A faithful remake of 1986’s The Legend of Zelda has been created in Minecraft. This passion project comes from the mind of creator C1OUS3R, who spent close to a month working on it.
In a video published to his channel, C1OUS3R catalogues his time building the remake from start to finish. At the top of the video, the creator notes that no mods are being used. According to C1OUS3R, this means the project can be made as accessible as possible. Rather than using a Resource Pack available in the game, which users would have to download, “Resources” were used. This method manipulates a native world’s resources to ensure all textures load into Minecraft without any mods.
After that, C1OUS3R spent time recreating the entirety of the overworld from The Legend of Zelda. Everything from the game’s starting point to the rivers, caves, etc. has been remade. Instead of leaving it as a 2D plain, C1OUS3R added 3D elements.
Using an online tool known as Blockbench, C1OUS3R cut down his time recreating the world. “This allows you to build the models and export them as a Minecraft file,” the creator explains in his video. Afterward, C1OUS3R created a model of Link and worked on a number of overworld enemies.
Within the first video published, only the first dungeon has been created. “Maybe if it does well enough, I can revisit this map and make the others.” The video concludes with C1OUS3R inviting a number of YouTubers to play through the overworld and the first dungeon.
Later, on Reddit, C1OUS3R says they will release the playable creation once their YouTube video on the project reaches 5,000 likes. As of the time of writing, the ‘I Made The Legend of Zelda in Minecraft’ video has 2,300 likes. It appears as though the goal may be within reach after only 24 hours of being live, as C1OUS3R is close to the halfway mark.
Minecraft has always been seen as this playground for players and creators to explore what’s possible. However, even after all these years, it’s exceptional to see a project so ambitious come to life.
Xbox has launched a new world in Minecraft Education called Privacy Prodigy, a learning experience that intends to teach youth aged 7-18 about the importance of personal information.
Now available as part of Safer Internet Day, Privacy Prodigy will teach players about how to keep their data safe in the real world while in public, as well as where to store it. Xbox says each of the world’s challenges has been designed to help students and parents better understand who should have access to their personal data. They’ll also learn about how to protect their data and some steps to take should it become compromised.
Privacy Prodigy can be accessed for free in the Minecraft Marketplace in the Bedrock version of Minecraft.
Since Microsoft acquired Minecraft in 2014, the beloved sandbox game has gotten a variety of spin-offs.
This includes the Telltale point-and-click adventure Minecraft: Story Mode, dungeon crawler Minecraft Dungeons and mobile augmented reality game Minecraft Earth.
Now, developer Mojang is taking the property even further with Minecraft Legends, an action-strategy experience. To bring the series into this more tactical space, Mojang has teamed up with Vancouver’s Blackbird Interactive, a studio consisting of strategy veterans from Relic Entertainment (Homeworld). In Legends, the player must unite the Overworld’s different factions to stop an invading Piglin threat.
MobileSyrup sat down with Dennis Ries, executive producer of Minecraft Legends at Mojang, and Lee Pederson, executive producer at Blackbird, to learn more about the game. Together, they discussed the collaboration between the two studios, introducing player vs. player (PvP) to Minecraft, offering a different perspective on Minecraft staples like Creepers and more.
Question: There have been a number of Minecraft spin-offs so far. How did you come up with the idea of an action-strategy one?
Dennis Ries: It really started with a small group of employees within Mojang sitting around talking about what type of genre would be really cool with Minecraft, and strategy kind of rose to the top. At that point, a group of us started going out and talking with different strategy developers trying to understand what type of experiences they would like to make for Minecraft. And Blackbird Interactive — that’s where Legends was born. And it was great because they really brought a kind of new, refreshing take on what what could be in Minecraft and it’s been exciting the whole way.
Q: Once you partnered with Blackbird, what did that collaboration look like, especially since you have Mojang teams in Stockholm and Redmond while Blackbird is in Vancouver?
