It just doesn’t make sense. Until you fullscreen the image above and peer closely, noticing the flat tones on the buses and the blocky curve on the roadway, you wouldn’t expect it to have come from a game more commonly used to build eye-hurting failure hovels from ugly cubes of cobblestone. But alas, this is a screenshot from Minecraft, and it is a view over the city of Greenfield, possibly the most impressive build project I’ve seen to date.
Based closely on Los Angeles, and built to 1:1 scale so every block represents a cubic metre in real life, Greenfield has been the work of more than 400 people for the last nine years. There are ports. Skyscrapers. Suburbs. Slums. Chemical plants. Railways. There’s everything, in fact, you might expect to find in the metropolis it’s based on. Managed by a committee of ten people, and built by legions of architects, it’s now grown to a size of 20 million blocks, making it the largest Minecraft city build that exists at present… and it’s only 20% complete. Let’s take a look.