Look at this nice wooden axe I made!

I built a house in Minecraft once. It was the sweetest house you’ve ever seen, and it made everyone who knew me jealous. Through careful architecture and planning, I carefully stacked dirt block on top of dirt block, until eventually I had a trendy, compact, and eco-friendly building.Of course, that level of skill meant the house was only just big enough to stand in, but still I feel my dirt shack was a testament to my building prowess.

And then Kotaku comes along and shows off someone’s work-in-progress concept of a fully functional copy of Pokemon Red in Minecraft to try and make Fort Dirtsworth look less impressive. Through the use of literally thousands of command blocks (blocks which allow the use of scripting without mods), all of Kanto has been lovingly recreated out of wool and stone.

How to render an entire world on a tiny screen in Minecraft is completely beyond my knowledge of the game, so I am just going to quote what creator Magib1 has said about the project on reddit:

There’s a physical representation of the map in spawn chunks in which each block corresponds with a texture… When the player clicks, a reader armor stand moves and clones the row of new textures behind the display. Display armor stands then detect the block type and stick the corresponding texture on their head before moving. The player model is just swapping between a static walking and standing texture.

In order to store easily accessible information I’m also creating a sort of physical database underneath the block map… For example, the first layer under the map represents whether the block can be walked on or not (green wool = yes, red wool = no). Separate levels with this type of binary information can be created for doorways, surfable tiles, signs, etc. This cuts down on the command blocks needed, as lag is a very serious concern for the map.

I hope you understood that, because I sure as fuck didn’t.

There’s still work to be done, of course. Magib1 believes the core gameplay will be recreated within a few months. At the moment, the game’s world is explorable and there is a fully functional Pokédex. Work is now being done on an item bag and general optimisation.

It’ll be really interesting to see how the game’s battle system and AI are handled through command blocks. My guess is black magic, fuelled by the blood of a thousand innocent Cubones as it pours through the empty skull of an Electabuzz.

Still, if they need a rad dirt shack building, they’re more than welcome to get in touch.

Someone’s Making A Working Copy Of Pokémon Red In Minecraft [Kotaku]