So, lately I’ve been doing the nerds version of the adult coloring in craze by recreating a couple of castles in Minecraft.

Last time I tried something like this, I attempted to recreate the Sydney Opera House, which put me off the whole thing for more than a year. (Hint: It’s really hard to make curved shapes look good in Minecraft!)

This time, I thought I’d start with something less ambitious, then graduate to something bigger if everything went according to plan.

I can’t recall how I stumbled on it, but the Crupet Castle (also known as Château de Carondelet) in Belgium seemed to fit the bill: nice and small, and with the convenience of some handy floor plans available on the web. I hunted around for shots from each direction and referred to them as I created pixelated plans for each floor, and elevations from each direction, at Minecraft scale.

With these in hand, I then proceeded to build it (I confess in Creative mode), complete with interior walls to match the plans. I am pretty happy with the overall result. Here are some screenshots. (I use the Sphax BDCraft 128-bit texture pack.)

The trickiest part was getting the interior staircases to all work properly, particularly in the tower, and in the confined space leading up to the top-floor.

Roof-lines are always tricky, but I liked the way this turned out.

On the whole I was pretty pleased with the comparison to the real thing.

Here’s a side-by-side: