Minecraft Super Mario Galaxy 2

Running Super Mario Galaxy 2 in Minecraft

The Minecraft Super Mario Galaxy 2 project is a custom map built by the community that attempts to recreate the level design, power-ups, and mechanics of the Nintendo game inside Minecraft's engine. It's not an official port — Nintendo doesn't make those — it's a bunch of dedicated builders who spent months placing blocks, wiring redstone, and scripting behaviors to approximate what the original game does. I've been working with large custom Minecraft builds for years, and I'll be upfront: this project is ambitious but deeply imperfect. The recreation is impressive for what it attempts, but it does not play like Super Mario Galaxy 2. It plays like a Minecraft map that remembers what Super Mario Galaxy 2 looked like. The gap between the two matters more than you might expect when you actually pick it up.

Minecraft Super Mario Galaxy 2

The map works by converting Galaxy 2's planetoids into floating Minecraft chunks, using a combination of command blocks, scoreboards, and custom entities to handle things like gravity changes, star bits collection, and Yoshi mechanics. Gravity in the original game is directional — you walk on the surface of spherical planets — which Minecraft doesn't natively support. The builders got around this by dividing each planet into quadrants, each with its own gravity vector controlled by a command block loop that constantly checks your position and applies upward velocity in the correct direction. Power-ups like the Cloud, Tanooki, and Ice suits are handled through inventory slots combined with custom NBT tags. When you touch a counterpart in the map, a command block triggers a scoreboard objective that swaps your armor slot contents and gives you a particle effect to indicate the transition. It's not elegant, but it functions. The Yoshi mechanics are the hardest part. You ride Yoshi by touching a specific spawn point, which replaces your player model with a custom entity. Eating enemies and performing ground pounds requires very precise command block timing. I found that the ground pound detection has a window of roughly 0.3 seconds from when you press jump after descending — miss that and you just do a normal double jump, which isn't even a thing in the original game. One thing most people don't mention is the performance hit. Running all those gravity-quadrant command loops on top of every planet simultaneously is brutal on a standard machine. I ran this on a Ryzen 5 3600 with 16GB RAM and an RTX 3060, and the frame rate dropped to 15-20 fps in galaxies with more than three active planets. The workaround I settled on was disabling non-essential visual effects through the map's settings command — there's a /smg2 settings menu hidden in one of the early levels — and setting the render distance to 6 chunks. That brought me to a stable 45 fps. It's still not great, but it's playable. If you're on integrated graphics or anything older than a 2019 GPU, you're going to struggle. There's no way around it.

Another counter-intuitive detail: the map uses a custom resource pack that replaces textures and sounds to approximate the Galaxy 2 aesthetic. Without it, the map looks like a normal Minecraft world with Mario-themed blocks slapped on top. The resource pack is included in the download, but you have to install it manually in most cases. Some versions auto-apply it, but the auto-apply broke in a recent Minecraft update, so check whether your version handles it before you dig in. I learned this the hard way after downloading a copy that launched everything in vanilla textures and wondering why I couldn't find anything recognizable. The controls map is mostly faithful to the original if you use a controller. Keyboard and mouse works but feels awkward because the camera rotation in Galaxy 2 is fundamentally different from Minecraft's default camera. The map does remap some keys, but you'll spend the first hour adjusting sensitivity and dead zones regardless. I ended up switching to an Xbox controller and binding the C-stick to camera control separately from movement. Took about twenty minutes of fiddling. Downloading the map is straightforward. The primary source is Planet Minecraft or the Minecraft forum, where the lead builder posts updates and version numbers. Make sure you're downloading the latest build — the project has gone through several major overhauls, and older versions have broken physics or missing levels. The current stable build requires Minecraft Java Edition 1.16.5 or later. Bedrock Edition has its own separate version that's further behind in development.

The biggest limitation you need to understand is that not every level from Galaxy 2 is included. The map covers roughly half the game's planets, and the ones that are there sometimes skip cutscenes, dialogue, or secondary objectives. The builders made conscious choices about what to prioritize, usually picking the most iconic galaxies first. If you're looking for a complete one-to-one conversion, you won't find it. No one has built it yet, and honestly, it may never get built given the hours of work each planet requires. If you just want to experience the feeling of moving through those worlds without dealing with the technical headaches, there's an alternative path. The emulator route using Yuzu or Ryujinx with the original SMG2 ROM gives you the actual game. The Minecraft version is a proof of concept and a fan tribute, not a replacement. Both approaches have their place, but they serve very different purposes. The Minecraft build is worth trying if you want something to tinker with, share with friends, or modify yourself. It's not worth trying if you expect the exact experience of the original game.