Star Trek’s Enterprise-D in Minecraft

Last summer, I discovered an up-and-coming game that on the surface looked boring, but proved me wrong within minutes of playing. I’m talking about Minecraft, a game that utilizes pixelated blocks like no other, offering people the chance to build something incredible, either solo or as a team. Though still in an alpha phase, the game has attracted thousands (more like one hundred thousand) of fans since its launch, making it a clear winner long before its official launch.

I admit that I don’t play the game all too often, but it’s mostly because I’m too lazy to build anything interesting. Instead, I tend to go to the various available servers and see what others have been building, and most often, I’m simply blown away with the talent of some people. If you’ve never played the game, I highly recommend you do, if not for any other reason than to look around at some cool creations.

One of the coolest surfaced earlier this week though, the Minecraft “Enterprise-D” – that is, a Star Trek ship modeled completely inside of the Minecraft gameworld. The result, whether you like Star Trek or not, is simply incredible, and likely to bog down most any PC if you look up at it. I’m not sure how many blocks the entire model is comprised of, but it’s a spectacular result regardless.

Ars Technica wasted no time in interviewing the builder, Joshua Walker, who admitted that there is more than meets the eye. He didn’t hand build this exact model, although he did start on one before. Due to a hard drive crash, he decided to find a more unique, and less tedious way to get the job done, and that he did, through clever tricks with images being imported into the game engine.

Even so, this is a sight to behold, and chances are, this method is going to be used to import other cool objects by other people. To me, though, nothing can compare to the hand-made works of art found in some of the servers!

“I originally took all the decks from the Whitefire plans and layered them in Gimp. I then re-sized the plans to a 1 pixel = 1 meter scale.” He then reduced each deck to a two-color bitmap exported as a layer, which he considers the most tedious part of the project. “After that, the level editor for Minecraft sucked up each layer and spit out what you saw. When I wandered around on the ship for the first time, I was so pleased it worked out so well.”