Minecraft player spends over 1800 hours to create Yharnam city from Bloodborne

One of the best parts of Minecraft is the ability to create almost anything. The different block colors, textures, and shapes can be combined in incredibly unique and interesting ways that make it possible to explore the limits of your imagination. This has made Minecraft an incredibly popular game for fans of other series, such as FromSoft's Souls games. Many express their love by making fan art for other games in Mincraft in the form of builds.

YouTuber Potomy, a fan of both Minecraft and Bloodborne, who recreated the entirety of Bloodborne's Yharnam, is a great example of just how passionate some fans can get. According to them the project had taken more than 1800 hours. This is evident in the level of detail, as every timelapsed clip featured showcases another incredible build coming to life.

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Minecraft's Yharnam City

A screenshot of the map from under Yharnam's Great Bridge (Image via Potomy/X)

The actual building explained by Potomy isn't necessarily complicated, just tedious. Much of the recreation process involves slowly and methodically recreating a building, just to double- and triple-check it both in game and via a map editor tool, explained in greater detail below.

The build consists almost entirely of different varieties of gray stone blocks. Many of these are custom built by Potomy for the project, but the gothic architecture and colors should still inspire some very interesting Minecraft house designs.

The map also appears to be built on a superflat world. This makes sense, as finding a large enough flat area to make a structure this large is nearly impossible, even on one of the best Minecraft seeds for building.

However, there is one huge issue for the map: there are actually two completely different maps that represent the same physical area. Potomy explained that the view upwards from the Tomb of Oedon should feature a bridge and a cathedral structure. However, the view from up above does not show off the Tomb of Oedon in-game. It instead has a view of a cylindrical stone building.

Having to reconcile two physically different maps within one physical space is a huge issue for any attempt at recreation. It essentially means that sticking true to one perspective makes the map invalid from another. Potomy's solution for this was actually quite ingenious.

Rather than forcing a solution in the moment, Potomy instead stepped around the problem, focusing on the back alleys and other buildings of Yharnam. This essentially forced a natural solution to the issue based on the rest of the city's construction.

Throughout the video Potomy showed off custom blocks, textures, and entities created to allow for greater detail in the environment than blocks are able to create. Not a ton of time was spent on any individual custom block or texture, but they were all phenomenal. One of the areas shown off that best exemplified this is the cemetary, which featured four custom tombstones as well as trees and blocks.

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The tools used

Attempting to reference buildings in-game never ended well for Potomy (Image via Potomy/YouTube)

Potomy explained in great detail just how annoying Bloodborne was to work with as a reference in the video. They mentioned that trying to look at buildings in-game was difficult, as, just like with Minecraft's hostile mobs, there are enemies all over the place in Bloodborne. This makes it almost impossible to stand still and carefully examine areas.

However, a tool called DSMapStudio allowed Potomy to load up the entire map to look at freely. While this might seem like the perfect solution, Potomy explained that it also has its issues. Namely, none of the shaders work. Similarly to how Minecraft's best shaders made lighting look amazing, Bloodbornes shaders control how lighting, shadows, and some textures look.

This means that a secondary tool needed to be found to let Potomy look at buildings in the game to see how they're supposed to look with the proper lighting. Thankfully, with some help, Potomy was able to get Bloodborne's freecam working properly. Due to Bloodborne only rendering buildings in view, this works as a nice middle ground between safety and ease of reference.

The final tool employed by Potomy was debug mode, which allows for much quicker movement speed and even the ability to move freely through walls and vertically.

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It's not just a map

Two of the more than 30 mobs included in the Bloodborne mod (Image via Mojang)

While the map is already a mind-boggling creation and one of the best examples of a Minecraft megabuild out there, Potomy revealed in the video that the map is only part of what they've been working on. There's also a fully-fledged Minecraft overhaul mod intended to bring Bloodborne's iconic enemies and bosses to Mojang's blocky masterpiece.

This mod isn't Potomy's work alone; it was made by a small team. This team has currently created more than 30 different models for characters in the game. They have also made more than 130 different animations based on those from the game to make these modded characters feel like their official counterparts.

However, that's not the extent of the project. Potomy also mentioned that one of the team's members, Bardo, has been single-handedly working on an engine that allows for real-time in-game modding by importing models made from Blender or Blockbench straight into the game. Needless to say, this would revolutionize Minecraft's mods and allow for a second modding renaissance.

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This project, on its surface, is a wonderfully faithful recreation of Bloodborne's Yharnam. However, it is actually much more, due to the team's incredible custom mod. And of course, the potential impact of their engine should not be underestimated either. Apart from this, the custom cinematics made to show off the map and mod are also amazingly well done.