Ries: That’s a great question because it makes me think way back. It started very small as you begin to try to understand what the concept is. And you have to find the timezone that works best. So fortunately, Mojang and Blackbird are in the same timezone, so we just sort of have to work earlier in the day, and then some of those things can continue in the afternoon if we’re just talking with Redmond. But the collaboration really started more on the creative side and as we got a little bit further down the pike, we started to see ‘oh, now we know we understand the technical route that we want to take.’ We are using the Bedrock Engine and that took a lot of collaboration with our Redmond counterparts; a lot development for Bedrock took place there at the time. And that grew bigger. It’s been a great partnership; it’s been fun to work with Blackbird. You might have an answer that’s completely contrary to me, Lee. [laughs]
Lee Pederson: No, not at all! It’s been amazing. Like Dennis said, it was a pretty small team to start. I’ve been on the project for almost five years — it spun off at the beginning of 2018. I started five months, maybe, after that initial group of two or three people. So I’ve been there, as has Dennis, the whole journey, which has been remarkable. So, a small team really collaborating on the creative. We were given a lot of room to collaborate with the Mojang team, both in Stockholm and in Redmond, which was amazing. It wasn’t like, ‘this is this is exactly what you need to make and here’s exactly how you go ahead and do it.’ There was a lot of back and forth. I think that really shows in the art style of Legends — that collaboration and where it led. It’s a really beautiful game that’s really distinct from Minecraft, but you can really get the Minecraft feeling from it. So I think we brought a lot of the team’s passion for strategy, and our background in strategy and our love of Minecraft. Working with our partners and in both in Stockholm and Redmond — I think we really developed a beautiful product.
Q: One of the things that’s interesting about Legends is it’s not really fact or fiction; it’s just these stories that are told within the Minecraft universe. How did you land on this idea and balance creating something that still feels like Minecraft but takes a bit more creative liberty and plays a bit loose with canon?
Ries: What’s great is we have a narrative director within Mojang named Kevin Grace. And when we think about how to tell the story, we understand all players have their own stories, right? And this is just a story in the Minecraft universe. And I think that was an important part. We’re not out to set some sort of official story for what Minecraft should be. It’s more about letting the players have that journey. So that was how we approached it, and I think that was an important perspective that we brought to the game.
Q: How did Blackbird’s previous experiences on strategy games inform your approach to Legends?
Pederson: While we have a background in strategy and a lot of us have a background in hardcore real-time strategy (RTS), I think we approached this with Mojang less with a rigid framework around ‘we want this to be an RTS.’ We were more like, ‘what are the elements of strategy that we can bring to this that also makes sense within the Minecraft universe, makes sense with the genre we’re aiming for with the action-strategy with your hero within it, and how can we layer that in rather than trying to force a more rigid RTS framework from within Minecraft?’
Ries: One element I will say, from a Mojang perspective, that really impressed us with Blackbird was their knowledge of Minecraft. There’s so much to Minecraft. Even working here, I learn new stuff about it every day, and it’s awesome. But that depth of experience really came to fruition as they would start creating these concepts and bringing them out and trying to explain how they take the strategy experience, and make it a Minecraft strategy game and not a strategy game with Minecraft in it. So it was really fun.
Q: On that note — Lee, what was it like for Blackbird to come in with a love of Minecraft and get to work on a new Minecraft game?
Pederson: It was pretty scary, I have to admit. This is such a huge responsibility. It’s such a big game. It’s such a big team. This is the biggest game that [Blackbird] has ever worked on. So just taking on that responsibility is a big mantle and we wanted to make sure that we were bringing our love of Minecraft and our passion and that we were aligning with the creative vision… So certainly, it’s a bit of a scary thing to take on. Because the community is so big, the love of Minecraft is so, so expansive and wide-reaching, that we wanted to make sure that we absolutely brought our A-game all the time. We want this to be a game that the community loves and embraces and builds on and creates legends on top of what we are building.
Q: Legends is the first time PvP has ever been an official mode in a Minecraft game. How did you decide on Legends being the right time and place for it?
Ries: It was actually early in prototype as we started to sort of think about this action-strategy component in a PvP environment. We created a fun experience — it was like this ‘chaotic fun’ and unlike something we’d seen before in the games that we played. And so we were like, ‘well, let’s explore this further. This could be something special.’ And so we kept at it. And we’ve run into some complex situations; balancing can be difficult with a procedurally-generated multiplayer game. And how do we solve problems to make sure players understand what to do? So for us, how did it start? Well, it started because we had this prototype experience that was just a ton of fun. And then we just kept pushing and got to a point where like, ‘Yeah, this is something we really want to support at retail and let players experience.’
Pederson: And I think we’ve also collectively really focused on campaign and PvP as being two distinct modes that have been moving forward — not in lockstep, necessarily, but we’ve been progressing on and tuning and moving forward on them rather than PvP being a sort of secondary game mode. We’ve really pushed on all fronts on those and really focused on both campaign and PvP.
