One Minecraft player elected to showcase how a mix of custom shaders, graphical mods, and texture packs can yield ultra-realistic results. Even with the vanilla version of the game, the unique simplicity of this iconic sandbox allows players to create marvelous, fully-realized projects such as building a functional MS Paint program within Minecraft. It is a game that embraces unorthodox builds and thinking outside the box, and the Minecraft community has eagerly pushed the envelope in every conceivable way over the years.
Within this intricate tapestry, Minecraft's shader packs represent a cultural cornerstone of the game's modding community. A good shader will make the voxel landscape come alive in breathtaking fashion, though often at a great burden to the user's hardware. How far a shader will upgrade Minecraft's visuals varies largely between the packs – with some being capable of achieving photorealistic looks. Today's example screenshot of a recreated real-life city uses one such shader pack.
User u/rudarbtce1974 shared a picture with the gaming community on Reddit that showed the Pacific Northwest city of Seattle, complete with its iconic Space Needle tower, possibly recreated in-game as part of Minecraft's Build The Earth project. At first glance, the buildings and skyscrapers appear unmistakably realistic, but the illusion falls apart quickly once the gaze sets on the Space Needle itself, as well as the noticeably blocky trees surrounding it.
One thing remains undisputed: the shaders do most of the heavy lifting. They elevate and transform the way an awe-inspiring (if not entirely accurate) Minecraft build of Seattle's skyline is interpreted and rendered. The clever use of a wide field-of-view also helps in selling the illusion as it creates the appearance of a gradual curve to the blocky buildings around the edges of the picture.
This is hardly the first time a Minecraft player has tried to pass off a screenshot of an urban landscape as real life, and there is a whole dedicated sub-culture within the community that specifically collaborates to design hyper-realistic, meticulously accurate renditions of existing cities, such as the 3,000 players recreating New York City in Minecraft.
In the 1.18 version of the game, city builders rejoiced as Minecraft's height limit was expanded by a total of 128 blocks. Though the limit likely won't be tampered with in the patches to come, Mojang seems invested in providing better and more varied building blocks to Minecraft players. With Minecraft Live 2022 being held on October 15, fans may just find out what the future holds sooner rather than later.
Minecraft is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
