Minecraft: The Little Things Can Be Amazing, Too

Is that House? Built in Minecraft? Well, time to cross out one more item off my bucket list! As inspiration for this week's Minecraft-themed Tuesday Giveaway (enter here to win an awesome Minecraft Pickaxe!), I present a roundup of amazing things found in Minecraft.

The great thing about Minecraft is the sheer amount of diversity and creativity in even the smallest of details. We were reminded of this a few days ago when a new player joined our server, Irish. He's been building for a week and he was able to make something that is very simple, yet stands out: stairs.

In our server, most of the stairs look like this:

It's okay, they serve their purpose, and well... there is not much to be done. Stairs can either be built with wood or cobblestones. Irish, though, created a flight of stairs that made everyone in the server take notice.

No one had deviated from the basic staircase width, nor the usual materials, whereas Irish went the other way building his grand staircase. The fence lining the ceiling gave it a very nice texture and an Asian inspired look. The stairs themselves are made of a mix of stone and stone slab, and work the same way as simple stairs, yet look more uniform and beautiful. The width of the stairs also makes you feel like you're walking up to something special, and as you walk up the stairs the width of the stairs changes.

Inspired by this, we went online to search for more creative projects on YouTube and we found a wide birth of creativity, from playing with the basic mechanics, to music, and all the way to real life mash-ups. We hope you enjoy the next few videos, we certainly had a lot of fun watching them. The videos are very random, but that's the beauty of the game—inspiration can come from anywhere.

This first video reminded me of Braveheart for some reason. If you are going to build a castle, this would be the ultimate defense:

This program came out a few months ago that allowed you to build what Kinect saw inside the world of Minecraft. Now that the official Kinect SDK is out, maybe this will become more accessible for people to try out!

What happens when you try the same principles of Minecraft in real life? Well, be thankful he didn't try to kill a pig!

A really famous skit of what Minecraft would really be like if it was real:

You are not alone! This Companion mod creates a female character that can follow you around and fight with you. The only problem? It's basically a twilight show episode—every time you die, a new Charlotte is created, and after some time you have dozens of Charlottes running around! What do you do, bury them alive? Hide them? They're everywhere!

Just like that song "Looking for Diamonds", this is a really funny song parody:

I hope all these videos have your creativity juices flowing. Don't forget, WonderHowTo is running a Minecraft contest with a really great prize, check it out here! I can't enter the contest since I'm hosting it, but I'll just sit here on the sidelines secretly envying your entries! Deadline for entries is Monday, June 27th, 11:59pm PST.