Minecraft recreation of r/place looks beautifully disorienting

This year’s edition of r/place, Reddit’s massive communal internet mural project, has wrapped. Started on April 1, 2022, it brought together internet strangers with a common goal — filling a massively blank canvas, pixel by pixel. There was much fighting for real estate to make memes, logos and fan art. Redditor One decided to keep track of the project by replicating it in MinecraftThis feat of engineering and code is possible. It is both stunning and confusing.

This mural was created by Redditor NickG365 in the 1.18.2 update Minecraft. Each pixel in r/place represents a tile in the game, and the result mirrors how they were placed in real life, on Reddit — those super tall stacks, in the video below, tell the story of territory disputes over pixels.

NickG365 gave a brief explanation of how the process worked in Reddit comments. This is to be clear, these were not put down hand-in-hand!

To get a better understanding of the process, I first looked at Reddit’s own r/place display in the browser. After that, it was just a weekend project’s worth of setting up servers to run it on and programming the Minecraft plugin. The plugin connects to Reddit’s servers and gets the same updates that they send out to everyone else, but knows which color should be which block in the game.

NickG365 initially created a flat version within the wall mural. Minecraft. It’s almost like watching a plane land and looking out at fields and subdivisions.

Reddit’s r/place was carried off for the first time in 2017 — founded by Josh Wardle, whom you might know as the creator of Wordle. This was the only time that the huge social experiment was carried out. A second version of the project was launched this year. NickG365 also created a new version of the mural that was updated in 2017. Minecraft.