Page Turner

I own a lot of books, but after seeing Fantastic Book, I’m worried they might all be defective. You see, reading them opens gates to other worlds only in the most metaphorical of ways, while this new project by wizard Dark_Cosmos does so quite literally.

Conveniently, you don’t even have to read it. Just open it up, and there it is, a tiny but incredibly detailed diorama emerging from the pages like from an enchanted pop-up book.

A burning campfire sits at the center, smoke rising vividly from its flames. Around it, there are traces of an absent wanderer. A heavy tome, adorned with a rune (actually the logo of Dark_Cosmos’ team) lies next to the fire. There are supplies, too - barrels, flasks and lanterns, surrounded by mushrooms, flowers and crooked trees. A bird swoops into the scene and towards a juicy moth that has been drawn to the fire.

Where has the wanderer gone off to? It’s dangerous to leave an open flame unattended in a wooded area, but who knows, heroes have been known to leave in a hurry, answering the call of adventure. The toppled barrel, wine gushing out, certainly seems to suggest as much.

Perhaps somebody has been abducted by monsters mere moments ago, and the heroes are chasing after them off-screen (on the next page perhaps)?

What alchemy lies behind a creation like this? Who’s the wizard who conjured this scene? That’d be the appropriately named Dark_Cosmos, of course, a French builder who’s been crafting in the game for six years. He’s certainly learnt a lot of the dark arts in that time (in his crafting style - hopefully not in real life please).

“A friend actually tempted me to create a map like this one,” Dark_Cosmos tells me. “I think of it as a portal to a utopian world.

“I chose this scene because every adventurer needs a little encampment if they want to survive. One thing that motivated me was how I imagined the atmosphere of the map might be once the project was finished.”

Wherever ideas may come from, Dark_Cosmos is big fan of creativity. “I enjoy these things a lot. You can do great things in Minecraft with inspiration and imagination.”

Of course, you need more than imagination to create a project like this. Some elbow grease is just as essential. “This project took me three days,” he tells me, along with an incredible number of blocks. “The biggest challenge was the smoke - it was very difficult to make it look realistic.”

That remind me: don’t light a campfire in the middle of a book. Rarely goes well.