Every Pokemon fan fantasizes about a game that contains every region for players to freely travel between, and while Pokemon Scarlet & Violet’s co-op mode is making the dream of going on a Pokemon journey with your friends a reality, its open world isn’t expansive enough to take you to old regions like Kanto and Sinnoh. However, a fan is building the next best thing: a Minecraft world that recreates every Pokemon town, cave, route, and forest from each game in one map.
@thechunkyhippo on TikTok began the journey of recreating all eight Pokemon regions in one playable map last month, which was signaled by a video outlining their mission: a continuous map made to look as close to the game it originates from as Minecraft’s toolkit allows. Once complete, the map will be free to download and playable using the Minecraft Pixelmon mod. The creation of each town and route is documented with a time lapse video, and, as of this writing, has reached Cerulean City, the fourth town in Pokemon Red/Green/Blue/Yellow. This kind of undertaking can be tedious, especially as a one-person project, but @thechunkyhippo says they will have more information about making it a collaborative effort in the Cerulean video.
@thechunkyhippo Its about time the entire pokemon wolrd comes to minecraft!! This will be a long journey ???? #minecraft #pokemon #pixelmon #pokemoncommunity #minecraftbuilding
The project is only a few weeks in at this point, but considering just how much there is to make with each game, it’s likely this will be a months to even years-long process. There are eight mainline Pokemon regions as of this writing, and Pokemon Scarlet & Violet will add a ninth in November. As @thechunkyhippo moves into later generations where the series moved from 2D to 3D, the maps will become more complex, so I’d expect some of those to be even more time consuming.
While the maps are as close to perfect as they can be, @thechunkyhippo already explains in a TikTok they had to make some creative liberties due to Pokemon games’ tendency to create building interiors that don’t fit the exteriors seen in the map. An example being a building that appears rectangular on the outside but is square-shaped when the player enters it. Minecraft can’t support this kind of inconsistency since it has a persistent world, but while some concessions have to be made, there’s clearly a lot of care going into making these recreations as close to Pokemon’s source material as possible. So, I’m excited to see the project continue to build a contiguous Pokemon world.
All the time lapse videos has been collected in a TikTok playlist for your convenience.
In the meantime, Pokemon fans can look forward to hearing more about the next region in the series, as a Pokemon Presents showcase is scheduled for Wednesday, August 3.
