Industrial Insect

A giant bug zipping across the sky is quite the sight – but even more so when it’s actually a great big metal aircraft! The Flight of the Bumblebee is a project created by four brilliant builders working together, just like busy bees!

Leading the team was Squity, a seasoned builder that is no stranger to being featured here on Minecraft.net – he's the bee's knees, if you will. He tells me that he noticed a contest on Planet Minecraft for builders to create some kind of flying contraption and got really excited to join with some friends.

It took them a while to figure out what they wanted to build, however. “We had lots of ideas, so it took quite some time to fine tune our concepts,” says Ranie, one of the builders that Squity worked with.

In order to make the world far, far below, she started with some desert rock and then added on dunes, sand, and some rough vegetation that could withstand the hot, dry weather. “I then took it to World Painter to apply the colouring,” she says.

It certainly fits with the story behind the build, which was made up by Jossie. Apparently, the bee is carrying humans escaping the effects of a deadly meteor shower, so no wonder the ground looks so unfriendly to live on. Jossie even wrote some pretend logs by the captain of the ship for extra flavour, and was the one who settled on the Bumblebee name.

But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t hard at work building, too! “Jossie is the organic-man,” Squity tells me. “He did an awesome job with the legs and the back of the insect where he pays attention to the overall look of the build.”

“We had a reference image to go by for the insect, but we kept constantly changing or going back and adding to it,” Jossie explains.

“Ranie is awesome with structures,” Squity says next. “He was helping me getting the mechanical parts done. He pays attention to the smallest details, which makes him a great builder.”

Ranie doesn’t confirm or deny this, but he’s full of praise for his friends. “As a team, we worked buttery smooth. We gave everything we could for the best result possible.” He does say that creating structures like this is his favourite thing to do in Minecraft though: “this part of building makes me full of joy.”