Now you can discover one among Ukraine’s most iconic pure landmarks – and the biggest salt mine in Europe – in Minecraft. The digital duplicate of the Soledar salt mines and their surrounding city, occupied by Russia troops for the previous 12 months in actual life, has been led by the wartorn nation’s authorities in an effort to assist rebuild a faculty destroyed in the course of the battle.
Soledar is present in Ukraine’s highest-popular province of Donetsk Oblast, positioned on the jap aspect of the nation. Its location resulted within the area and metropolis turning into particularly hard-hit by preventing within the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years in the past. After greater than a 12 months of battle, the city and mines have been captured by Russia forces in February 2023, having claimed the internationally-unrecognised annexation of Donetsk in late 2022.
The city and its mines have been collectively answerable for producing extra salt than anyplace else in Europe, however have been shut down because the Russian invasion started simply over two years in the past. Nonetheless, the Ukrainian authorities – by way of its fundraising effort United24 – has not too long ago give you a novel approach of each attempting to protect the pure awe of the mines themselves and assist a few of these affected by the continued battle.
With the assistance of French devs Endorah and miner Stepan Bandrivskyi, who labored within the mines for a decade, Ukraine has recreated the Soledar salt mines and a part of the encircling city as a playable Minecraft degree dubbed Minesalt. With bodily entry to the real-life mines unattainable because of the Russian occupation, the devs spoke to former employees and used a mix of present pictures, movies and even hand-drawn maps to make a devoted recreation.
“As the town is beneath non permanent occupation, Minesalt is the one solution to discover the unimaginable magnificence of those salt mines and commemorate the historic and monumental components of this place,” mentioned United24’s Yaroslava Gres. “It preserves its reminiscence, paying tribute to the individuals who have labored there era after era.
“We hope that as many individuals as attainable world wide will undergo Minesalt and fall in love with the Soledar mines as we’ve got.”
The extent itself duties gamers with accumulating a set of crystals as rapidly as attainable, encouraging them to discover the mines and city. Alongside the way in which you’ll additionally discover Minecraft characters based mostly on a few of United24’s ambassadors, who embody the eclectic likes of Virgin billionaire Richard Branson, actor Misha Collins, Nobel Prize winner Paul Nurse and footballer Oleksandr Zinchenko. Bandrivskyi may even be there to speak with you in regards to the expertise of working in the true place.
On the finish of the extent is a quiz in regards to the mines, earlier than encouraging gamers to donate to efforts to rebuild the native Velyka Kostromka faculty, which was destroyed by a Russian missile assault in October 2022. (There’s additionally a raffle being run as a part of the donation drive, together with – amongst different issues – packs of salt signed by Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.)
The Minesalt server for Minecraft will be discovered at mc.minesalt.web, and is out there to play now.