Q: One of the official Legends videos said there’s less on an emphasis on “fair,” per se, and more on the “chaotic fun” you mentioned. You obviously don’t want it to completely unbalanced and broken, but you do want to keep it loose and chaotic. How do you toe that line?
Pederson: When we’re creating the PvP worlds, we’re making the worlds much smaller than we are in campaigns. So, in campaign, it’s really about exploration and uniting the overworld and the Piglin hordes and approaching battle. Whereas in PvP, it’s a much shorter experience — we’re hoping it’s a 20- to 30-minute experience for each team, each game. So we’ve made the world much more compact, so that you are within a distance of your opponent’s HQ; you’re not having to traverse territory for 30 minutes to try to find where the opponents are. So it’s a small world.
We balanced the resources differently. So there’s more stone, there’s more wood, there’s a different distribution of resources, so that you can leverage your strategy, whether you’re going for an iron strategy, or a diamond strategy, whatever it might be. There’s just a different resource allocation within the world. Because it is procedurally generated, it’s not always going to be the same thing every single time — you’re not always going to find the same balance of resources in every biome, whatever it might be. There are elements of chance within that, but we’ve tuned certain elements of it to make the experience where you’re focused on resourcing and building out your base and attacking your opponent’s team rather than having to traipse around because you can’t find any trees to get any wood.
Ries: And while it may not be perfectly ‘fair,’ which is what I think the comment was from the video you may have seen, it’s interesting to see… sometimes a base may be generated in a less advantageous position than another base, but maybe that base has more beneficial resources closer to the base. And so it’s sort of a trade-off scenario. And the real interesting part is, even though it may not be perfectly fair, it doesn’t feel like it’s not perfectly fair. It feels fair every time. So it’s interesting and it’s worked out pretty well.
Pederson: And then it’s interesting how the procedurally-generated world informs your strategy because you have to react to what’s around you, and where you and where your opponents are.
Q: You’ve mentioned how you want this to be your own unique take on PvP. Besides the procedural generation, what are some of the ways that you’ve done that?
Ries: Taking things from the campaign, which is already unique enough, and then transitioning them to PvP. For example, you collect resources quicker. Also, you do share resources with your teammates, so that takes a lot of cooperation and effort to do — that’s definitely a unique element of the game. Then you take this action-strategy component where you can go off, if you wish, and have combat with another person in the map. That’s fun. Or you can take a strategy where you’re taking a Creeper and very pinpointedly directing the Creeper to go and try to blow up a very specific section of the person’s base. So there’s a lot of unique elements to PvP here I think that we tried to introduce but still stay true to a strategy element.
Pederson: There’s some components from the campaign, but they’re unlocked for the player or given to the player in different ways. They’re able to be acquired or battled for in different ways, which again, adds to the kind of layer of strategy. Like, you can create a Redstone Launcher because you’ve gathered enough resources to create that and potentially hide that behind a mountain and then surprise your opponents and destroy their HQ without them even knowing that that’s what you’ve done.
Q: On the flip side, can you talk a bit about how the cooperative multiplayer work?
Pederson: In the campaign, you can have up to four people in co-op. In that scenario, every single person could be attacking the same base, or you could be attacking different bases, or you could be wandering around resourcing. It’s a different experience in that you’re not necessarily having to all work together for a strategy, which is what PvP is about. You can drop-in and drop-out and help or not help. You can just sort of experience the world and explore and unlock mounts or help in that way, but you don’t necessarily all have to be banding together to handle different areas of the resource gathering defence/offence for a single kind of time-sensitive goal.
Q: Another interesting element of Legends is that you have Minecraft staples like Creepers, which used to be hostile, and now you can command them. When you were making Legends, how did you decide which existing parts of Minecraft that players know as one thing to reintroduce in a different way?
Ries: Yeah, that was fun for us because the idea of taking a Creeper and making them your friend was really foreign to us. And the same is true for the other mobs like the skeletons and zombies. So we just wanted to make sure that the behaviours of the Creeper were the same. So we didn’t want to suddenly have a creeper shoot arrows. And so once we got past the thought of, ‘we’re going to go with the strategy experience and we’re going to take something iconic like the Creeper and make it your friend, and that’s going to be the mobs that help defend the Overworld because everyone needs to work together here,’ then it became just making sure that we’re staying true to what Minecraft is. But the exciting part for us was creatively accepting that Creepers are not an enemy and that was definitely a fun thing to do.
