Acid Interstate V4 is a music video for the song Time Lapses by Glue Trip. I produced this video over the course of nearly 5 months from late August 2020 to early January 2021. The video was produced entirely inside of Minecraft, with only minimal color correction and speed adjustments done in Premiere Pro.

Production for this video started in late August 2020 when I discovered that MiningGodBruce, the original creator of the Minecraft Acid Interstate series, was for a time working on a 4th video. The video used the song Time Lapses by Glue Trip. The video was only worked on for a short while as by the time of its inception Bruce was employed full time and had little spare time to work on a mammoth of a video such as this. I took this as a golden opportunity to work on an Acid Interstate video of my own, following in the footsteps of the unfinished video.

Things started off with preparing the world, mainly getting Far Lands into modern versions of Minecraft. I initially started out with generating the Far Lands directly in modern Minecraft, specifically 1.12.2, (my version of choice, it’s easy to work with and performant) using Beta+. Unfortunately, this mod resulted in the Far Lands generating up to the height limit, meaning that no foliage would spawn and I couldn’t place any rails.

To fix this, I used a very old for Minecraft 1.2.5 called Generator Ports which remedied this issue. It generates the Far Lands at y=128, whilst the height limit in the game is 256, meaning that trees would spawn and I could place rails. This was great a start, but 1.2.5 has its own issues, commands don’t really exist in this version, generating chunks takes forever and getting 1.2.5 to even launch is hard nowadays. I installed SinglePlayerCommands which I hadn’t done before, as well as some render distance mods to make generating terrain more efficient. I then generated worlds with random seeds over and over again until I found a seed that was to my liking.

I then split the song into 5 sections and calculated how many blocks I would need to generate for each section. I also decided how sped up the video would eventually be at this stage as it was required for the calculation anyways. The world was then generated for the first section (I ended up working each section until it was completely finished before moving onto the next, this made each task more palatable but I also had no idea how to make portals at that time), generating each part of the world took about an hour.

I then took the world into MCedit to clean up unnecessary chunks, move the Far Lands back to the center of the world (made working on the shader a lot more pleasant) and place the rails. The world was then ported into 1.12.2.

The next stage was placing the torches which sync to the music. I took the song into Premiere Pro, and placed a counter which went from the x coordinate of the start of the generated Far Lands until the x coordinate of the end of the Far Lands. I then placed solid white for a single frame whenever I thought a torch should be placed. This allowed for me to easily place torches whilst listening to the music, frame by frame of the final sped up video.

I then setup my rendering pipeline in Minecraft. Modifications to Minecraft which allowed for offline rendering were done with Minema, camera control was done with Aperture and, of course, the video was encoded with FFmpeg. I spent a few days working on FFmpeg encoding presets, a work in progress preset can be viewed here.

It was at this point that work on the shader began. I downloaded the shader from Bruce’s Acid Interstate V3 (which he kindly provides in the video description) which would serve as a base for my shader. I didn’t have a workflow for the shader because when I started, I had a pretty limited knowledge of GLSL. I started off by looking for duplicated code, moving it to #include’s for easy editing, then figuring out how the acid effect was achieved.

Once I was familiar with GLSL and the codebase, I worked on changing the shader as to fit with the song and make it substantially different from Bruce’s V3 video. You can watch an early version of this here. (The portal here was only to test how portals work, there were no torches in the next section.

This process of syncing things to the song, creating unique visuals and endless bug fixing continued up until the end of production. Once each section was done, I moved onto the next, syncing it to the song and making it unique.

If you’d like to run the shader and world for yourself, you can find everything on GitHub. All of the work in progress videos can be found on this playlist.