Minecraft meets Blue Planet in Attenborough style documentary

The world of Minecraft is a beautiful one. It can be easy to forget, some twelve years after it first took over to become the best-selling game ever, because we’ve seen it everywhere for so long, but there’s something about Minecraft’s art style that just clicks. To celebrate the release of Minecraft 1.20, the Trails and Tales update, developer Mojang is producing a series of David Attenborough-style mini-documentaries to showcase the beauty of the sandbox game.

In this second instalment of Minecraft: The Great Wild, we explore the depths of the Minecraft Oceans, a place that many players are probably slightly less familiar with. I know it’s by far the Minecraft biome I’ve explored least – I just feel more content with my feet on (mostly) solid ground, y’know? So it’s good to get some more perspective on it and, honestly, the whole tone and framing of the series is just delightful.

The video, which you can see below, perfectly captures the spirit of Attenborough for those of you who’ve enjoyed his nature documentaries such as Planet Earth, Frozen Planet (which was imitated in the first episode, covering Minecraft’s colder zones), and of course, Blue Planet, which we see here.

We’re introduced to a family of turtles – the baby coming in at “a height of 0.0032 or 0.12 blocks,” making it one of the smallest Minecraft mobs, but also a potential snack for any nearby cats. Will the poor critter manage to elude its claws? You’ll just have to watch and find out.

We also see a school of dolphins defending one another as they cross the ocean waters, before delving into one of Minecraft’s more fantastical, and dangerous, underwater creatures. Although honestly if you told me someone had discovered such a terror lurking in the murky depths of the Earth’s own oceans I would not be at all surprised.

Of course, with Minecraft available to PC Game Pass subscribers – in both Bedrock and Java iterations – you’ll be able to explore the oceans for yourself after watching if the mood takes you.

Discover some wondrous locales of your own by visiting some of the best Minecraft seeds, or add even more beauty and depth to the world with the best Minecraft mods. We’ve even picked out a great list of the best Minecraft skins you won’t want to miss in 2023.