In a game where you can build nearly anything, one 18-year-old spent two months creating and sharing the whole observable universe.
Christopher Slayton, 18, is a long-time aficionado of Minecraft, a game that allows people to create castles, cliffs and other objects using old-school blocks. But Slayton supersized the effort.
He created black holes, stars and galaxies using his desktop computer and shared the epic results on YouTube and in the Minecraft Reddit community earlier this month, swiftly going viral in the process.
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The family-friendly Minecraft is not a traditional space game in any sense, but the mods Slayton implemented and shared on Patreon appear to place it among the best space exploration games out there.
"What am I doing with my life?" Slayton said in the YouTube video, which is now pulling close to a million views. "I've been sitting in this tiny, sweaty room for eight hours trying to build the curve on a black hole."
Minecraft, first released in 2009 and taken to a wider scale in 2011, now has more than 141 million active users worldwide, according to Statista. It has attracted its fair share of small-scale space mods over the years, like this Baby Yoda in an official Star Wars DLC in 2021. But the universe? That's another challenge altogether.
"Everyone freaks out about the power and expansiveness of the universe, which I never really got that much," Slayton told the New York Times. But after six weeks of work on the Minecraft universe and two weeks creating the YouTube video, he added, "I realized even more how beautiful it is."
The first problem Slayton encountered was trying to replicate the dark and light sides of planets like Earth in a game that doesn't even have a source of light. He manually put in light blocks and dark blocks, a process that took him days, only to find new issues at ringed planets like Saturn. "It took me an entire day just to space out and tilt all of its rings," he said in the video.
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The journey to galactic-scale builds pushed Slayton to his limits, as he pursued ventures like skydiving to see the Earth from on high, and advanced math to recreate the continents of a planet accurately.
He built solar flares, the famous "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula and galactic-scale structures, all to scale and all with numerous technical challenges to overcome. The big reveal at the video's end shows a true journey that feels like you're flying through galaxies.
Slayton has almost 25,000 subscribers on YouTube. For now, he told the Times, he's planning to collect a lifeguard's salary and reduce expenses (such as by living with his family) while continuing to pursue growing his online business.
Over time, Slayton hopes to share stories through Minecraft to engage the community and to try projects like the multiverse, the metaverse and multiple dimensions.
"I want to tell a real entertaining story, unlike how anyone else has done it in the Minecraft community or just the gaming community," Slayton said. "I kind of want to up the standards a bit."
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