Someone crafted a redstone PC in Minecraft to play Minecraft inside Minecraft

This is the Chungus 2, a fully working PC built inside Minecraft—so you can play Minecraft while you play Minecraft. But that's not all it does, oh no.

Also known as the Computational Humongous Unconventional Number and Graphics Unit, this machine is the lowest spec thing I think I've ever written about. But hats off to project lead Sammyuri and team for managing to push Minecraft redstone crafting to new heights.

Technically someone did create a Minecraft-alike in Minecraft with redstone back in 2012. And while that's damn impressive, it was only a 2D version of the game. This one plays it in 3D.

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Essentially what we're looking at here is a virtual machine, only these utter ballers painstakingly crafted the components using the tools Minecraft has to offer—along with a healthy helping of code—and put them together in-game.

"Built over a period of many many months, with a significant amount of planning and dedication," the video says in a rather swift wall-of-text splash screen. 

It then goes on to detail an important disclaimer:

"Some viewers, for example those used to videos of simpler farms and piston doors, may not be able to comprehend the scale of this build and may suffer adverse affects including but not limited to having their minds blown in spectacular fashion."

Honestly, it is pretty mind-blowing watching all the components chugging along in real time, so we thought we'd bring you the specs so you can see what they managed to scrape together using Minecraft materials alone.

CHUNGUS 2 CPU specs

8 bit data, 16 bit fixed size instruction length
1Hz clock speed, 4 stage instruction pipeline (fetch - decode - execute - writeback)
64 byte automatic 8-way associative data cache and 256 bytes RAM
Up to 256 addressable I/O ports
7 general purpose registers
Over 40 ALU functions, including a hardware barrel shifter, multiplier, divider and square rooter
32x128 byte program pages for a total of 4KiB program storage

The CPU runs at 1Hz, and the AMOGUS (Absurdly Massive Operator of Graphics) graphics processor packs just 6KB of graphics memory. It's sure as hell not about to win a place in our best gaming PC guide, though I'm very tempted to sneak it in there when my boss isn't looking.

The 96 x 64p resolution is garbage by modern standards, and the graphics are rendered in only two colours: brown, and brown. But what did I expect? The main thing is that it works. You can craft, smelt, take fall damage, and all that good Minecraft stuff, even if you do need to be superhuman to tell what half the things on the screen are.

Of course one of the top comments is "Can it play Doom?" And although there's no evidence of that, I can tell you it runs Tetris, Snake, Conways Game of Life, and even renders Mandlebrot sets.

Sammyuri cites Mumbo Jumbo specifically "for inspiring me to begin my redstone journey back in 2013." From there they learned computer architecture and how to build it in Minecraft from the ORE Minecraft server community, and they encourage anyone looking to learn the trade to head over and check it out.

So here's a nod to Sammyuri, Uwerta, StackDoubleFlow for putting the Chungus together, and to Dimdom10 for running the server and helping to render some of their work. May they be forever immortalised as the bringers of Minecraftception, even if the r/Minecraft mods team decided to remove their post and lock the comments section.

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Katie Wickens
Hardware Writer

Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been demystifying tech and science—rather sarcastically—for three years since. She can be found admiring AI advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. She's been heading the PCG Steam Deck content hike, while waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.