People are building increasingly huge hard drives inside of ‘Minecraft’

The fad of building anything and everything in MInecraft may be far from its peak today, but that seems to mean that the people still building are the most dedicated — and they’re creating some of the most impressive stuff yet. That continues this week with the construction of a hard drive inside of Minecraft that’s said to be capable of storing 1KB of data. While that figure may sound low, the fact that it exists inside of a digital environment makes it an impressive creation. The 1KB drive gained attention earlier this week on Reddit, and according to Wired, it was built by Cody Littley, a PhD student at University of Texas at Austin.

Though this is far from the first Minecraft hard drive, it appears to be among the biggest made to date. Earlier examples were made several years ago, but they were working in only the tens of bytes. These complex creations are all made possible because of a Minecraft item called “redstone,” which actually allow you to create working circuits within the game — a basic implementation might be wiring a redstone circuit between a switch and a door, and then flipping the switch to open and close it. The hard drives use redstone to create a huge network of binary storage, which can then be written to and read from in game. It may not be all that useful in game, but it’s among the cooler projects you can put your time toward.

The Verge spoke with Minecraft creator, Notch, last year