Overview

Rokushoji is a retrospective Minecraft project, which reconstructed the Japanese Buddhist city Rokushoji (六勝寺) which used to be the capital of the country back in the 11th century.
I took a special effort for two years to precisely reconstruct the ancient architectures in one-by-one scale, so that we can tour in the virtual world with the sense of reality.

Research

I took a 1-year thorough archeological & comparative process to reconstruct Japanese Buddhist & Shinto architectures back in the time, with the help of academic studies conducted at Shiga University and their miniature reconstruction of the city showcased at Kyoto Asney.

My study included fieldwork at 50+ sites in all around the west Japan.

Miniature reconstruction of Rokushoji (Kyoto Asney)

Development

I then encoded those architectures into Minecraft's cubic form, which turned out to be rather challenging. I spent another year with countless tries & errors to get it all right.

I found myself using third-party tools and coding my own plugins to automate things by the time I was in the last several wraps.