A trio of clever crafts from this new French build team!
BEES! Gaaah, they’re huge and climbing up the walls with their honey-slicked knees!
Ahem, sorry about that. I’m way too absorbed in the beautiful and only slightly terrifying sights of Myrthar – The Bee World. If you head inside this Minecraft build’s many honeycomb fortresses you can even spot tiny bees buzzing around as they create honey. It’s adorable and, er, very sticky. Oh, I can’t seem to get my hand off this wall...
Well, since it looks like I’m stuck here forever, I might as well tell you about the people who created this place. French build team Quantics Build only officially formed in March 2019, with founding members Ariux, Agraïc, Royalfils2, Volcom40, Folos, and Huntos.
In just a few months they’ve expanded their team and already put together an impressive portfolio of brilliant builds. I guess you could say they’ve been busy as a bee, but I’m worried the giant bees surrounding me won’t find that funny, so let’s not.
Myrthar is the result of Quantics Build admiring the complex, hexagonal structures that bees use to shape the inside of their hives. The team claims their building style is “inspired by the physics and architecture that surround us in real life.”
You can see some of that inspiration in Quantics Build’s very first project, PetroCity, an over-industrialised human dystopia. Smoke billows from the chimneys of the factories in this claustrophobic cluster of buildings, and you can almost taste that sweet, sweet pollution.
Further down you can see railways, government buildings, and dams all crammed together. Can you spot the trade ship coming into dock and the cargo truck waiting to enter a warehouse?
Quantics Build explains that rapid industrialisation in PetroCity has fractured its society. The rich are contaminating the atmosphere with their smoggy industries at the top, while “the poor people are restrained to the worst areas, in villages next to polluted water,” Agraïc tells me. “It’s not a big project, but it is incredibly dense.”
Agraïc reckons this is the project Quantics Build has shared the most, mixing everyone’s different styles. But how do they decide what to build in the first place? “Most of the time, decisions are made democratically, as we want all of our members to be able to give their opinion,” Agraïc explains. Once a project has been decided upon, they split up into smaller groups, which means everyone is working on a build they’re passionate about!
This process is how Titus – Return of the Undead came about. It depicts a legendary warrior, Titus, climbing out of his muddy grave, ready to fight again – except time has rotted his flesh away, so now he’s just a skeleton, and whoever heard of a skeleton attacking you in Minecraft? Oh, wait…
But don’t be frightened! After all, deep down we’re all skeletons, right?
This project was led by WazerFighter, a later addition to Quantics Build who mostly specializes in creating organic structures, like creatures, insects, and people. “To build my organics, I mainly use Fast Async WorldEdit and VoxelSniper for the basic shape,” WazerFighter tells me. “I then use Arceon for the details and the cloths. But I'm also working a lot by hand.”
Once the build was complete, render artists Volcom40 and Ariux moved in to give it the finished look you can see now. They helped make the bones of Titus shine a bright white, and if you watch the gif created by Eonli, you’ll see that the light casts playful shadows across the red cape flowing in the wind.
While Quantics Build encourages different members of the team to work together, they also make an effort to work with other build teams from France, and even the wider international community. A great example of this collaborative work is Volcom40’s render art on this deconstructivist building, which was made by fellow French Minecraft build team GBKD. This is only a small slice, too, as Volcom40 tells me that “GBKD wants to create something bigger using this deconstructivist style.”
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Quantics Build’s future projects, assuming the giant bees don’t get me first. Wish me luck!
Renders by Ryer, Ariux and Volcom40
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