I won't pretend to understand half of what Minecraft players do - giant redstone computer that can somehow run Doom? Sure, whatever. A working AI pet that you have to feed and play with? Grand. I can make a nice little medieval shack with a small manual farm. But it compels me, and the new snapshot continues to do so. Combined with a server-side mod, has allowed for one player to create working physics. It's not blender, and it's not a third-party addon. I'll try to explain it by using PatboxPL's own words as well as seemingly in-the-know commenters, since to be entirely honest, I've no clue how any of it works. "Yes this is real," Xeterios said. "New snapshot added the block display entity, which allows you to put a block with custom data in your world."Display entities don't have physics or collisions, as one user pointed out, but PatboxPL replied, "They don't, I just added it (via rayon library + polymer). Still works with vanilla client (so ideal for MC servers)!" This means that the server handles the physics, so the client doesn't have to download anything or fiddle with mods. That beingn said, it looks a little funky if you get too close.
In one of the clips shared, they spawned several blocks that gradually stacked on top of each other. Patox then pushed them over. Normally, you'd hit a literal wall and the blocks wouldn't move - even blocks with gravity like sand and gravel don't interact with the player, they just drop when there's nothing underneath them. In this case, the wooden blocks collapse and spin around like they would in real-life. However, Patbox phases through them slightly, as collision isn't 100 percent perfect.
Not only does Patbox nudging them cause them to fall down the hill, but blowing them up with TNT sends them all flying into the sky in different directions, before they fall back down. There's a clear performance dip, with a little bit of FPS stutter both in-game and with the blocks themselves, but it works - and it's pretty impressive for vanilla Minecraft. The logistics of this, and what it can be used for practically, aren't clear, but at the least, it's a neat effect.
Performance is a concern, however, as Patbox does clarify that they wouldn't use this for bigger-scale projects, keeping it to smaller demos akin to this for now. But over on Reddit, they said that there are plennty of new possibilities for severs and datapacks to play with now. Perhaps we could see buildings constructed out of these display entities, blown up in real-time, and there's even the possibility of using shulkers to add proper collision. It's all very impressive, but again, don't ask me to explain it. As far as I'm concerned, it's magic.