#khalimar

Earlier this year, my housemate Khalimar and I played on a private Minecraft server to test out a particular modpack idea of his. He's been kicking around this thought for a long while: it's a pack where you build your base and then it moves with you. He's always envisioned it as building a ship to sail on, but in order to test the idea he set up a Create pack with Interactive so we could build up a train and add to it while it was in motion.

Y'all. It was a fucking monumental experience. I have a lot to say about the Nameless Train to Nowhere and not a lot of space to put it, but understand that this was probably one of my absolute favorite Minecraft experiences in years, bar none. Whenever we were done exploring an area, we just…kept riding west, racing the sun into the distance, digging tunnels and finding new structures.

One of my stand-out favorite moments was while we were riding through a shrubland, icey lake on one side and low-lying grasses and trees on the other, and we popped Otherside into the jukebox. It just felt…right. He was driving the train, I was standing on the edge railings looking out for fun structures and mobs, and I saw a perfect image in my mind of the exact scene as if it was animated.

So…that's exactly what I made. I didn't crunch it this time, no fucking way. I worked on it little by little throughout the month, learning to paint to make the backgrounds and designing the train in a more stylistic, less blocky manner. I took a lot of screenshots on the server- every environment drawn is one we traveled through that I wanted to immortalize. I even learned how to use DaVinci Resolve so Krita didn't crash nearly as often as it did during my previous animation! It only crunched twice!

I wanted to show all of the love I felt for this pack in an animation. It's full of in-jokes and references (the blueprint is unnamed because we forgot to name the train before engaging it, the armors The Emissary and Aero wear are our actual endgame fits, train car 4 looks like it's been stung by a bee because we accidentally made it too small and we had to expand it, and there's Moofy in train car 2 with the other livestock, and that's just a few examples) because after only two months this became one of my favorite modpacks of all time. How could I not?

I still ended up cramming the day before because circumstances lead to me being unable to do art until the last few days, but I still finished the piece with hours to spare instead of minutes. And honestly? This is one of my favorite pieces yet.

You can also check out this animation on Youtube!