planet’s continents.
He built solar torches, the famous “pillars of creation” in Eagle Nebula and structures of galactic size, all on a large scale and all with many technical challenges to overcome. The big reveal at the end of the video shows a real flight that feels like you’re flying through galaxies.
Slayton has nearly 25,000 subscribers on YouTube. For now, he told The Times, he plans to raise the lifeguard’s salary and reduce expenses (such as living with his family) while continuing to grow his online business.
Over time, Slayton hopes to share stories through Minecraft to engage the community and experiment with projects such as the multiverse, multidimensionality, and multidimensionality.
“I want to tell a truly entertaining story, unlike the way everyone else in the Minecraft community or just the gaming community has done it,” Slayton said. “I kind of want to raise the standards a little bit.”
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