This Civil War Minecraft build took a year to build and has a voice-acted Abraham Lincoln

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Minecraft's battle of Vicksburg is for charity, but it does feature "small dose of chicanery"

Minecraft
(Image credit: Microsoft/The American Battlefield Trust)

The American Battlefield Trust, a charity dedicated to preserving the lands where the Civil War was fought, has partnered with a group of Minecraft builders to recreate the battle of Vicksburg in-game.

The battle of Vicksburg build took a team of 30 builders a full year to complete, and it features not just Vicksburg itself, but a giant section of the countryside around the city, including the trenches where the battle was fought. The map features 3,000 voice-acted NPCs, including Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain.

You can take a look at the full map and additional screenshots over on the official site, but it's incredibly impressive. The city itself is made up of scale models of the real buildings that would've been standing in Vicksburg back in 1863.

Whether or not players actually treat Minecraft Vicksburg with any of the reverence a historical site might deserve remains to be seen, but a trailer for the event does acknowledge a "small dose of chicanery" in the proceedings.

The charity notes that heavy rain and mudslides in 2020 at the Vicksburg National Military Park opened massive sinkholes and washed away whole hillsides of the Vicksburg National Cemetery, leaving large sections of the park inaccessible to the public. This event is part of a drive to help restore the park and reopen public access.

Maybe you can also find Vicksburg somewhere in the Minecraft build of the entire universe.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.