"I considered Minecraft the computer version of a stone garden; I found a great deal of calm in creating and exploring its world. I decided to build something incredible which wouldn't sacrifice aesthetics for a larger scale or ease of construction. It would all be done on normal with no hacks or plugins.

The process of building the pyramid was SLOW despite the fact I was trying to work smart instead of hard. Obsidian simply takes too long to pickax up, so I built each layer of the pyramid by pouring lava into a trench of soil and then pouring water on top of it.

The base of the pyramid is 68x68. It is 34 blocks high. There is a 268 obsidian circumference for the first step. The outside of the pyramid consumed 4556 buckets of lava, with 3928 being turned into obsidian and 628 being kept as lava for a light source. The floor for the inside required 1572 additional buckets of lava, which takes the total obsidian/lava bucket count to 6128!


(...)
I built the Obsidian Pyramid many years ago in survival mode, before Minecraft had the Nether zone. That means every obsidian block was brought up from the bottom of my mine as lava and placed into a 'molding' trench of dirt, then cooled to obsidian with water. It was a self-challenge that I knew would test my patience. I recently pulled these from my data backups and as I try to keep a screenshot of every game I play on Steam, they needed to be uploaded."