Minecraft has been used in various ways during this pandemic; students and even the Mojang Studios developers are getting into the graduation feeling with the free The Graduation Celebration marketplace item. This item is free and allows players to walk across the stage, which many students haven’t had the option of doing due to the current pandemic and quarantine.
The Graduation Celebration is a marketplace item that Minecraft: Bedrock edition players are easily able to download and experience for free. At the same time, there are other options for the Minecraft: Java Edition players.
For the Java Edition players, who don’t have access to the Minecraft marketplace, various students from various colleges and high schools have been recreating the campus that they are unable to go to and enjoy.
Many are doing this in Minecraft due to the incredible flexibility that Minecraft offers its players; some of these students include students from UC Santa Barbara, which recreated their campus in Minecraft to enjoy walking through the halls even while being stuck in quarantine.
The University of Washington ended up making national headlines six months ago due to being the first university to switch entirely from in-person to virtual classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This quick change left students in a transition that was tougher for some when compared to Ryan Angliss, who is a junior at UW and is majoring in computer science said, “It all kind of happened really fast.”
This was on the UW Reddit page, where he came across a Minecraft server for students to some needed social interaction that has been harder to come by since the quarantine has started.
Ryan said he looked and saw the builders just building and got some inspiration to recreate one of the campus’ libraries.
Ryan also said, “I thought nothing of it and got off, and when I got on the next day, someone had posted a photo, people were like, ‘I want to join.’” After Ryan recreated the library, people started to formulate a plan to build the entire campus and named the server UDub Minecraft.
Currently, the builders have 80% of the campuses entirely built and to scale, while the UDub Minecraft now has 1,100 Discord members, 300 builders, and more than 2,500 Minecraft players in total.