After seeing the massive, three-tiered world of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it’s easy to forget that Breath of the Wild’s map was once considered massive in both breadth and detail. When the game first came out in 2017, players spent hundreds of hours combing its nooks and crannies, and were still making incredible discoveries years later.
Now, one player is revisiting every last inch of that original Breath of the Wild map by reconstructing it to the tree… in Minecraft.
Meet Grazzy
Grazzy is a content creator on YouTube who, prior to his great Hyrule building adventure, filled his channel with videos of the mobile game Geometry Dash, and later, playing Minecraft in Hardcore mode. After a few years, he became bored and felt limited by what he could do in that format. On a whim, he tried an idea he’d been sitting on for a while: building all of Breath of the Wild in Minecraft, starting with the Great Plateau.
Fortunately for Grazzy, this was the exact change he needed. His video blew up, netting him a massive surge of new followers and encouraging him to keep going. Grazzy had just started college, but was already feeling like it wasn’t for him. His YouTube success provided a perfectly timed out.
“I was completely overwhelmed already, so stressed out,” Grazzy recalls. “And even without YouTube, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to keep going. And so I was just thinking, I’ve got a unique chance on YouTube here. No one else gets an opportunity like this. So I feel like if I don’t just go full in on this and try this right now, I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life. Because I can always go back to college. But this might be my only shot at YouTube. It was the end of my first full week of college, and I decided to skip one of my classes so I could do a live stream, and I just never went back.”
Grazzy had never built anything complex in Minecraft, and certainly nothing on the level of another game’s entire setting. He had only built what was necessary in Hardcore mode. Which is part of why he’d hesitated to build all of Breath of the Wild in Minecraft – he felt intimidated by the idea. But during his experiment with the Great Plateau, he discovered the tool that would help him realize his ambitions.
“I found this software that allowed me to simply import a height map of Breath of the Wild into Minecraft,” he says. “So I had the whole base map done off the start. I just had to add all the extra stuff in. That was the first daunting thing, that was my main hurdle at first, just doing that. So once I found the workaround, it was kind of really easy to get started because I don’t think I really understood how big of a project this was. I think my hope was to finish before the end of 2022.”
Brick by Broken Brick
With Breath of the Wild running on a second monitor, Grazzy is meticulously constructing every crumbled wall, decayed Guardian, wooden bridge, and stable in Minecraft. He uses some shortcuts, too, such as making basic trees and structures he can then copy/paste elsewhere. But some big landmarks, like towns and the Divine Beasts, require him to go through one-by-one and build each by hand.
Which is why Grazzy did not, in fact, finish before the end of 2022 as planned. Halfway through 2023, he’s finished the Great Plateau, Necluda, Faron, Zora’s Domain, Lanayru, and the Gerudo Desert. He still has to tackle Hebra and Tabantha, the areas around Korok Forest, Death Mountain, and Central Hyrule. Everything, he says, takes much longer to do than he initially expects – he’ll plan for a month, and then it’ll take two months or more to fully build.
As he explains it to me, I remark that the whole thing sounds very, very enormous and overwhelming, but Grazzy says he’s learned to take it chunk by chunk, focusing on the short-term. He releases new videos slowly, roughly one every month and a half or so, with each video focusing on a massive landmark that he builds up to and around. While such a slow upload schedule might seem unintuitive to those familiar with how YouTube prioritizes content, Grazzy says taking his time has worked out well, and his audience has remained engaged. “If I were to split this up into a 60-episode series, and every week I was uploading, ‘Today we’re building this grass field over here,’ it just wouldn’t be interesting,” he remarks.
Of all he’s done to date, Grazzy says the section he’s most proud of is Zora’s Domain, which was also the most difficult section by far.
“I thought, based on my productivity, how fast I was building things, that Zora’s Domain was going to take me a few days, maximum, and it ended up taking a month and 70, 80 hours or something,” Grazzy says. “The intricacies of the Domain itself were already hard to replicate on their own, but because of where its location is on the map, it was at a slight angle, so I wasn’t building on the regular axis. Basically just made it 30 times more difficult than it needed to be. So it took a while, but I do think it’s my favorite location on the map, because… Just look at it, just look at it.”
Just look at it!
Through his time building Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule, Grazzy has also made some interesting discoveries. One of the most curious, he feels, is that there are some small sections of Breath of the Wild’s map that are copy-pasted from other areas. It’s a detail that regular players are unlikely to ever notice, but when you have to build it up brick by brick, it stands out.
“There are these massive cliffs… between Kakariko Village and Hateno Village. It’s just this massive overhanging part of the cliff, and it’s got some pillars to hold it up and support it. And they actually just copied that part of the cliff and pasted it down on the beach near Lurelin Village. There’s pretty much an entire mountain that’s just copy and paste. I built the first one, and seven months later I got to the second one, and I was like, ‘This looks familiar. I feel like I’ve already built this before.’ And then I realized, ‘Oh, I have actually built it before, because they just reused the same cliff.’”
Another Kingdom
Recently, Grazzy took a break from his Breath of the Wild build to focus on another project: the Great Sky Island from Tears of the Kingdom. He tells me he really wanted to build something from the new game right away, and is glad he did, but isn’t sure just yet if he’ll move on to building all of Tears of the Kingdom once he’s completed Breath of the Wild. Part of the reason is that Tears of the Kingdom’s new areas – the Depths and the Sky – aren’t all that interesting from a construction standpoint.
“I was thinking, what if I split it into three videos?” he says. “I do the Surface, the Sky, and the Depths. But if I do the Depths, there’s no big one interesting location. Even if I do all of the Depths in one video, there’s no one spot where it’s like, ‘Oh, people can’t wait to see this.’ And it’s kind of the same thing with the Sky. There are a few dungeons, but I’ve already done the most interesting part of the Sky, I think.”
For now, though, Grazzy is just trying to finish his Breath of the Wild map before the end of the year. He thinks he can manage it in about three videos, but isn’t sure. The remaining space is roughly equivalent to what he’s built so far, but the areas are less dense, so he hopes they’ll be less work. He intends to make Hyrule Castle – including all the detail of the interior areas – something of a grand finale for his last video.
One of the most impressive things about Grazzy is seeing how far he’s come for someone who had never built anything more than a utilitarian hut in Minecraft before he started this project. I ask him what advice he has for anyone who might be intrigued by the idea of building, but is daunted by the complexity of it all, as he once was. His answer? Watch other people build. Then, just bite the bullet and try it yourself, even if it’s rough.
“When I came back to the game and played it – because of all these building YouTubers that I had been watching and just these building videos – I already knew so many techniques to where I was decent already,” he says. “I think watching other people is a good way to do it. People who go really in depth with smaller builds, because the more of them you watch, you’re going to notice similarities between the two, these techniques that they use.
“And then, of course, just go build it yourself, essentially. Because of this project, I keep being forced to build things that, if it wasn’t for the project, I would never be building it. When I had to build a dragon, I was like, ‘I’ve never tried to build a dragon, because I suck at it.’ But I was forced to try and improve from this project. So I would say… go try and build a dragon. Go try and build a, I don’t know, a magical castle floating in the End. Just keep pushing yourself to do new stuff.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
