Building Hawkins Lab in Minecraft Broke Me (But I Kept Going)

I spent 4 months building Hawkins Lab in Minecraft, and somewhere in the middle of it, I almost gave up on it entirely. This video is about that build, but it's also about what happened when my own mental health struggles started mirroring Max's fight against Vecna in Stranger Things Season 4.

If you've ever worked toward something for years and felt like it didn't matter, you'll probably relate to this one.

To recreate Hawkins National Lab as accurately as possible, I analyzed every screenshot I could find from the Netflix series and studied the real-life location—the old Georgia Mental Health Institute building at Emory University's Briarcliff campus. I gave myself a month to finish it before Season 4 dropped. Spoiler: that didn't go as planned.

What started as a detailed Minecraft build timelapse turned into something more personal. Eleven's and Max's stories in Season 4 reminded me of my own experiences building a YouTube channel from scratch, and I realized their journey paralleled mine in ways I wasn't expecting. So this video goes there—into the parts of my story I don't usually talk about.

Fair warning: this gets real toward the end. If you're just here for the build showcase, you'll get that. But if you stay through the whole thing, we're going to talk about failure, giving up, and what it actually means to keep going when that voice in your head tells you you're not good enough.

SUBSCRIBE TO ME
https://www.youtube.com/SWChris?sub_c...

WORLD DOWNLOAD
https://www.swchris.com/minecraft/haw...

THINGS MENTIONED OR USED IN THE VIDEO
Industrial Torches Resource Pack
https://www.planetminecraft.com/textu...

Harkenburg Resource Pack
https://www.planetminecraft.com/textu...

BSL Shaders
https://bitslablab.com/bslshaders/#do...

VoiceMod "The Spellcaster" Voice
https://www.voicemod.net/blog/how-to-...

John M Nardo's Blog
http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/20...
http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/20...
http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/20...

Other Reference Material
https://filming.emory.edu/Locations/i...
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/a...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/the_mov...
https://www.ajc.com/entertainment/boo...
http://www.whsc.emory.edu/_pubs/momen...
(I left out the links to the "breaking and entering" YouTube videos for obvious reasons, and I'm not sure they'd want credit anyway. They can be found through search though.)

OTHER MINECRAFT TIMELAPSES I MADE
Jabba's Palace from The Book of Boba Fett
   • I Spent 152 Hours Recreating JABBA'S PALAC...  

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☺ ABOUT ME
I make Minecraft time lapses and digital art. Watch your favorite franchises become blocky.

I spent a decade as a kid building stuff in virtual worlds in my free time. Now I'm helping Minecrafters become creatives so they can discover their purpose and make the world better by putting their art out into it.