How a Limerick student recreated his hometown in Minecraft
Mateusz And His Bartnik Mtu Recreation Fo
On the rare occasions that he gives himself a break from studying, Mateusz Bartnik likes to build. The Leaving Cert student is the founder and team lead for Ireland’s affiliate to Build the Earth, a worldwide collaborative effort to recreate the earth in Minecraft.
The 18-year-old first started playing the popular computer game when he moved to Ireland from Italy. Though born in Poland, he spent most of the first ten years of his life in Modena before moving to Limerick in 2016.
“There are infinite possibilities in Minecraft,” he says. “It's about getting together with your friends and creating your own reality. You build your own house, live in it, explore around it and try to survive. That’s the basic idea around the game.”
Minecraft prides itself on its strong community and open-ended gameplay which have made it popular with people of all ages and helped it become one of the most successful video games of all time.
Its tagline, If you can dream it, you can build it, is an irresistible call to creatives like Mateusz who can fashion new worlds from their imagination or be inspired by what they see around them.
While he was in Transition Year, Mateusz saw Ireland.
“If I’m honest, I had taken a bit of a break from Minecraft,” he says, “but when I saw this project recreating the planet it drew me back in. I saw there wasn't a specific team responsible for Ireland. There was a team based in the UK with responsibility for both the UK and Ireland. When I joined, I found a bunch of Irish builders and I felt it would be more appropriate to make a separate Irish team. So I took it on almost three years ago.”
Though Mateusz and his band of rebel builders didn't have the blessing of their official overlords, their first construction, O’Connell Bridge in Dublin, went live on April 20, 2020. As the group grew its membership, their talent and determination could no longer be ignored and just two months later, Build the Earth Ireland became the official team.
Today the discord boasts a diverse management team made up of people from Ireland, England, Germany, Italy and Poland. They have grown their community to two thousand members and their two hundred-plus individual builders have contributed almost one thousand builds. While the growth is impressive, Mateusz is realistic about what can be achieved.
“We will definitely never finish,” he says. “With the number of builders in BTE Ireland and at the pace we are going right now, it will take us one thousand two hundred and eighty-four years to build Ireland. So don’t get your hopes up.
“It’s about the process really and the community engagement. You might find a place in your local estate for example and find a friend in the area that you can build it with. I built my own school for example with some friends.”
Much of Mateusz’s own work is inspired by his local area and his hometown. He has recreated many of the Treaty County’s landmarks including King John’s Castle, Arthur’s Quay and The Crescent Shopping Centre which took him a week to construct, spending “one or two spent hours on it a day”.
He does not confine himself to his adopted county however, and he is constantly on the lookout for new and interesting landmarks to work and collaborate on.
“When I’m out driving around Ireland I’m always looking around for places to put into the project,” he says.
“I only went to Dublin for the first time last year. I had never been out to see it for myself. But I had spent two years recreating it in Minecraft, so I was a bit of an expert on the place when I got there. I knew so many details about it that I was able to find my way around the city. I think that’s the best feeling that you get from the project.”
As well as building Ireland and studying for his Leaving Cert, Mateusz is a talented musician. Once the books are closed after the state exams, he will start preparing for his Grade Eight Piano Exams. By then, he hopes to be settled into a new course in either Creative Media and Interaction Design at the University of Limerick or Immersive Digital Media at TUS.
Over the coming weeks and months, his time might well be limited but it seems unlikely he will take his eyes off his beloved community for too long. They are always on the lookout for new members.
“The easiest way to join is to go to our website bteireland.ie,” says Mateusz. “You can become a builder, a visitor, or even a staff member. We have different people doing different things like marketing, social media and so on but there are lots of ways to join the project. It doesn’t matter where you build. The map of Ireland is already pregenerated, the terrain is already there and you just put your building on top of it with your coordinates.”
While it is, on the surface, all about the build, Mateusz returns repeatedly to the project’s key function.
“It isn’t just about building in a computer game,” he stresses. “It is an active community that is always happy to help those who need it.”