Like other fantasy-themed live-service games such as Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online, Genshin Impact has a highly customisable housing system. With it, players can craft furniture using materials they’ve gathered, they can grow flowers for use in potions, and they can even create little rock gardens in the generous amounts of space that the game provides. I love fiddling with the elaborate furniture sets, but I don’t think much about the rocks. One Chinese content creator has perhaps been thinking too much about the rocks, but the results of their obsession are incredible. They’ve been building massive dinosaur sculptures and uploading the videos online.
This spring, the version 1.5 update of Genshin Impact added a robust housing system to the game. By entering a magical teapot called the Serenitea, players could customise their personal subspace with various furniture items, trees, and animals. Video sharing site Bilibili user “Roasted Coins Selling For Three and a Half” (烤硬币3块半) took advantage of a special clipping glitch to assemble their beautiful monstrosities. Take a look:
As a player who spends a lot of time in the housing system, I can tell that these sculptures must have been deeply frustrating to build on a technical level. The artist had to navigate a clipping glitch which would require them to wiggle an item until it allowed them to place it close to another object. Additionally, the rocks are time-gated. You can’t just stock up on materials at the marketplace, like one might in Final Fantasy XIV. Acquiring the necessary resources for these creations takes serious time.
For instance, there are at least ten orange crystals on this sculpture of the Genshin miniboss Azhdaha, and players can only purchase three per week. Which means that Roasted Coins spent at least a month gathering materials to decorate its spiky armour. That’s true dedication to craft.
Videos showing off the dinosaur sculptures are among their most popular, but Roasted Coins also creates sculptures of fictional creatures such as the nine-tailed fox, the titan from Attack on Titan, the Blue-Eyes White Dragon from Yu-Gi-Oh, and King Kong.
But even a brilliant artisan like Roasted Coins has their woes. They bemoaned on their stegosaurus video: “miHoYo, can you make a symmetrical stone?” While uneven rocks can be visually appealing when viewed from a distance, they’re not the most ideal dinosaur construction materials. Not that I can really tell, because the artist uses the existing rocks so effectively. It took me a couple of seconds to notice that the lower jaw of the tyrannosaurus rex sculpture was actually a hot spring.
Of course, all of these sculptures are only possible because the developers of Genshin have actively decided not to fix the clipping glitch. For the sake of creators like Roasted Coins, I’m hoping that decision is permanent.
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