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Minecraft Barcraft is a thing, and it’s happening right now

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The WCS Season 2 global finals have dutifully rumbled into being at Gamescom, and scores of faces are glued to a huge flatscreen TV. On the screen, as in bars like this one all over the world, somebody is taking a Protoss base to pieces and a man named Apollo is shouting. But in front of it, the clientele are totally unique: pirates and creepers, some totally invisible. Sat shoulder to shoulder, their heads merge together to form several long vertical columns.

This is the Barcraft phenomenon, as viewed from Minecraft.

The server in question was made possible by Buildlight’s mind-twistingweb browser mod for Minecraft, which StarCraft Redditors found required little tweaking to adapt for Twitch streaming. A team of like-minded individuals have worked to build a fitting venue ahead of the event, and the results can be seen live here.

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The astonishing setup comes replete with fireworks, fired at the point of GG:

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And you can join in. To get started, you’ll need to install Flash 11, Java 32 bit(direct link), Minecraft 1.6.2, Minecraft Forge(direct link)and Minecraft Web Browser(direct link).

“Do not skip any steps,” writes organiser Auclair. “It may screw things up if you do. Also, you must be using Windows to use the Minecraft mods, they will not work on Mac, or Linux.”

Once you’ve logged into Minecraft’s launcher, you’ll want to select the Forge profile from the bottom-left corner of the box. Boot up the game, head to Multiplayer and click ‘direct connect’ – from where you can hop straight to the server using the IP address 76.31.41.235 and port number 25565.

Gosh, people are clever, aren’t they?