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400 people spent a decade building a 1:1 city in Minecraft♬ We built this city on robust project management standards ♬
♬ We built this city on robust project management standards ♬
It just doesn’t make sense. Until you fullscreen the image above and peer closely, noticing the flat tones on the buses and the blocky curve on the roadway, you wouldn’t expect it to have come from a game more commonly used to build eye-hurting failure hovels from ugly cubes of cobblestone. But alas, this is a screenshot fromMinecraft, and it is a view over the city of Greenfield, possibly the most impressive build project I’ve seen to date.
According to NJDaeger, one of the Greenfield server’s five admins (he brought the server to my attention withthis poston Reddit), Greenfield’s 11th iteration - Version 0.5.3 - is about to be released on the construction team’sPlanet Minecraft page, where keen tourists can download the current build and have a mooch around it without a care in the world for lockdown. If that sounds too much like hard work, you can be shown around on YouTubehereinstead.
It’s not just an empty shell, either. According to NJDaeger, almost every building has a fully detailed interior, with regular inspections - yes,inspections- to check everything has a functional inside when a build is released. These quality assurance exercises are just one facet of a project management effort that seems almost unfeasibly competent: there’s a whole workflow system for laying out new districts, construction codes to keep style and quality consistent among the swarm of builders at work on the city, and regular staff meetings over discord to co-ordinate the mammoth effort.
The result of all this is a city that doesn’t just look as realistic as a minecraft city can from ground level, but from the air, too - it’s got a layout that’s totally convincing as the result of professional city planning. Just look at the following image, captured from Greenfield’sdynamic map, and tell me you wouldn’t dream of creating something like this inSimCity 2000:
Of course, Greenfield has had its crises, NJDaeger told Reddit, where despite multiple safety measures, the city has gotten borked. “We’ve had one incident where all our methods of backups [..] failed, which happened last year,” he explained. “Someone accidentally removed all oak logs on about 70% of the city.” And who was the culprit of this wanton destruction? “It was one of our admins. He was using his laptop and was teleporting around the map doing some stuff for our train system, and he accidentally set one of his positions to one end of the map and the other was on the other end. He thought he was editing a small area and in fact, it was a monstrously large area… that took some teamwork to fix, lmao.”
Still, with daily backups, coreprotect, and offsite backups taken every few days, the city seems as safe as it can be. Even so, to my knowledge, Greenfield has yet to face the Minecraft server equivalent of Godzilla:a dad who’s angry because you overslept.
