It’s Earth Day Again!

The world is a very strange place these days with the majority of us staying indoors to make the outside world safer for all the people with essential jobs. I don’t know about you, but my couch is the center of my world right now. I say this like it hasn’t always been, but you have no idea how terrible my posture is so I feel like I’m going to get away with it! 

Since we currently have a lot of time to sit around and think, let’s take a moment to direct those thoughts to the outside world. Specifically, the one that we want to return to when this storm has passed. We’ve read about some of the unexpected effects that quarantine has had, such as swans returning to the canals in Venice, which are crystal clear these days. Since we don’t want to resort to quarantine as a solution for environmental issues, we’re going to need some other ways to take care of our planet. I’ve heard we only have one so we should probably get on that. 

This is probably the point where you’re asking yourself “Sure, this is important but what does this have to do with Minecraft?”. A valid question to which I answer “Everything can be connected to Minecraft if you try hard enough”. Luckily, I don’t need to try very hard in this case which is why this assignment landed on my desk.

Minecraft is all about building new worlds. Sure it’s also about flirting with Endermen and trying to pet ocelots (each attempt will fail, trust me), but a big part of the game is about exploring biomes and building a world you want to play in. Some people even use Minecraft to design worlds they want to play in in real life, like this neighborhood in Ethiopia that came together to turn a polluted area into a park. That’s pretty impressive, I can’t even control the builds on my own server and I’m the only one on it! 

Last month, Eurogamer brought another very impressive build to our attention, namely PippenFTS’ 1:1 scale build of the entire world. Yeah. So we do have a second planet, only it’s not livable for real people. Stop looking so smug, Steve.