The potential of Minecraft as a creative tool is massive, with creating art being the primary focus of the game for many players. Through some relatively recently added blocks, builds inspired by the steampunk aesthetic are becoming a popular subject for builders.
Minecraft, despite its age of over ten years, is kept alive through regular updates and ongoing community support. Its most recent content addition released just days ago, introducing a terrifying new mob and an entire new biome type for players to explore.
A video by builder Omegacannon shows off a majestic steampunk-style quadripedal home, with the legs carrying a structure made mostly of copper and wood. The ladder coming down the side and lantern hanging off the front gives the build a whimsical quality, with a small garden in the back adding a nice colorful protrusion from the walls of wood. It would already be impressive, but the builder went even further and manually animated the legs, making them physically move.
In the replies, Omegacannon explains that the clone command was used with command blocks to animate the walker's legs. Twelve frames of animation are hidden somewhere in the world and copied underneath the walker using command blocks in sequence, so the legs all move. Creating the frames would have been time-consuming to get right, but the result is an impressive effect not seen often in Minecraft builds that lends the walker a unique touch.
Many parts of the walker's aesthetics are made possible by blocks that were added to the game relatively recently, and would have been much more difficult to convey otherwise. Copper blocks are only a few years old, but have a great texture for conveying a metallic surface, something that barely existed in the game before their introduction. Every new block added in updates has great potential for enhancing aesthetic builds in Minecraft, and ongoing updates mean the possibilities will only expand.
Naturally, a house walking on four legs would draw comparisons to the classic animated movie Howl's Moving Castle, so appropriately the soundtrack edited into Omegacannon's video is the main theme from the movie. Howl's Moving Castle also stars a steampunk-style walking home, with some similar construction motifs like its four spindly legs and dome-shaped living areas. Interestingly, it was initially assumed that the movie would fail in regions outside Japan, so its inspiration reaching all the way into the 2020s shows its lasting impact.
Minecraft is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.