Message from the Stars

Don’t you think that being contacted by aliens would be incredibly cool? I think it would be incredibly cool, even if they sent us a very creepy message. You may be wondering exactly what this has to do with today’s Minecraft build, so I’ll let creator Eric explain.

“This printer is actually a futuristic industrial factory called CMYK Co., which prints spaceships.” (Off to an absolutely excellent start here.) “Suddenly, one day, they received a mysterious transmission from the other side of the universe.”

As you can see, those aliens seem to have been playing Minecraft themselves, because their strange message reads “You may not rest now, there are monsters nearby.”

Yes, the warning that no one wants to hear when they’re settling down for a nice nap. Unless you just love to slay monsters, in which case I imagine it’s a nice activity to wind down before catching those Zs. But even you might not like the kind of monsters that technologically advanced aliens want to warn us about from across the universe.

Eric’s printer-factory was made for a competition with the theme “space-time continuum,” run by the Builder’s Refuge community. “I essentially worked from left to right starting with filling large chunks with blocks then slowly detailing and carving to create the structure,” he tells me. Like one of those old-timey sculptors working with marble.

“It was a lot of back and forth looking at images of machinery and sci-fi concept art to see what fitted in the build,” he says, but of course, without a real giant printer to copy from, he had to get creative. “I designed the structure with a story in mind, asking ‘how would this system work in that universe?’”

For example, if you look really closely, there’s more than just the printer itself in this spaceship factory. Underneath are rows and rows of flowers, grown to make the dye they need for the coloured ink. I bet it smells gorgeous down there!

As well as being inspired by the theme, Eric wanted to use a tool created by another developer known as Arcaniax, which can turn text into Minecraft blocks. “I wanted to use it in a build where it would make sense to have text, and the first thing that came to mind was a printer,” he explains.

And of course, given the choice to write anything, he went for the iconic “there are monsters nearby” phrase. From there the story was born. “I wanted to recontextualise it as a mysterious alien message. I think it creates an interesting sci-fi horror element to the build.”

Aliens trying to send us a warning is indeed an interesting and creepy spin on a giant printer, but I would definitely have had it print the Minecraft.net website, so that I could read it while I play!

We’ve spoken to Eric before, about a beautiful island village capped off by a giant statue. It’s very different from the clean mechanical complexity of this build! I asked what makes him keep trying new things. “The fact that the idea is new is what drives me to make them a reality,” he says. “I’ve been a builder for many years and seen countless amounts of builds, ideas, and colour palettes, so I've learned to look into boring objects or things you wouldn't think could turn interesting, and reinterpret them into a story.”

So next time you’re stuck somewhere boring, just think about how you could turn your surroundings into a fabulous, maybe slightly spooky Minecraft build like Eric’s!