7 best Minecraft optical illusions that will confuse your mind

One of the core reasons for Minecraft's explosive popularity is the ability for players to create almost anything they can think of within the game's now iconic blocky art style. While some players use this creative freedom to make massive fantasy castles in Minecraft, others use it to recreate some of the strange visual effects found in our real world.

Detailed below are seven of the best examples of how players have taken the sometimes strange ways our eyes process visual information and converted it into the game. However, players wanting to make illusions of their own will need quite a good Minecraft wool farm, as most of these illusions use thousands of blocks.

Note: This article is subjective and reflects the views of the writer.

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The seven best optical illusions found in Minecraft

1) Inverted furnace

An inverted furnace (Image via Mojang)

This simple Minecraft illusion is as easy to create as it is confusing to look at. All players need to do is place three furnaces in the upper corner of a structure in such a way that they line up with how a furnace should look. This trick also works with any block that has an obviously recognizable top and bottom texture, such as crafting tables.

The inward corner of the building clashes with how the brain wants to see the regular furnace block, causing players to see a furnace that has been warped and stretched in strange ways, almost as if affected by a funhouse mirror, with the effect of stretching and moving as the player moves around the room.

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2) Trick of the light

Optical Illusion Three - Distorted Colors byu/red5aa inMinecraft

This strange Minecraft optical illusion can be discovered using any of the game's differently colored blocks, such as colored cool, patterned glazed terracotta, or industrial cement. Reddit user u/red5aa points out that there are slight variations in the color we perceive blocks to be based on the blocks next to them, causing the yellow wool in the image to appear as two very different shades.

Comment byu/red5aa from discussion inMinecraft

If the effect is not there, try zooming out on the page to make the image smaller. Several comments on the post stated that they could see the effect in the post's smaller thumbnail but not on the full-resolution image. This makes sense, as the larger image provides additional color information to the eyes, stopping the illusion from working.

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3) Traditional optical illusions

Some optical illusions I made in creative. (WIP) byu/coopc42 inMinecraft

Minecraft Reddit user u/coopc42 recreated three traditional optical illusions within the game, all of which are sure to confuse. The first uses a series of alternating rectangles and squares of growing size, causing the entire shape to appear to balloon out into three-dimensional space.

The second uses a series of squares that alternate between black and white to cause a circle to appear seemingly out of nowhere. Circles are hard to make in Minecraft intentionally, so making a circle out of squares is even more impressive. The final illusion uses three layers of black-and-white rectangles that are slightly offset to make the tops of the blocks appear to tilt up or down.

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4) A completely regular-sized house

I created an optical illusion in Minecraft byu/Falus_ inMinecraft

Reddit user u/Falus_ shared an illusion they created on the Minecraft subreddit. This build seems ordinary at first—just a simple starter house—but as the user flies through the build, something starts to seem off.

More specifically, each block seems to be much more detailed than it should be. Then, the realization finally clocks in: Every single block within this build is made up of a sixteen-by-six grid of smaller blocks. Despite its initial appearance, this small base is actually made up of tens of thousands of blocks.

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5) Big blocks

Optical illusion byu/xavierherra inMinecraft

This illusion is an inversion of the previously mentioned one. Whereas that illusion sought to make a large number of blocks look small, this trick tries to cause a single block to grow in size.

This trick works by having players place a floating block much closer to them than the background build. Then, through careful camera positioning, everything can be made to line up properly, as if this much larger, closer block were also distant, just huge in scale.

Reddit user u/xavierherra shows off this illusion wonderfully in a post that causes a crafting table to appear two blocks tall. Though the effect can be done with nearly any block, the important part of the trick is using Minecraft's console commands to position the camera in a pixel-perfect way.

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6) Circles and Squares

Optical Illusion in Minecraft byu/LonelySpaghetto1 inMinecraft

This optical illusion, first brought to the attention of the Minecraft community by u/LonelySpaghetto1, uses a very specific mathematically generated build to cause what, in reality, is a diamond-shaped build to be perceived as a circular one instead.

There is talk in the comments about sine waves and how they were used to create the shape, exemplifying how precise the build had to be and also how this illusion is confusing visually as well as mentally.

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7) Petal wave

Cool optical illusion map I recently made. byu/smint123 inMinecraft

This optical illusion is almost dangerous in its hypnotic nature. Reddit user u/smint123 posted an illusion they created using map art. The build is a series of petal-shaped objects with highlights and shading to imply movement and direction.

When placed in this way, as if they were flowing along a waving current, the brain is tricked into seeing this motion from nothing as it attempts to focus on the green lines between the shapes. The flow and motion are created through nothing more than their implication, which also seems to break out of the borders of the map at times, making the effect even more confusing to look at.

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As blocks with more detailed textures are added to the game, such as glazed terracotta, alongside new items that change the perspectives from which players can view the world, such as elytra for flight and Minecraft maps for interesting uses and views, new and even more confusing Minecraft illusions are sure to be found.