The latest Minecraft snapshot, 22w46a, allows players to individually fit books into a chiseled bookshelf in any order, enabling one fan to construct a huge pixel art build which takes advantage of this new feature. Minecraft's latest snapshot has brought a lot of small changes to the game, while allowing players to experiment with some of the new features coming up with the game's next major update.
The game's latest snapshot version adds a couple of new experimental features besides the chiseled bookshelf mechanics, including Piglin mob heads, mob head interactions with note blocks, and some tweaks to certain Nether-spawning mobs which intend to nerf certain mob farms. Alongside the typical list of bug fixes, the most recent Minecraft snapshot allows players to interact with the new chiseled bookshelf block in a more detailed manner now, as players can place books in any slot that they are looking at. This essentially allows players to modify the external appearance of the bookshelf block, leading to the possibility of creating more detailed pixel art than ever before.
A user on Reddit by the name of META_Tommy demonstrated this by sharing their pixel art creation with the Minecraft subreddit. This phenomenal construction consists of a huge number of chiseled bookshelf blocks, with each of the thousands of books being manually placed across them all. With books placed in a specific manner on such a grand scale, fans are able to design elaborate pixel art creations such as this one, which is considerably more compact than traditional pixel art methods within Minecraft. This particular time-consumptive build depicts Lewyn, a character from the Fire Emblem series.
While detailed pixel art creations were already an impressive feat in Minecraft, this method takes the art to another level entirely. Many fans have entertained the idea of automating these sorts of creations with command blocks, allowing players to design not just still pixel art images, but animations too. Some fans firmly believe that it's only a matter of time before a player uses command blocks to recreate the Bad Apple video using chiseled bookshelves, as things such as Bad Apple and even Doom have famously been recreated in the game using Minecraft's sheep, among other things.
While Minecraft's snapshots only provide a glimpse at what can be expected from the 1.20 update that awaits fans in the future, the new chiseled bookshelf mechanics are yet another example of fans using what is seemingly a simple feature to do extraordinary things. What other toys Mojang might provide to players during the wait for 1.20 is yet unknown, but as long as Minecraft fans are armed with tools as basic as bookshelves and books, the gaming community is sure to see many more mind-blowing creations from them in the future.
Minecraft is available on Mobile, PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.