Null Island
Part 24 ~ 8 September 2025
Played: 13 April 2025
Ever heard of Null Island? It's a spot off the coast of West Africa where the equator meets the prime meridian. Latitude 0, Longitude 0. Despite its name, there's no actual land there, just a weather buoy. (Okay, I looked it up, apparently even the buoy is gone lol.) Being something of a data nerd, I've taken an interest in this place, because when blank or unexpected location data goes into a system, it often gets translated to 0,0 and thusly mapped to this mythical location. This may sound weirdly niche, but believe me when I say that I LIVE for these kinds of fun facts, and y'all better get used to hearing more of them :D
So... what the heck does this have to do with Minecraft? Well, just like the real world, my world also has open ocean at 0,0. My world spawn is at 128 west and 64 north – on dry land, as is usually the case in this game. So I've had it in the back of my mind to mark this oceanic origin point once I got my sea legs (and sea lanterns). At first I was just gonna pop down a conduit on a stick and call it a day. But then I remembered the buoy and got a wave (whoosh!) of inspiration.
What's another word for null? How about zero, for the zero coordinates. Okay... another word for island? I know – an atoll! That's a ring-shaped island formed from coral – a resource that we have in abundance. And so my vision came together: a ring island, made with coral, and shaped like a zero. ZERO ATOLL.
So anyway, I built a conduit on a stick. I hadn't thought of any of this Null Island stuff at the time lol. I decided to keep it though because it's a fun centrepiece, and I like being able to breathe underwater while I work on subterranean stuff. I called this monument The Origin, after the mathematical term for the zero point in a coordinate system (mind you, the true origin is 63 blocks down at y0).
One buoyant brainwave later, I returned with a stash of sand and started forming an oval-shaped bowl around the central pillar. This ran out alarmingly quickly, so I went off and rearranged the surrounding ocean floor to resupply. After a couple of cycles of this, and a couple of lengthy Youtube videos on the second monitor (boy did I underestimate the scale of this), I had a neat ring of sand formed up from the seafloor to the surface, with a peaceful lagoon in the centre. My stats page actually had sand ahead of dirt as my most placed block at this moment, with over 5000. Also while I was at it, I picked up some 4000 pieces of kelp, which were smelted down and condensed into blocks for future furnacing.
Now for the defining feature of this atoll – the coral! I went with three colours: purple, yellow, and blue. (I'm not a huge fan of the red or pink.) As per usual, I brought too few items to begin with and had to go back for more partway through the build... sigh! I went around the bowl making coral structures, cycling through the colours and trying to give each colony a distinctive shape – some solid, some branching, some looping. I then circled around again, adding decorators of the other two colours (I figured blue on blue wouldn't show up well) plus strategic sea pickles for lighting. And finally, I filled the surrounding seafloor with more pickles for a little extra spawnproofing.
And there we have it – Zero Atoll! A beautiful feature to mark the centre of this world. The coral seems to be thriving here in these cooler waters – well, apart from a few blocks that died because I boxed them in completely. But better still, these waters are still warm enough (officially, "Lukewarm") to support tropical fish! Which means that all manner of colourful fishies come by this little reef of mine. It's a little piece of paradise :D
