Minecraft YouTuber creates playable version of the game inside a single chest

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A teleporting armor stand makes it all work.

The creativity of the Minecraft community knows no bounds. Not content with the usual 3D version of the game, YouTuber SethBling has created his own, playable 2D version set entirely within a Minecraft chest, complete with crafting, jumping, and flowing water.

As you can see in the video above, blocks from the game are replicated inside the chest, and you can walk left and right across the world, breaking blocks as you go. You even have a separate inventory—a chest within a chest—where you can store blocks you've mined from the world and craft new tools.

What's essentially happening is that a slice of the normal Minecraft world is being rendered inside the chest. When you move the player inside the chest, an armor stand teleports around the world. Breaking blocks in the chest breaks them in the world, too. It's all done via a /loot command that figures out what blocks are around the armor stand and then renders the correct, corresponding block into the chest. 

"It's a very limited system, but it's enough to look pretty cool," says SethBling in the video, and I can't help but agree. He says he might expand the system with new crafting recipes and, potentially, even mobs. The system was inspired by this Reddit post, which is basically the same idea but doesn't seem to have any moving parts.

If you want to download the world within a chest, you can do so here (clicking that link will immediately download a .zip file). If you're hopping back into Minecraft in 2019, check out our handy Minecraft update log to see what's new.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.