It seems like I should be desensitized to the impact of large-scale Minecraft builds after all these years but just when I think I've seen it all someone goes and starts posting screenshots of a build that looks right out of Bloodborne. Super skilled builder Potomy has spent four months on this project so far and still has bigger plans yet for turning it into a custom downloadable map, they tell me. Even if I didn't ever get to play inside this build, it's making my eyes pretty damn happy just to look at.
For this map, Potomy has designed massive Gothic structures based on some of the big Bloodborne buildings you'll remember looming over you in Yharnam: the Astral Clocktower, the Iosefka's Clinic hub, and the huge main gate of the Cathedral Ward.
Like Bloodborne itself, I'm shocked by just how gorgeous something so gray can look. Potomy's Bloodborne-inspired buildings are all enormous, using depth to add variation to its monochromatic color palette of stone, cobblestone, and iron bar blocks. Like other huge Minecraft builds, the scale that Potomy is working at allows for some really intricate detailing on each building. Paired with the custom textures that Potomy is working on and some great Minecraft shaders (they're using the BSL shaders) these screenshots just bleed spooky atmosphere.
- The co-creator of Dark Souls' most ambitious mod resurfaces to inform me that Blighttown, source of my nightmares, was cobbled together with '10 bits of wood'
- This Minecraft creation blots out the sun for the villagers below, they surely praise it as God, but we know it really to be a functioning 32-bit computer with 2 kB of RAM
progress_so_far_for_the_city_grant_us_gothic from r/Minecraft
heres_from_a_different_shot_practicing_with_photo from r/Minecraftbuilds
Potomy's customized texture pack is doing some lifting in a couple of these cases. The iron bars in a couple shots, for instance, are way more tall and detailed than in vanilla Minecraft. Same goes for the whorls of those lamp posts. Most of it is pure Minecraft though. The giant circular windows are built with lots of stone brick stair pieces and old fashioned ingenuity.
The timelapse videos on Potomy's YouTube channel are particularly illustrative of the process. You can spot the points where they're designing bits of architecture by hand before using the WorldEdit mod to copy and replicate different sections. Even with the help of that tool, Potomy estimated that they'd spent 76 hours on the project as of two months ago. If they've managed to keep pace since then, they're well past spending 100 hours on this feat.
There's plenty left to go, though. Potomy tells me that they're planning for this build to eventually be an adventure map with a focus on combat. They eventually want to make the project available on the Bedrock marketplace where they've published lots of other creations already. This is still Minecraft, mind, so it's not going to hold a candle to the possibility of Bloodborne on PC, but it sure could be a very cool tribute.
