Hacksmith Industries Converts Their Office Into a Fully Functional Minecraft Train Network

James Hobson and the team at Hacksmith Industries spent eight months turning one room of their Canadian workshop into a miniature Minecraft landscape where a powered minecart actually runs. The idea started during a regular session with friends on a fresh server. Within a day or two they always laid rails so they could stop walking everywhere. One evening Hobson spotted a backyard model train setup online and carried the thought into the office the next morning. What if the same approach could work at a scale that fit the building itself.

They chose G-scale track, the size most model railroad sets use for outdoor layouts, because the rails are approximately 85 millimeters wide and neatly aligned with the sides of a Minecraft block. Each block was printed at 42 millimeters on a side, a ratio of about 1 to 23.8. That choice let the rails sit naturally on top of the structures while still leaving room for the cart to clear tunnels and doorways. They had to print the track parts in chunks, which took more than 12 hours to complete each.

Nickel battery welding strips were pressed into slots at the top of the rails, allowing a constant charge to flow down the line. The minecart has no batteries because it has brushes beneath that draw up current from these strips. This is routed through a bridge rectifier and then to a small geared motor. In the beginning, they had a really noisy motor and straight-cut gears that vibrated pretty strongly if we ran the minecart through a tight curve, as the cart would bounce off the rails. Then their friend David came to the rescue, redesigning the drivetrain with some quiet helical gears and a smaller motor. The whole system operates much smoother now that the voltage has been increased and a little capacitor has been added to keep the momentum flowing even when the cart is slightly off track.

Daryl did most of the block printing and assembly. Over a dozen Bambu Lab H2S machines and a couple X1 Carbons were working tirelessly for them. At the end of it all, they’d used 222 kg of filament, enough to reach all the way to the peak of the CN Tower 132 times. That’s not even adding the 1,600 machine hours they spent on the wall shelves, which were a true struggle. They ended up printing 124 shelves in total, each taking 13 hours per printer.

You know what? Blocks are so easy to put together that glue is unnecessary. Of course, there are normal scaffold parts that form the concealed bit, as well as thinner fascia pieces that form the visible surfaces of all those other materials, such as stone, mud, wood, and sand. To create the particularly intricate pieces, such as the bookshelves or maps, they employed one of those UV resin printers that can lay down a full color texture as thick as 5mm in one pass.

The finished route slinks out of the video room through holes made above the doorways, passing a few of steel beams before returning through other small breaches in the walls. One of the weirdest sections, the part that climbs a straight incline, was modeled after Minecraft’s own powered rails, with no curving slope to be found. Further ahead, there is a printed forest of oak trees, which is quite stunning. Then there’s the desert, replete with a small pyramid, an oasis, and some cacti.

Then there’s the cave, which contains amethyst crystals and chiseled stone, precisely like in the game. A little further on, the cart passes in front of a Nether portal with a tablet display and a lava stream that activates when it passes. Gabe rigged the lights and the lava effect so that they can be activated with a single switch. Charles designed the brackets that hold the shelves to the walls and helped install the track. Danny from the N Scale Dystopia channel also provided suggestions on track geometry and where we wanted to go next.