Pederson: Yeah, our zombies have to wear hats, right? But they’re your friends. So it’s within the [Minecraft] framework, but also it’s a legend, so this is how we unite to defend the Overworld and push back the Piglins.
Q: That’s definitely part of the appeal for returning players. But part of tackling a new genre like this is you can bring in new players as well. So for those who haven’t played Minecraft, or maybe just haven’t in a long time, how is Legends inviting and approachable?
Ries: I think it’s very approachable. One of the things we really wanted to make sure is that even if you don’t know what Minecraft is, you still enjoy playing this game. So it’s not like you need to know Minecraft. So you can get in, you can explore the world — just the act of exploring is fun. And it feels fun to run through the world, it feels fun to find a mount and fly through the world or a tiger and just jump and go really far. You find these things. That was definitely fun and that helps it be approachable and kind of draws you in. You learn about the world and then you start to understand how the mobs can help you and that these Piglins are horrible things and you need to fight them and send them back. And it’s this element of easing the player into it that I think [Blackbird] actually did a really great job on.
Pederson: Because it has elements of strategy, it’s a little more complicated than just being able to pick up a very easy game and play it, but we do want to make it approachable. It isn’t extremely RTS, UI heavy, tech trees, etc. So while it’s probably a little more complicated than a kids game, we do have a good onboarding tutorial and first-time user experience. In the campaign, you’re not having to go in and immediately engage with a Piglin base. You can spend as much time as you want exploring around the edges of those and unlocking mounts like Dennis was talking about or engaging with the mobs and bringing them over to your side. So there’s things that you can do if you’re not feeling like you’re ready for the battle yet to get yourself more acclimated. But the experience, both PvP and campaign, is meant to be approachable for a broad range of players.
This interview has been edited for language and clarity.
Minecraft Legends will launch on April 18th, 2023 on Xbox consoles (plus Xbox Game Pass), PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PC.
Xbox has announced that it will be holding its first games showcase on Wednesday, January 25th at 3pm ET/12pm PT.
Under a new format called ‘Developer_Direct,’ Xbox developers will offer deep dives into a small handful of games, rather than the sorts of E3-style events featuring dozens of titles. Windows Central first reported on the show earlier this week.
Specifically, Xbox is promising looks at:
The Elder Scrolls Online (ZeniMax Online Studios) — an unveiling of the 2023 Chapter Update (an ‘ESO Chapter Reveal Event’ will also take place immediately after Developer_Direct)
Forza Motorsport (Turn 10) — we’ll learn more about the next Forza game built from the ground up for Xbox Series X/S
Minecraft Legends (Mojang and Vancouver’s Blackbird Interactive) — an “insider’s look” into the PvP experience
Redfall (Arkane) — “several minutes” of gameplay from this vampire FPS will be shown
The Developer_Direct will be streamed to Xbox’s Twitch and YouTube channels.
Additionally, Xbox confirmed that Starfield, the next game from Todd Howard’s The Elder Scrolls and Fallout team, will get its own standalone show in the future. All of the aforementioned games are set to release within the first half of 2023. Presumably, Xbox will keep with tradition and hold a major showcase in the summer (perhaps at E3) to outline what’s coming later this year and beyond.
As several video game developers and publishers dive into the wild world of NFTs and the blockchain, the studio behind Minecraft has made it very clear it has no interest in the technology.
Mojang Studios made the statement following a request from community members regarding “clarification and transparency” on where the developer stands on the issue.
“While we are in the process of updating our Minecraft Usage Guidelines to offer more precise guidance on new technologies, we wanted to take the opportunity to share our view that integrations of NFTs with Minecraft are generally not something we will support or allow,” writes Mojang.
The developer goes on to say that it wants Minecraft to be a place “where everyone has access to the same content” and that they believe “NFTs can create models of scarcity and exclusion that conflict with our Guidelines and the spirit of Minecraft.”
Mojang released this update following the launch of play-to-earn NFT servers by some players of the popular block-building game.
Minecraft paid homage to Technoblade by updating the launch screen with a crowned pig, a symbol of his famous crowned royale pigman character within the game. Minecraft also tweeted its commemoration of the YouTuber and added the pig, crown, and sword emojis.
