Minecraft recreation of r/place looks beautifully disorienting

This year’s edition r/place is over. Reddit’s huge communal internet mural project has now been completed. Started on April 1, 2022, it brought together internet strangers with a common goal — filling a massively blank canvas, pixel by pixel. The usual ensued: lots of fighting over real estate for making memes, logos, and fan art. But one Redditor decided to track the project by recreating it in Minecraft, in a feat of code and engineering. The result is stunning and disorienting.

Redditor NickG365 made this mural come to life in the latest 1.18. 2 version of Minecraft. Every pixel represents a tile within the game. The result is the same as how it was placed on Reddit.

In a Reddit comment, NickG365 explained a bit about how it was done. (To be clear: These were not laid down by hand!)

I started by taking a look at how Reddit itself shows r/place in the browser to get an understanding of how it works. After that, it was just a weekend project’s worth of setting up servers to run it on and programming the Minecraft plugin. Reddit sends updates to the plugin, and the plugin receives them. However, the plugin knows what color is which block of the game.

NickG365 had initially designed a flat version of the mural, within Minecraft. It’s almost like watching a plane land and seeing the fields, subdivisions and houses around you.

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. It remained the one time the massive social experiment was conducted, until another version was kicked off this year. In 2017, NickG365 had also made a live-updated version of the mural in Minecraft.