Minecraft project

Awhile back I started building a giant sphere while playing Minecraft on my home computer. I never finished it and the computer died. I recently started playing on a server that's home to mostly Imgur users and started again. But this time I decided to go to the next step. I built the sun. Then I started moving on to the other planets.

Click to enlarge

The sun consists of two glass hemispheres. The lower half is 100 blocks wide, the top is 96 blocks wide leaving space for a 98 block ball of lava. Many servers don't allow you to pour out buckets of lava. They're too dangerous to work with. However, if you put the bucket of lava in a dispenser it can produce the same effect, just with more effort. So I set up dispensers on top of the sun and kept moving them around as needed. Due to the nature of the sphere and how lava behaves I was able to cover most of it with just 4 buckets. The rest was very dangerous work.

You can see Mercury peeking out from around the sun. Then Venus, Earth, and Mars. The picture is taken from what's done of Jupiter.

I tried to be fairly accurate with Earth. Africa looks pretty good from here. But the design was done by trying to manually convert 2D pictures to a 3D surface. There's flaws. And the parts we're most familiar with are all near the top where we can't see them.

Mars has polar caps. Everything else is made from Netherrack, which is reddish, but not very reflective. So at night it goes dark and would be invisible if not for the fact that it still blocks out stars. This picture was taken at sunset, so you can see Mars going black already.

Jupiter is being developed with colored bands and storms. I have some ideas on how to make the moons move. I figure I'll build a glass ring, put mine cart tracks on the glass, and release 4 carts driven by occasional powered tracks.

Saturn will have the hexagon, but I'll move it to the south pole, instead of the north.