Minecraft renditions of BioShock Infinite‘s cloud-cruisin’ Columbia are a dime a dozen nowadays, but I’ve never seen one as embellished as this. Just look at the colors in that skybox, at the arcing sky rails, at the towering statuary, and at all the fussy little details like flower boxes beneath windows — and those windows with their exquisite tracery, and the way the designers used subtly different colors to block-texture the buildings and walkways.
Then check out the green vistas way way down below. You’re not supposed to be able to see all that, what with Columbia being a cloud-hidden city and all, but it works here. In fact it’s all the more impressive knowing this block-homage to Irrational Games’ metaphysical opus actually lives up in the air, somewhere.
That somewhere would be The VoxelBox, a free-build, creativity-focused community with its own Minecraft texture and mod packs whose members attempt to craft ridiculously ornate homages to various worlds — or entirely new ones from scratch. The community’s server doesn’t support survival or PvP play, and the FAQ notes “there are only very rarely any monsters, and it’s nearly impossible to die.” Which explains how you wind up with the bandwidth to create something as ambitious as this.
You can see all of the images stacked on imgur here.
[VG247]
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Write to Matt Peckham at matt.peckham@time.com