A skilled Minecraft player recreated Venice’s iconic canals, utilizing the help of texture mods to add extra realism to their build. Thanks to its sandbox gameplay and a variety of game modes which cater to different play styles, Minecraft continues to remain highly popular with fans 12 years on since its initial release.
Minecraft mods remain an excellent and easy way to add realistic textures and lighting to the game, providing creative players with many ways to obtain the exact aesthetic they are looking for in their in-game world. While Minecraft RTX version adds ray tracing to a select number of showcase worlds, it's only available for those with higher end graphics cards. Ray tracing-capable hardware remains out of reach for many players, but ray tracing mods, texture packs, and resource packs are the only way Minecraft players with more powerful PCs have been able to spruce up the game's visuals without official support.
Reddit user Eonli0 shared some screenshots of their recent build, in which they attempted to recreate Venice, Italy’s canals in-game in another example of how far Minecraft builds have come in 10 years. Their creation features an aqua canal set between two stretches of buildings, with a red brick bridge in the distance cutting out a path for theoretical pedestrians. A gondola sits parked to one side of the canal, and sitting on the boat’s bow is a red-ribboned canotier hat, a staple of a traditional gondolier’s uniform. Wooden window shutters and iron wrought balconies filled with greenery line the sides of buildings, beautifully contrasting against the warm tones of the walls. The stunning scene was created with the help of mods including Chocapic13’s shader, which gave the canal waters a realistic look, and Cocricot’s mod, which provided extra items for the architecture.
While vanilla game builds can be equally impressive, mods like these add a little extra realism, with one player recently creating a Minecraft glass mirror effect that looks like an optical illusion. Redditors were stunned by Eonli0’s Venice build, and many commented that they had mistaken the screenshots for an actual picture of the tourist city's canals at first glance.
Minecraft continues to be an excellent canvas for creatively inclined players, as the easy-to-use creative mode gives players the freedom to build structures as small or as grand as they like without many limitations. The game recently received new blocks to help players with their creative endeavors in the form of the Caves & Cliffs: Part 1 update, with even more content set to be added in the future with the eventual release of Minecraft's Caves & Cliffs: Part 2.
Minecraft is available on all platforms.
Source: Eonli0/Reddit