Do you ever look at something beautifully and functionally designed and think to yourself, “I could build this myself, but probably terribly and ineffectively”? Then you’ve probably been spending too much time discussing Minecraft on Reddit. The marvellous minds over at Minecraft’s Reddit community recently set themselves a design challenge with an inefficient twist: who could make the smoothest stairs in Minecraft?

The mission of these staircase enthusiasts was simple: create a set of stairs that have the smallest increase in height between each step. They had to try to get to the height of a single stair block while using as many blocks as possible. Wasteful, bizarre, and slightly stupid… this competition was born to be on Minecraft.net!