A grazing pack of sheep, nestled in between structures. There are shocking moments of beauty too. It feels like nature itself has overtaken this place, and the people died or left due to the Earth's assault. The monsters I mostly run away from don't feel like causes here, but symptoms. Entire districts of this city, which stretches out in all directions, are overgrown nature preserves that are reclaiming the concrete and cobblestone blocks. In Minecraft's minimal block-based world, little details like that go a long away. Some buildings have gaping holes in them, like the concrete has crumbled due to age or erosion. It's worth it.Īs I explore, I start to imagine what caused this world to end up like this. Every now and then, the frame-rate crawls. I increase the sharpness of the shapes, turn up the draw distance as far as it'll go. I turn off the game and install another mod that allows me to tinker with its graphics. Buildings several stories high mingle in the skyline with trees that look like they've been growing for 100 years. I try again, respawning in the same verdant loading zone where I began the first time. I soon come to understand that they've taken residence in the abandoned buildings and manmade caverns of my creation, an understanding that more than once has cost me my life. Almost immediately, I get lost in these tunnels, wandering underground, beset by the sorts of monsters that only come out in vanilla Minecraft at night. Immediately upon loading my underequipped explorer into this space, I find abandoned plazas, vacant homes, and desolate subway tunnels. And what cities they are-sprawling, empty metropolises. That's why I chose to put cities in my empty Minecraft world. But it's hard not to imagine it in those terms, to fantasize about the end of the Anthropocene. When the world changes drastically, as it's already doing, what will happen to the structures we've built? What will happen to us? Probably nothing immediately apocalyptic. But I'm terrified of the natural world, and on some level I expect it to kill me.
Walking through cities, driving down freeways, I imagine the way the world used to be, before human structures fundamentally changed it. On the one hand, I'm constantly pining for nature lost. Living during a time of manmade climate change is to live in a paradox.
Together, they changed the world I generated into an overgrown apocalypse, and I went about the work of getting lost. I downloaded a pair of them: one called Lost Cities, and another called Biomes o' Plenty. I found a whole set of mods that build on the game's single-player Adventure mode to create new types of game experiences inside Minecraft, from dungeon crawlers to roguelikes. I downloaded the Java version of Minecraft on PC, the version best suited to player-centric mods, and I went hunting for ways to make my worlds even more surprising. When I get bored of other games, the allure of that wild lonely wilderness calls out.
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