Zen of the Build

There's so much wisdom that Buddhism can teach us: Try to live a life of peace and prosperity. Don't put too much value in material objects. Never dig straight down because there's lava down there you dolt. Wait, that might be one of ours. Good advice though!

Still, you don't need to possess eternal wisdom to see that Life of a Buddhist by Team Vaeron is a beauty of a build. Buddhists preach a life without envy (probably) but it's hard not to be a little green when you learn this was made in just 24 hours, for Buildcon 2017.

"We had the idea of doing a 24 hour build battle against the amazing Shapescape team for quite some time," explains Team Vaeron founder, Rafessor. "So we got in contact with Vanessa [Buildcon founder] and asked if they would like to host the contest. They agreed on organizing it as an event at the Buildcon and that’s how it all came together." Look out for an interview with Shapescape on Minecraft.net later this week!

Team Vaeron started in 2013, when Rafessor founded the building team "for a server network I was owning with two other people. We decided to continue as a building team when that server went offline, started getting active on social media and are now working with a big group of servers and YouTubers."

Clearly a talented bunch, what makes Minecraft their building tool of choice? "Well for me," explains Team Vaeron member, Guavacado "it is one way I can express my creativity and infinite imagination with the building aspect of the game, which probably makes that my favourite part about it."

"In my eye Minecraft isn't the kind of game you can find everywhere," says xZinjoo, another Team Vaeron member. "[It's] something that acts as a completely new way of expressing creativity and creating art in a really simple way. Minecraft gives me a way of expressing artistic thoughts in a simple way, and that's what makes me use it."

So why a Buddhist build? "The theme given for the build battle was “Life”, and we had the idea of depicting a lifestyle to fulfil the theme," explains Lastbanan, another member of Team Vaeron. "It had to be something that everyone is able to help on and we had to consider that we only had 24 hours for building what we planned. Later the same day I reminded myself that I recently had a project for school about life and religion."

"My teacher had a very interesting presentation about the central thoughts of Buddhism and I started researching about the religion and looked at Buddhist temples for references to complete the concept. We also have a Buddhist member in the team, and he helped with the building process and gave some ideas, but we didn’t originally came up with the concept because of him."

In an average 24 hours in the Mojang offices, we manage to raid the fridge, send about three emails (four on a good day), and then sneakily play Minecraft for the rest of the day until the boss lets us go home. Basically, we achieve nothing. But Team Vaeron took only a single day to deliver their build. "Fixing our sleep schedules after everything went down also was quite a challenge for some of us, hehe," admits Rafessor.

"I’m pretty proud of the overall atmosphere the build creates and how everything fits together that well. It doesn’t happen too often that everything looks like it’s made by the same person when a large group of people actually worked on it, and it just worked out perfectly on this project."

Heck, we're so inspired by this work ethic, we're gonna try and send five emails today. Right after our nineteenth trip to the fridge. Get inspired yourself by enjoying more Team Vaeron builds here, following them on Twitter and their YouTube channel here!

Header/tile image rendered by Droolie.