One inventive Minecraft player has boiled down the mechanics, gameplay, and very essence of the sandbox world builder into a whole new, simplified experience. They have recreated the game – in a chest.
User SethBling has posted a video on YouTube showcasing his invention, Playable Minecraft in a Chest, which you check out further down this article. It can be accessed by approaching what looks like a normal chest in the game and opening it up to reveal the user’s creation: “I shrunk down the entirety of Minecraft into a single chest. Sort of.” It works by “taking a slice” of the player’s Mincecraft world and “rendering it into the chest”.
From what we can see in the video, the new mode is Tetris-like in its neat, geometric simplicity, with everything reduced into a nine-by-six square grid, plus an inventory grid below. The player is made up of two squares in the middle, one each for their head and body. You move around the environment by clicking the edges of the chest’s screen – right or left to move about the environment, and at the top to jump. To jump to the side, you click the corners. Simple.
Your landscape is made up of simple tiles packed with sweet cubic representations of what its features and obstacles are made up of. One particularly cute example is a tree – there’s a ground tile below, two wood-block tiles stacked to depict the trunk, and four leafy squares around its top, leaving you in no doubt just exactly what it is. The chest mode even has a blue sky (of blocks) above.
The video shows some gameplay indicating that the chest mode really can be as involved as the original game. You can harvest resources – for example, the creator chops a tree down and stores wood log tiles in his inventory grid, which can then be used in the recreated crafting bench. There are caves to dig down into, waters to navigate, ore sources to mine (if you can craft the right pickaxe, of course), and some other cool features like building a house.
More Minecraft: Check out our Minecraft enchantments guide
If you’re keen to see the new mode in action and find out more about how it works, check out the Playable Minecraft in a Chest YouTube page, which includes a download link in the description. Alternatively, you can check out our list of the best Minecraft mods on PC.