Build... A Circle?

Tutorial Difficulty: 9/10

This is madness. This is an unholy creation. This is... a circle. In plain, unmodded, vanilla Minecraft. Many have tried – by combining minecarts, or by making a circle so big that you can't see the blocky bits when you zoom out really far – but no one has ever made a circle as circular as this one.

Technically, this video is a tutorial, since it features all the steps to make this affront to Minecraft God, but I'm going to warn you: it's extremely complicated and involves a lot of commands that I won't pretend to understand myself. In fact, the easiest part of this tutorial is probably the bit where you build a square out of sand, and I'm not convinced I could even do that without help.

But if you're still here, and you're up for a challenge, then here we go: how to make a circle in a game entirely made of cubes. Don't say I didn't warn you.

For Mysticat's circle, you'll need a lot of armour stands, a lot of sand (or whatever block you want, really), and some command blocks. To put it in layman's terms, you'll need to "clone" an armour stand in a circle around the command blocks, each one with a block as its head. Then you set it up so that all the armour stands face inwards, and... boom! You have a circle.

There's a bit of fiddly stuff, where you have to make sure that the blocks don't touch one another (or they'll start flickering black) but it's all explained in the video, and I'm not good with command blocks, okay? I don't understand this wizardry!

Mysticat decides to use the circle to make a lovely little pool, but there are as many uses for "large circle" as there are lines of symmetry in a circle, which is to say, infinite. You could put animals in it as a cool new-agey pen. You could turn it into one of those '70s conversation pits. You could build it out of black concrete so it looks like a giant vinyl record, although I don't know why you'd want that.

At this point, you're probably thinking, "surely, this can't be the first time someone has figured out these arcane steps to summon a big round?" I thought the same thing. You won't be surprised to hear that my YouTube recommendations are about 50% Minecraft stuff, and a lot of it is people building safe houses and medieval cottages – not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's certainly not the first time anyone's ever built those things.

But this video, at the time of writing, has fourteen million views. The sequel, "How To Build A Sphere In Minecraft", already has three million views. This craziness is new, exciting, and horrifying, all in equal measure. Minecraft will never be the same again.