Urban layers

What do you think you could do with one thousand hours in Minecraft? I feel like I've already spent that many hours in the game, and most of it has just been a loop of dying, running to collect my loot, and dying again (darn those creepers!), but maybe you're more dedicated than me? Maybe you've built one of those intricate little villages, or a castle, or a gigantic statue of yourself out of gold blocks. I won't judge! 

French builder mine67 has different priorities. He spent a thousand hours building a map he simply calls "Urban Buildings". But, as you'll soon see, there’s more to this title, because Urban Buildings isn't anything like what we’ve featured here on Minecraft.net in the past. In reality, it's a neat perspective trick – an illusion created out of thousands of layers, each one adding up to make something that's far more detailed than the plain dirt house builds I make in my spare time. But why have me explain it when the pictures below will do a far better job? Just look at them with your eyes!

mine67 says that he first began "building seriously" at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, but the Urban Buildings build didn't begin until May 2022. Inspired by concept art by Edward Delandre and Alariko, which depicts grungy characters and busy urban cities with apartments piled on top of shops on top of markets, mine67 began to sketch out buildings in Minecraft. He quickly realized that traditional Minecraft building just wasn't going to cut it with the level of detail he required.

"When I started the construction, I was forced to detach myself from my usual conception of the build," he says. The final build, he decided, would be viewed at an angle, which meant that he could paint the details in layers – some chains and stone here, flowerpots and layers of glass there, all adding up to make one solid building. 

The process was long and required a lot of testing and checking. "First, I put simple shapes for the placement of the building," he says, "then, based on these simple shapes, I defragmented them to find other more complex shapes that would have the same shape seen from the [player's point of view]." mine67 repeated this process – creating a shape, breaking it apart, adding details, then putting it back together – over and over until it looked just right. Which, I will remind you, took at least one thousand hours.

It wasn't easy. At many points, he wanted to give up completely. "I had to completely relearn how to build," he says. "On top of that, since there was no example of this type of build in perspective, I was constantly in a state of limbo wondering if I would be able to show the potential of this technique." It's always hard to be a pioneer, but it seems to be paying off: mine67 has already seen other builders using his techniques, like the one he calls "chain smoothing". 

Speaking of techniques, I usually like to point out a few neat details about the builds that we show off on the site, but this build is entirely details. Still, let's take a look at some extremely neat techniques that mine67 figured out while building – like the dragon motif made of dead coral on the door of the central building, or the fact that all the windows have accurate reflections, or mine67's clever use of shulker boxes that deserves its own paragraph. 

You see, shulker boxes cast shadows, like most blocks placed on a surface do. But shulker boxes disappear when you move away, and other blocks don't. This allowed mine67 to create custom shadows without adding extra bulk to the design, by placing shulker boxes in all the places that needed shadow. He ended up with 11,876 shulker boxes across the entire build, and you can't see any of them. How cool is that?

More fun numbers for you: because mine67 was building something that required a very specific perspective trick from a very specific viewpoint to work, he tested out the build by taking screenshots from that viewpoint, checking them, and adjusting details accordingly. He estimates that his screenshot total, across the one thousand-hour build time, is around 15,000. Fifteen thousand! I think my computer would simply catch fire.

But was it all worth it? Of course it was! "I'm really proud of it," mine67 says. "It's important for me to go the extra mile, and that's what I've managed to do. I don't think people have noticed yet how many details I put into it!" As for whether or not we'll see more perspective builds in the future, he's not sure. "I would like to," he says, "however, projects with this technique are long, very long, and my computer is dying, so for now I don't know." But with this level of talent and dedication, I don't think we've seen the last of mine67!