We have been trying to find the words, but all of us here at Minecraft are heartbroken over the loss of Technoblade. He meant so much to our community and brought so much joy. He will be missed dearly. 🐷👑🗡️
On June 30th, a final goodbye video, titled “so long nerds” was posted on his channel of over 13 million subscribers. In the video, narrated by his father, he explained his love for fans and their contributions, the effort he made to make the final video and his battle with cancer.
Several other Minecraft community members and YouTubers posted tributes for Technoblade, with fanart being shared on Twitter as well.
To see the new launch screen, make sure to update to the latest version of Minecraft — you’ll notice the difference between the original pig and the crowned pig right away.
After watching 70,000 hours of YouTube videos of Minecraft gameplay, an AI has learned how to play the popular world-building game.
It took me several stressful and painful hours over a few days to figure out how to play the game, while this AI learned to play Minecraft just by watching footage of the title.
OpenAI tweeted a video of its Minecraft AI chopping down wood to make planks and other wooden materials, creating mining tools, and then finding diamonds (creating diamond tools as well) within the game in a matter of a few minutes.
We trained a neural network to competently play Minecraft by pre-training on a large unlabeled video dataset of human Minecraft play and a small amount of labeled contractor data. https://t.co/a2pyBqvLvgpic.twitter.com/XbqtwQSTwU
In a blog post, OpenAI said “With fine-tuning, our model can learn to craft diamond tools, a task that usually takes proficient humans over 20 minutes.” It’s worth pointing out that this AI was able to do 2.5 percent of what it learned in a 10-minute video.
However, this is where it gets a little scary. The AI was also able to swim, hunt and cook based on observations from human player actions while also performing popular techniques like “pillar jumping.”
Notably, the only mentioned Xbox consoles and PC, but given that other Minecraft games are on other platforms, it remains to be seen whether Legends will be as well.
Microsoft has teamed up with Ontario’s Peel District School Board to develop a new world in Minecraft aimed at teaching students about accessibility.
Announced at Microsoft’s accessibility-focused Ability Summit event, the world is called ‘BuildAbility’ and will focus on showing kids how to make their communities more inclusive. Specifically, the world will focus on five barriers: ‘Attitudinal,’ ‘Information’ or ‘Communication,’ ‘Organizational,’ ‘Physical,’ and ‘Technological.’
The tech giant notes that these don’t cover every accessibility barrier that people face, but they’re intended to reflect many common real-world ones. To accomplish that, Microsoft says PDSB educators who helped develop BuildAbility spoke with students about the accessibility barriers they regularly encounter.
In terms of the actual design of the world, Microsoft says it’s divided into three distinct areas inspired by Peel Region locations: a school, a shopping centre and a community corner with a gas station and store. BuildAbility will also feature an open sandbox for educators to create other areas for students to navigate.
The idea is that educators, with the help of a dedicated ‘Educator Guide,’ can lead lessons and provide resources for students to learn about and identify barriers in these areas. With Minecraft‘s extensive suite of creation tools, students will also be encouraged to build and re-build areas to make them more accessible.
Microsoft’s Ability Summit comes one week before Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 19th, which aims to promote the importance of accessibility around the world.
In what is perhaps the most random video game adaptation casting since Chris Pratt as Mario, Aquaman‘s Jason Momoa has been tapped to star in the live-action Minecraft movie.
If that wasn’t odd enough, Napoleon Dynamite filmmaker Jared Hess will direct. The film, which will draw from Microsoft’s massively popular Minecraft video game, is being produced by Warner Bros.
Interestingly, The Ankler reports that Momoa won’t star as Minecraft mascot Steve. Instead, he’ll voice Gabriel the Warrior, one of the antagonists from Telltale’s spin-off game, Minecraft: Story Mode. Gabriel was originally voiced by Dave Fennoy, best known for playing Lee Everett in Telltale’s The Walking Dead.
Otherwise, no details on the adaptation have been revealed. Given that the film is set to be live-action, it’s possible that it will feature human actors alongside CGI characters à la Pokémon: Detective Pikachu or Sonic the Hedgehog.
In any event, it makes sense that Microsoft would be interested in a Minecraft adaptation, as the sandbox building title is the best-selling game in history. The company has slowly been expanding into adaptations of its franchises, with Halo, a TV series starring Canada’s Pablo Schreiber, premiering on Paramount+ last month.
