RICHARDSON, TEXAS (April 12, 2022) – Ben Cressman, Assistant Head of Events at UTD Esports, shares how Alex ‘Scorpio5′ Nguyen, a senior biochemistry major here at UT Dallas, recreated UT Dallas’ campus in Minecraft down to two meters of accuracy on the official UT Dallas Minecraft Server, which can be joined after getting whitelisted via the official UT Dallas Esports Discord Server at mc.utdallas.edu.
First, a quick disclaimer: most of the campus is actually accurate down to one meter, but due to the limitations of Minecraft, some freedom had to be taken in the construction of some of the detailing in several places.
I’m sure you, like me, when I first sat down to interview Alex, are wondering the obvious: why would he do this? More than 50 hours of work for a project which was not for a grade, a financial incentive, or a portfolio, is a pretty big undertaking for a senior. So, naturally, that was my first question, and his response was rather simple: it started as a small pet project that just didn’t stop getting bigger. His inspiration was fueled mainly by a desire to create a spectacular first impression when players log on to the server, as he was unsatisfied with the typical ‘Minecraft spawn’ that the previous iterations of the server had used. As such, there was only one reasonable course of action: recreate the entirety of UTD itself in Minecraft.
His first step was to begin researching any other attempts at the creation of UTD in Minecraft and consider how best to approach the problem. He immediately discovered Polycraft’s attempt at the UTD campus, and while impressed, decided he wanted to do something on a significantly larger scale.
This project, as Alex had envisioned it, would require significantly more than just eyeballing campus or glancing at the campus map (found here), which is unfortunately stylized to be more visually appealing, but less accurate, meaning that it was effectively unusable here. As such, he turned to some more professional tools – originally Google Maps, but when that wasn’t enough, he was inspired by Microsoft Flight Simulator to using actual LiDAR scans. Yep, you read that right – he went and found LiDAR scans of Richardson and cut out a map of UTD, which he then used in conjunction with a ruler and a 0.3mm mechanical pencil, enabling him to manually map out campus. As one block in Minecraft is equivalent to one meter in real life, he was able to do a simple conversion, and from there some calculations to map campus in three dimensions (yes, even the elevation is accurate).
This was, however, just the beginning; now that he had a layout of campus to work with, he had to actually make the buildings, which was, unsurprisingly, an incredibly long and tedious process. Most of this was comprised of finding reference images online, and for what he could not find online, wandering around campus and taking the reference images himself. He was then forced to find a block that most accurately represented the color and texture of whatever material was used for each building, which was an incredibly tedious and frustrating process in itself. If you’ve ever seen someone taking pictures of random sides of buildings on campus, Alex was likely the culprit.
And now, Alex’s worst nightmare: interior design. As someone who specialized in ‘mega builds’ (which means exactly what it sounds like: absolutely enormous structures), the interiors were easily his least favorite part of the process, especially since most interior detail takes place at a scale of less than one meter. This is where most mistakes occur, as some things are simply impossible to perfectly replicate due to Minecraft’s limitations. For example, in the Student Union dining area, the entire area is actually half a meter higher than it should be; this is due to the fact that building on a 0.5 meter ‘half block’, or slab, in Minecraft results in what is placed on it floating, which would, of course, ruin the immersion.
In this entire process, Alex has learned quite a bit about UTD’s history, its architecture, and especially small places that just aren’t quite right. One which was especially painful for Alex to replicate was the intersection between the Student Union and the Founder’s Building, which is actually off by exactly one meter itself. Faithful to the build, he chose to accurately recreate this too, but describes it as still bothering him to this day.
I asked for his final thoughts and Alex concluded with this: firstly, he wants to expand campus even further in the future but is done for the time being. Secondly, some advice for aspiring builders. Building at this level is not wildly difficult, it just takes practice. He got here by emulating builders that he admired, recreating their styles, and trying to build similar projects – so he suggests that you practice, practice, practice, and look at what the experts do.
If you want to check out UTD’s campus in Minecraft, you can get whitelisted via the UTD Esports Discord Server and join at mc.utdallas.edu. Alex can be contacted via his Discord, Scorpio5#5781. Some of his other recent builds are shown below.
