Minecraft is one of those games where you can play every night for two months, crafting intricate castles and communities with your friends, obsessing over ocean temples and finding The End, and then… you don’t touch it at all for six months. Until one day, you see someone doing something cool in Minecraft, and you think, “huh… it has been a while. Maybe I should boot it up again?” And then you play every night for two months. Rinse and repeat.
I’m currently in my six month Minecraft lull, but this incredible project might be enough to lure me back in (if I wasn’t about to go travelling for a month, anyway).
Grazzy is a YouTuber with a focus on Minecraft, and his channel is full of Let’s Plays, tutorials, builds, and testing out new features in the updates. But it wasn’t until really recently that his channel took off, catapulting him from just a thousand subscribers to over 60,000 in a matter of months.
What happened? Zelda happened.
Five months ago, Grazzy posted a video called “I’m Building ALL OF Breath of the Wild in Minecraft (#1)“, and though it didn’t do particularly well at first (especially considering the hours of work he put in), it suddenly blew up, and is currently sitting at over 1 million views. But Grazzy wouldn’t post part two until recently… and it turns out that it was because he had to start over. From scratch. Ouch.
Step one of the process of building Breath of the Wild in Minecraft was importing a height map to import the terrain into Minecraft’s blocky world. Easy peasy! Step two is to build… everything else.
In the video at the top of this article, Grazzy maps out the Great Plateau, Kakariko Village, the Dueling Peaks, Fort Hateno and Hateno Village, plus a few other close-by landmarks. Luckily, a lot of Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule is just vast, open plains and forests, so with the help of World Edit — a third-party software that lets you make big changes easily, including the ability to copy and paste pre-built structures — Grazzy managed to fill a lot of terrain in quite quickly.
Grazzy has a long, long, loooooooong way to go, of course, and the next part will be Zora’s Domain and the rest of the Faron region. The next part, he says, shouldn’t take five months — “only about two of those months was I actually working on the project” — and when it’s done, you’ll be able to download the whole thing into your own Minecraft game.
Which part of Breath of the Wild do you think will translate best into Minecraft? What do you think of Grazzy’s build so far? And do you think this map will be ready before Breath of the Wild 2 comes out? Tell us in the comments!
