Dragon Scale

People often imagine their own worlds, full of great heroes and evil villains. They doodle designs for futuristic cities in the margins of their schoolbooks, or draw maps plotting out every inch of the fantastical lands that they picture in their heads. Some even make up whole new languages, like Tolkien, the weirdo. Whatever happened to him?

These days, people can now also use all kinds of computer programs to bring their unique fantasy worlds to life. Computer programs such as, to pick an example totally at random, Minecraft!

One person who took the opportunity to turn his imaginary world into electrons and beam them across the internet was dennisbuilds. “I started playing Minecraft with my friends back in the 1.8 beta,” explains dennisbuilds. “But I only started building in summer of 2014, before I was just doing some survival action and goofing around.”

Let's see where 'goofing around' gets you!

Once dennisbuilds started building, he found it hard to stop, as a look at his other projects shows. After creating several designs in Minecraft, he came up with the world of Wonderland Santuary, an island where people who've fled their old home can build a new civilisation. Not content to let the idea gather dust inside his head, dennisbuilds decided to create the land he'd dreamt up.

“It's easy to get into it and start creating stuff right away,” dennisbuilds explains, when asked why he used Minecraft to bring this land to life. “Not to mention you can create whatever you want or have in mind. That's also why I mostly do fantasy builds, because there are no rules. You can create whatever you want. If you strive for realism you can't just have things floating in the air or a dragon flying right next to your building. ”

They might not be realistic but who wouldn't want a few dragons flying around their house? Only peasants, princesses and the more flammable kinds of livestock. Of course, it wasn't easy getting all the dragons and other fantastical ideas from his head to the screen.

“Sometimes it took quite a long time to finish one structure," confirms dennisbuilds, "especially because I prebuilt them with only one or two different blocks to get the right shape. After having the shape done, I could concentrate only on the details for the structure and the block palette. That way if I built something I didn't like, I wouldn't lose that much compared to if I did all the detailing and texturing as well.”

As you can see from these pictures, all that hard work paid off! For anyone out there thinking of building their own worlds, "do whatever you want to do and take your time," Dennis advises. "Practise a lot."

“Get feedback. Let your friends have a look at your stuff and listen to what they have to say.” If they say bad things, just get new friends! Or, er, learn from their feedback. We guess.

Got your own fantasy worlds you want to build? You can get inspiration and see more of dennisbuilds' majestic creations worlds by following him on Twitter here!

Renders by Iskilla, Splekh, Hypacletus, LNeoX and Joebricksy.