The Battle of Hoth Gets the Minecraft Treatment

[Andy Chalk]

The Battle of Hoth Gets the Minecraft Treatment

​

A great Imperial victory over the Rebel scum has been lovingly recreated through the magic of Minecraft.

Isn't it amazing what you can do with Minecraft and perhaps a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder? The AT-ATs in this video might not actually stride across the frozen wastes of Hoth but the camera work is so good and the audio so well-synced that I hardly even noticed, and while I wasn't gripping the arms of my chair quite as tightly as I did back in 1980, I might have actually enjoyed it more in some ways - if only because I wasn't terrified that somebody was going to get his throat crushed or his arm chopped off.

The downside to watching this with a more "mature and sophisticated" perspective is that it's harder to ignore some pretty obvious questions. Why do snowspeeders have harpoons? Why can't the guy up front fire them? Why doesn't the Empire have air support? And why did they drop the AT-ATs so far from the Rebel base anyway? If I was Darth Vader, I think I'd be pointing a lot more fingers at a lot more guys in that organization.

I don't play Minecraft so I don't know what the maker actually means when he says that the video was "built by hand using the 1.4 snapshot" with no special effects or mods, but I don't think it really matters anyway. This is just too damn awesome to worry about details.

Source: Youtube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFQwAuInDnw&feature=player_embedded]


Permalink

 

[Soviet Heavy]

They had to drop the AT-ATs far away from the Rebels because their shield generator prevented them from getting closer. If they tried, they had that giant ion cannon to blast the dropships out of the air.

Plus, you can walk through energy shields a la Battle Droids in TPM.

 

[Supernova1138]

Repulsorlifts short out when they try to enter a deflector shield like the one on Hoth, so the dropships would have crashed into the ground if they tried to land the walkers closer to Echo Base. The Rebel's Ion Cannon may also have been a problem. That's why you don't come out of lightspeed too close to the system.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

As for the harpoons... yeah, it's silly. The in universe explanation is even stupider.
According to the Expanded Universe, you want to know who came up with the idea to use tow cables?

Spoiler

Yeah, it was that guy apparently. He was supposed to be an Imperial Officer, but Veers got pissed that he found a weakness in the AT-AT and got him bumped down to Stormtrooper duty.

So he killed his CO and joined the Rebellion.

Yeah it's silly

 

[Legion]

They should use Tekkit, it actually has jetpacks and force fields etc. which would work really well for this kind of thing.

 

[Lt. Rocky]

I love how throughout most of the video there was this black sheep trotting around the battlefield near the AT-AT's. Rogue tauntaun, methinks.

 

[Veldel]

As for the harpoons... yeah, it's silly. The in universe explanation is even stupider.
According to the Expanded Universe, you want to know who came up with the idea to use tow cables?

Spoiler

Yeah, it was that guy apparently. He was supposed to be an Imperial Officer, but Veers got pissed that he found a weakness in the AT-AT and got him bumped down to Stormtrooper duty.

So he killed his CO and joined the Rebellion.

Yeah it's silly

could i get a source for that mostly for reading


OT: i love how minecraft can do all this im always excited to see what ppl create.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

As for the harpoons... yeah, it's silly. The in universe explanation is even stupider.
According to the Expanded Universe, you want to know who came up with the idea to use tow cables?

Spoiler

Yeah, it was that guy apparently. He was supposed to be an Imperial Officer, but Veers got pissed that he found a weakness in the AT-AT and got him bumped down to Stormtrooper duty.

So he killed his CO and joined the Rebellion.

Yeah it's silly

could i get a source for that mostly for reading


OT: i love how minecraft can do all this im always excited to see what ppl create.

Tales from the Mos Eisley cantina.

 

[antipunt]

Whenever I see one of these vids:

"my god there are only so many hours in a day..." :0

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

The downside to watching this with a more "mature and sophisticated" perspective is that it's harder to ignore some pretty obvious questions. Why do snowspeeders have harpoons? Why can't the guy up front fire them? Why doesn't the Empire have air support? And why did they drop the AT-ATs so far from the Rebel base anyway? If I was Darth Vader, I think I'd be pointing a lot more fingers at a lot more guys in that organization.

They were tow cables, not harpoons. Speeders were used for moving/towing repulsorlift equipped things, and the Rebellion was notorious for using what they had on hand to fight the Empire (see Guerilla Tactics). So there's a mature answer for that.
Air Support: Tie Fighters (the main workhorse of the Empire) were designed for space battles (starfighter) and the Star Destroyers were used for orbital bombardment. Tie Fighters were more or less useless in atmosphere conditions like Hoth (unpredictable weather conditions) and high winds could rip a TIE apart.
AT-AT issue has been explained already, but mostly the Hoth battle was a failure due to the incompetence of the Admiral who got choked to death by Vader. Aside from that, Vader wasn't a master tactician, just a powerful Force user who had more cybernetic parts than organic and thus was half-blind to the Force, brooding and mentally unstable. Basically unfit for command, hence why he let others do most of the tactical thinking and killed officers at the drop of a hat (or loss of a battle).

 

[Scow2]

As for the harpoons... yeah, it's silly. The in universe explanation is even stupider.
According to the Expanded Universe, you want to know who came up with the idea to use tow cables?

Spoiler

Yeah, it was that guy apparently. He was supposed to be an Imperial Officer, but Veers got pissed that he found a weakness in the AT-AT and got him bumped down to Stormtrooper duty.

So he killed his CO and joined the Rebellion.

Yeah it's silly

could i get a source for that mostly for reading


OT: i love how minecraft can do all this im always excited to see what ppl create.

Tales from the Mos Eisley cantina.

That kind of source makes me think that the story is Star Wars Apocrypha.

As for the answers about Snowspeeders and Tow Cables... I figured they're for hauling/pulling, using a fleet of snowspeeders as something like airborne tugboats. Using them against AT-AT's was weaponization of a mundane tool. The ion cannons and anti-repulsor shields answer why they landed so far away.

What I don' understand is why they'd use an AT-AT in an area as wide-open as Hoth's battlefield, instead of something slimmer... Then again, the height advantage DID give them an advantage onto firing into the trenches and out-ranging the turrets. As for them going down and suddenly being vulnerable to blasters? The collapsed mass of the thing probably loosened a lot of armor platings, in addition to jarring the deployment hatches open.

 

[ParadiseDecayTM]

They should use Tekkit, it actually has jetpacks and force fields etc. which would work really well for this kind of thing.

I didn't want to use any mods! I wanted it to be vanilla only, its more of a challenge that way!

Thank you Andy for the brilliant article!