We have seen some incredible builds in Minecraft during its 15 years. The amount of time and effort builders put into these things is incredible. I used to be pleased with my own little world I have had going since the beta came out originally, but some of the things online put it to shame.
With renewed interest in the 1980s nuclear catastrophe at Ukraine’s Chernobyl power station over the past few years since the incredible HBO drama about the incident came out, then we have had a renewed interest in the area because of the ongoing conflict in the region it has sparked several iterations of Chernobyl’s iconic buildings in Minecraft, but nothing we have seen is anything like what a builder posted to the r/chernobyl subreddit recently.
User Adaptive-Monke779 showed off their incredible work via a series of screenshots and a downloadable link on their Discord server which has taken two years to almost complete, putting in over 4,000 hours of work scouring original floor plans of the site to create a 1:3 scale model of the plant as it was before the accident in April 1986.
Adaptive-Monke779 said: “The plan is to progress the story of Chernobyl through different maps, the issue is, I need to create a baseline map, to begin with, and it’s already too hard to decide when I’m done. This current map is actively being updated but if someone downloads it, they have access to all the future worlds and their respective updates.”
It seems then as if there is going to be a lot more than the 4,000 initial hours going into this project.
Big Bang Theory
Some of the plans, all of which can be found on the internet date back to some five years before the disaster, meaning you actually have the chance to walk through a Minecraft version of the actual historic building near to the city of Pripyat.
There are versions of the map available for both Bedrock and Java editions of Minecraft and you can get your hands on it by downloading it from the linked thread above.
Even beyond being a lot of fun to wander around, there is a huge educational value in projects like this and it is important to archive them for the future.