This Minecraft recreation of a Japanese townscape is surprisingly detailed

An image posted by a Twitter account called Misosiru City has been drawing the attention of social media users in Japan. At a glance, you might think it’s just a picture of a town in Japan, but it’s actually a Minecraft world.

Misosiru City is a project put together to recreate a fictional Japanese city in Minecraft, and the image in the above tweet contains a screenshot showing a part of what the project entails. If you take a closer look at the roofs and river, it becomes clear that everything is constructed out of cubes. But there’s something else you may have also noticed. Everything appears to have been made with Minecraft’s vanilla blocks.

In Minecraft Java Edition, there are resource packs that can change the appearance of blocks. A wide variety of these packs have been made, with some containing textures to give the game’s blocks a more modern look. However, at least based on what can be seen in the image, Misosiru City doesn’t rely on these resource packs and instead looks to be a town made with just vanilla blocks which seems worthy of special mention.

From the parks set up below the apartment buildings to the temple placed right in the middle of a residential area, they’ve managed to stay faithful to modern Japanese urban design with just vanilla blocks.

The project also drew attention in February of this year with the below tweet.

The Misosiru City project is being created by multiple people. You can get a closer look at the work of each member by searching for the “#味噌汁市” hashtag. It’s when you see the work up close that it really feels like a Minecraft world made with what appears to be only vanilla blocks. For example, here’s a recreation of the famous Japanese gyudon (beef bowl) chain Yoshinoya as made by Misosiru City project lead @momo6599.

The restaurant’s limited time offer posters have also been recreated using banners. In Minecraft, banners can be customized with banner patterns and dyes to put designs on them. In this case, it looks like the banner uses a red dye to get a brick pattern with a green border around the edges.

Additionally, the below tweet from February shows birch planks being used to represent braille blocks on the sidewalk.

There are also other projects besides Misosiru City, such as Sayama City and Tomisaka City, that are recreating modern Japanese cities in Minecraft. Moreso than construction in Minecraft, these projects all have a scale that seem more like urban planning. Each of the Twitter accounts for these projects gives a closer look at the different homes and buildings that inhabit their worlds. It’s strange but you can somehow almost feel the history of these fictional towns when looking at them.

Written by. Nick Mosier based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2022-10-31 22:49 JST)