Streamer Recreates Legend Of Zelda In Minecraft Without Any Mods And It's Awesome

Minecraft has become a cultural phenomenon. With the first development release way back in 2010, the 12-year-old title has impacted gaming quite a lot. The title has had enough effect that Microsoft decided buying Mojang for $2.5 billion was worth it. Perhaps one of the biggest reasons that Minecraft has such a solid following is for its significant experience. A YouTuber recently showed this capability when he decided to make a working version of the NES classic The Legend of Zelda entirely within Minecraft, without technically modding the game.

Some arguments could be made that making texture changes or file changes to the core game are still technically modding. Ultimately, though, the creator kept all aspects of his "Zelda Not-Mod" within the core functionality of Minecraft 1.17, including textures, enemy behaviors, and even throwing in the classic "full-health thrown sword" functionality of the classic title. He accomplished this by implementing the changes into the world file itself. Any player opening it would automatically get the full experience, without any additional downloads (e.g. resource packs).

The Legend of Zelda isn't the first foray into rebuilding classics in the popular voxel game. The creator, C1OUS3R, has built a working Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros. within Minecraft. He's even promised a download for this working Zelda if the video gets 5,000 likes. Of course, it isn't the whole game currently, but it does let players play through the overworld and first dungeon.

The YouTube video posted goes over the meticulous details and changes that had to be done to make the game work, including building in enemy AI, which he based around a Unity developer's "Artificial Unintelligence" concept, even allowing the octoroks to fire their rocks.

C1OUS3R also described how he brought Link into the game. He first created a flat model in Block Bench (also used to generate parts of the map), and used it to replace the carved pumpkin "hat." He then made the Minecraft player model invisible so only the visual representation of Link remained. With some special command blocks, he could detect the player's direction and rotate the flat model accordingly.


From what we see in the video, all of this comes together amazingly well. We're hoping that this creator releases their non-modded Zelda mod for Minecraft because we'd love to play it. After you finish watching the Zelda video you can also check out their videos on Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros.