RTXcellent

Of course, Athra is beautiful enough without all that magic computer stuff, but with RTX on, the place becomes a wonderful hall of mirrors and light, colour splashes mingling to create a rainbow symphony. We’re tempted to ask our bosses if we can make this an official biome – and Immanuel says that we could add a new mob to it, too: the Astrocetus, AKA “flying whales”.  

“They’d nest inside the big crystally rocks, and fly out as soon as hatched. They’d eat spores from the yellow Phallaciae plants, which in turn would dye their fins and gills a sunset orange.” Sounds good to us – maybe they can be friends with the glow squid? In actual fact, the biome that Athra is built in is mostly in the Nether, and so ghasts and pigmen will spawn here naturally. Ghasts are kind of like sky whales, right? 

The landscape of Athra is carefully made so that it suggests that it grew that way naturally. “I really tried to steer clear of any blocks that would suggest man-made,” says Immanuel, preferring a palette of concrete powder, nether blocks, and stained glass to create his artwork. But some of you may know that the original texture pack provided by Nvidia for the RTX version of Minecraft includes wooden frames around the stained glass – so Immanuel had to go in and manually change all the textures himself.