The Borgian kilomatrix is the name for a structure I've decided to start building. It's a structure that's designed to be big, and ugly, and intrusive, but also functional; it's ugly scaffolding for a base or a city. It's also a design that's easy and repetitive to build; you just need the space for it, and the materials to build it.
It's called a kilomatrix because there are 1000 cells in it, 10 floors of 100 cells in a 10-by-10 grid, and the matrix part comes from it being a regular 3D grid of pillars and beams. (And it's called Borgian after the Borg of Star Trek, who have ugly cube-shaped spaceships.)
My design uses a cell width and height of 2 blocks, with 1 block pillars and beams delineating them. (I call this a "2-block-wide grid", but I can see this being confusing; I count the space between the grid lines.) Each repeating unit of the structure thus is a 3-by-3-by-3 cube, with 7 building blocks and 20 free blocks.
These units are then stacked together horizontally and vertically, and then the matrix is capped off at three sides by an extra grid of building blocks.
The kilomatrix occupies a space of 31 by 31 by 31 blocks. 31 blocks isn't a tremendous distance to walk horizontally, but it is a pretty tall height for a structure, and so, although it isn't a skyscraper or super-tall tower, it is still big enough to be an imposing presence. The kilomatrix can be chunk-aligned to fit in exactly 2 by 2 chunks. If done so, and the topmost grid of the kilomatrix is built with one color of blocks, then the kilomatrix will show up on the most zoomed out map, as four pixels.
The short answer is that a full kilomatrix, with a 2-block-wide grid, requires 8591 cubes of building materials. That's 134 stacks of 64 blocks, plus 15 extra. This rounds up to 135 inventory slots taken, which divides evenly into 15 rows of 9: one kilomatrix requires 5 full chests of materials (minus 49 items from one stack).
The detailed calculation can be thought of in many ways, but the way I've approached it is by layers:
The same result can also be found if you think about having 1000 cells of 7 blocks each (for 7000 blocks), then you add in the missing sides (10×10 cells to cap off, 5 blocks in each cap, 500 blocks per side, and 3 sides gives you 1500), then you add in the three missing edges (3 edges of 30 blocks each = 90), then add one more block for the final missing corner: 7000+1500+90+1=8591.
Like mentioned earlier, 8591 breaks down into 134×64+15, and 135÷9=15: two and a half double-chests. But if you were to build a kilomatrix out of planks, you would only need a quarter of this amount of logs. 8591 doesn't divide evenly into 4, but 8592 does, so you'll be left with one extra plank. 8592÷4=2148, and 2148=33×64+36.
2½ double chests of materials is quite a lot of materials (at least in survival), and the 2-block-wide matrix is quite dense. Therefore, I also have calculated the material needs for what if the same sized structure was half as dense: instead of a 2-wide grid, we use a 5-wide grid. This 5-wide grid can then be densified and upgraded into a full kilomatrix, as need be and materials become available. The half-kilomatrix requires 2916 blocks.
The calculation follows the same pattern as before, but now there are only 125 cells in a 5-by-5-by-5 grid. With the first approach, G=6×6+6×5×5+5×6×5=336 and P=6×6×5=180, and 6G+5p=2916. With the second approach, each cell is 16 blocks (5+5+5+1), all 125 cells are 2000 blocks, each of the extra faces are 5×5×(5+5+1)=275, each extra edge is still 30, and there's still a leftover corner, so 2000+3×275+3×30+1=2916.
In any case, 2916=45×64+36, and 46÷9=5+1⁄9; just less than one double-chestful of materials. And in the plank case: 2916÷4=729 and 729=11×64+25; this is 1+⅓ inventory rows.
The difference in blocks between a half-kilomatrix and a full kilomatrix is 8591−2916=5675. In stacks, 5675 is 88×64+43, and 89÷9=9+8⁄9. In planks, 5675=1418+¾, and 1419=22×64+11.
The upgrading of a half-kilomatrix into a full kilomatrix can be thought of as taking two parts: firstly, upgrading the faces (walls) of each 5-by-5-by-5 cell, by adding 9 blocks in a cross shape on each face, for a total of 6×9=54 blocks; and secondly, adding in the internal beams and pillars in a 3D cross to divide the single 5-by-5-by-5 open space into eight 2-by-2-by-2 spaces, using 13 blocks. Upgrading a single cell, from scratch, thus needs 67 blocks, but of course neighboring cells will use fewer blocks overall because of the wall they share.
This upgrading can be done piecemeal. For instance, every floor could be subdivided, but leaving internal cells unfilled, or the outer walls of the kilomatrix could be subdivided. Each plane in each of the three dimensions is independent when it comes to subdividing the faces of the cells. Each plane of 5 by 5 faces has 25 faces in total, and each face needs 9 blocks to subdivide it from 5 by 5 to 2 by 2. Therefore, upgrading a single plane of faces from 5-by-5 to 2-by-2 requires 5²×9=225 blocks; 225=3×64+33; 225÷4=56+¼.
But, of course, the kilomatrix is itself stackable. Each unit of the kilomatrix is 30³ blocks in volume (and there's one extra layer on three sides to cap off the empty cells), so 100 kilomatrices stacked into a 10-by-10-by-10 arrangement would produce a structure that's 301 by 301 by 301 blocks in size. There are a million cells in such a structure, hence the "mega" in megamatrix.
The massiveness of such a structure is mainly in its height and its uniformity, because on the whole, 300 by 300 blocks isn't a massive surface area (it's 19 chunks long and wide); it would fill up the smallest world map, but would only be a fraction on the most zoomed out one, and it only takes about 70 seconds to walk across it. But in height, it would dwarf every mountain range in the game.
300 blocks is in fact too high for the default height limit (you can only build about 250 blocks above sea level, the build limit is at Y=319 currently), but if you excavate a huge pit, or just dig the matrices underground, you can fit the megamatrix into the world before you even hit the deepslate layer. You could also build a megamatrix on the floor of a large deep ocean.
To calculate the material usage of the megamatrix, we first calculate the material usage of the "unit kilomatrix", without the single end walls capping it off. The unit kilomatrix is simply 1000 cells of 7 blocks each, 7000 blocks. We have 1000 unit kilomatrices, for 7000000 blocks, onto which we add the three capping end walls and the edges. Each wall is a 100 by 100 grid of 5-block cells, for 50000 blocks; the edges are 300 blocks long each; and finally there's the single missing corner block. Summed together, the megamatrix requires 7150901 blocks; this is 111732 stacks of 64, plus an extra 53 blocks; these require 2069 double chests to store, plus 7 extra stacks.
The megamatrix would be a tremendous undertaking to build in survival mode (or even in creative mode, without automatized tools), and I won't even be starting to build one. I can see myself stacking a few kilomatrices on top of each other or side by side, but the full 301-cubed block is ridiculously massive. But: I don't think it's at all impossible, for a very dedicated group of players (and their bots) to mine the required materials and excavate the required space, for a true megamatrix to be built.
Posted 2026-01-10, last modified 2026-01-24.