All Conquering

“I’m a big sucker for medieval things,” says Stefan ‘Monsterfish’ Krein. He’s responsible for the Conquest resource pack - and part of the team behind the related Conquest Reforged mod - which transform the textures of Minecraft to create a world of ancient beauty. It’s been used in a number of the builds we’ve featured on this site - allowing builders an expanded palette of naturalistic landscape textures and manmade structures that offer a rustic, old-world charm.

“The inspiration I had for this style was the game Stronghold,” says Stefan. “It was a medieval RTS developed by Firefly Studios. I played that for way too large a part of my life, and I really fell in love with the aesthetics. It had the realistic touch of how the world really was back then, but had a comedic factor to it - a mixture of the romantic and the funny - to soften it up around the edges so you didn’t feel totally disgusted by what happened actually in medieval times. Those are all aspects of the Conquest pack. We have a realistic approach, but it’s also stylised - it just looks ‘better’ than reality, to a degree.”

Perhaps one of the most striking demonstrations of the pack’s naturalism were these comparison shots Stefan created, in which he recreated beautiful photos using the Conquest textures.

However, one of my favourite builds using Conquest does indeed use the textures as originally intended: to explore the medieval world. It’s called A Castle: Rise and Fall, and it’s one of Stefan’s own projects. It tracks the construction of a medieval castle across time in meticulous detail - before seeing it under siege, destroyed, left derelict and then, much later, a ruin in the modern day.

It’s a rather brilliant and informative build, that uses Minecraft to demonstrate at least three or four separately fascinating things. First you see first-hand the practicalities of building such an ambitious structure in the days before forklift trucks and motorised cranes. And then you understand the purpose behind the castle’s design - its forbidding presence; its defensive capabilities - before witnessing its failure and how the remaining structures slowly collapsed. Oh, and it looks pretty, too. It’s worth taking a look at Stefan’s full gallery, here.