This hugely impressive Minecraft mod lets you build all manner of functioning vehicles, including planes, combine harvesters, and even airships

Viewed from below, an airship glides through a valley in Minecraft — (Image credit: Microsoft, Simulated Team)

It takes a lot for a Minecraft mod to impress me these days, such is the abundance of third-party addons and expansions for Mojang's digital LEGO set. So it says a lot that the trailer for the recently released Create Aeronautics mod made me catch my breath a little bit. This huge addon lets players build and pilot fully functional vehicles across the game's angular landscapes, allowing you to construct anything from offroad vehicles to enormous airships.

An addon for Minecraft's already substantial Create mod, Create Aeronautics has three key strands that facilitate its vehicular construction. The first is what the modders refer to as "Simulated", the fundamentals of the mod that facilitate vehicular construction. These include new block types, redstone components and other necessary tools, like the ability to use slime to stick different components together. It basically gives Minecraft the kind of contraption-building tools you'd see in a game like Besiege.

The second element is the eponymous aeronautics section, which introduces the key components necessary for creating flying machines. These include propellor bearings that let you create prop planes and helicopters, burners for building hot air balloons, and special floating blocks designed to create lift. Alongside aerial vehicles, tools like propellers will also let you build powered boats and ships, meaning you're no longer restricted to using that implausibly fast wooden rowboat.

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Create Aeronautics Mod Release Trailer - YouTube

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Finally, there's the "Offroad" section dedicated to creating terrestrial vehicles. This allows you to build engines, suspensions, and that rarest of phenomena in Minecraft's world, round(ish) wheels. As the name suggests, the main purpose of these tools is for creating all-terrain vehicles, but as shown in the trailer, you could also use them to build combine harvesters to mechanise your crop farming.

Create Aeronautics is available to download now. As the title suggests, you'll need the broader Create mod installed to play it, as well as Sable, a mod that adds a physics pipeline to Minecraft and allows groups of blocks to interact with one another.

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Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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