This player recreated the entire universe in Minecraft

And it’s insanely gorgeous

Every once in a while, I see something a player has created on Reddit or Twitter, and it makes me have faith in video games again. I’ve been feeling a bit run down after the tumultuous Overwatch 2 launch this week, but then I saw something so beautiful, it made me remember what a beautiful medium games can be: a Minecraft player recreated the entire universe in the game. Yeah, it’s just as beautiful as it sounds.

User u/ChrisDaCow uploaded a video of his work to the Minecraft subreddit, among other sites, earlier this week, and the post has amassed more awards than I’ve ever seen on Reddit before. The build features a black hole, a nebula, the whole solar system, and a super cluster.

ChrisDaCow also made a whole vlog documenting to process of the build, which I find fascinating as someone who hasn’t played more than a handful of hours in Minecraft. He says one of the most useful tools that made the entire build possible is the fact that you can “paint with light” in the game (something I never knew was a thing), which allowed him to recreate how light actually works in space.

He also had to scale the blocks way down to fit everything into one Minecraft world, and Chris even breaks out some math to make sure to get the scale of Saturn’s rings just right. I’m seriously impressed by how much effort he put into this whole thing, and I get the feeling it’s going to go down as one of the all time greatest Minecraft builds of all time.

Not gonna lie, I usually have a good deal of existential dread rattling around, but seeing our universe depicted so beautifully and with so much care helps me see things in a new light.