Constructing Seattle, brick by online game brick: Metropolis rises in Minecraft as a part of immense mission

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day. But hey, Seattle was built in a month! At least a large part of it was – in Minecraft.

An impressive feat from a collection of geeks interested in Microsoft’s block-by-block video game can be seen in new videos that hit Reddit this month. The 1: 1 restoration of the city is part of the larger “Build the Earth” project, in which Minecraft builders plan to recreate the entire planet and all of its locations.

This company is run by a Seattle area YouTuber who offers PippenFTS and prefers that name for this item. PippenFTS told GeekWire that he grew up in Washington state and now lives north of Seattle.

The 31-year-old has been playing Minecraft since 2013 and said he worked in retail before pursuing his dream of being a full-time professional pianist. The pandemic shattered that dream, so he turned hard full-time around Build the Earth and being a YouTuber.

CONNECTED: Block The Date: The Minecraft Graduation Ceremony features the impressive construction of the UW group in Seattle

PippenFTS ‘YouTube channel has nearly half a million subscribers, and its videos are a fun collection of comments and clips on Minecraft builds, including Seattle.

In March, he called to see if builders could assemble 1,000 buildings on the Seattle Minecraft server. They did and some more.

His longer video below is a dizzying depiction of the work that went into building from Columbia Tower to Lumen Field. Time-lapse and aerial views in-game show progress as the city rises brick by brick.

And because construction never seems to stop, in real Seattle or Minecraft Seattle, there are cranes everywhere.

“It’s hard to measure how many hours,” PippenFTS said of the time he and others spent building the city.

He said he spent 256 hours on the first 100 buildings himself and built another 60 buildings on the “1,000 Buildings in Seattle” video, increasing his time investment to an estimated 410 hours. With a large error rate, the group is charged a total of around 3,018 hours for the construction of 1,179 buildings.

“The two hardest parts were getting everyone to motivate and personally maintain the stamina to be active every day and grind to the best of your ability,” said PippenFTS.

PippenFTS said he had worked downtown in the real world every day before the COVID-19 pandemic and was most satisfied with his work in the game at Columbia Tower, which took six to ten hours a week to build.

A view of downtown Seattle in Minecraft, looking north with Smith Tower in the foreground. (Build the Earth Screen Grab)

At least he entered the real version of the city. Reddit user WigitMigit, a 16-year-old student named Spencer, was the one who posted about the project on Reddit’s channel r / Seattle and shot the highlight video at the top of this story. He’s never been to Seattle and lives across the country in Maryland.

“I certainly learned a lot about the city through this process and have always loved the Pacific Northwest,” said Spencer, who did most of the work for Build the Earth teams.

“We used Google Maps and Google Earth as a reference and we have a mod that essentially generates the elevation data of the world on a Minecraft map,” said Spencer. “We build our buildings on the site that the mod creates.” In a previous article, PippenFTS explained how the two mods make it possible to exceed Minecraft’s normal terrain height limit.

The Amazon Spheres in Seattle’s 1: 1 Minecraft build were created by a user named Eno.

Spencer has played Minecraft for more than eight years and it was through the game that he developed an interest in architecture that he hopes to pursue in college and as a career. The Seattle construction only adds to his desire to visit the city in person.

For someone who lives close enough to the city to actually see and experience it, PippenFTS is still in a space between what is real and what a video game is.

“Last weekend we drove through the city center on the way to the airport [Seattle] on the freeway, ”he said. “It was surreal, I felt back on the server and built it in Minecraft. That’s how heavily the experience spends so much time with the buildings in the game and in real life and then shifts from one to the other. “