Those who have been watching Minecraft content for some time may remember YogLabs – a YouTube series made by the Yogscast that ran from 2012 to 2016, with each episode now having over a million views. Now, the Yogscast have teased its return. We spoke to Yogscast co-founder Lewis about bringing this iconic series back.
For those less familiar with YogLabs – or for those that need a refresher – it’s a comedy sci-fi series set in a state-of-the-art science facility, following Yogscast founders Lewis (a.k.a. Xephos) and Simon (a.k.a. Honeydew) as they test out bizarre and often dangerous new inventions and experiments. It acts as both a Minecraft mod showcase series as well as having semi-scripted storylines.
It’s been nine years since the last episode – so why bring it back now? “YogLabs has always been living rent-free in the back of our minds as a fun time that is relatively easy to do again,” Lewis tells us. “There are so many good Minecraft mods. We’ve been doing Jaffa Factory 2 on Duncan’s channel and it’s a complete world of difference. Minecraft modding has come so far in nine years that things like the Create Mod make Minecraft feel like a whole new game. We’ve been having a blast with Create and there’s so much in there, from the trains, to all the different mechanics of throwing objects around from one machine into another machine.”
“YogLabs has come about because Harry was playing around in Create, making some sort of setpiece moments for the Jaffa Factory,” Lewis continues. “He was like ‘I could easily make a YogLabs episode out of this’ and so it kind of spiralled from there. We had a talk and we realised that we could probably make a few episodes focusing on different mods – and that was essentially what YogLabs was supposed to be. YogLabs was supposed to be a mod spotlight hidden in a little laboratory setting. We did YogLabs before Rick and Morty, and I like to think we inspired them, honestly. Simon is Morty, I’m Rick… well, maybe we’re both a bit of each of them.”
It’s now been over seventeen years since Simon and Lewis started making YouTube content together, though the original YogLabs series came in Yogscast’s “golden era” at the peak of the channel’s popularity. “I think YogLabs shows off Yogscast at its best,” Lewis says. “For the OG YogLabs series we had great builds, we had great mods, and great community input. You know, these incredible things that have been made and that have had loads of time and effort gone into the building of them – these are either built by us or by Yogscast community people – and then Simon and me just having a really good time. It’s strange how Simon is always so reliably having a good time when he’s just allowed to mess around in Minecraft – that’s very golden era Yogscast content as far as I’m concerned.”
“It’s strangely so familiar, right?” Lewis says. “Doing this new Yogscast series is so familiar to the first one we did or the ones we used to do. It just all kind of comes back to you and we just slip into the dynamic, and Simon messes around and is naughty. I think it’s just a great podium for Simon to be funny as well – like I’m there trying to make sure ‘okay we need to go to this place next and this is how this thing works’ and Simon is just constantly cracking jokes at every stage of the process. It’s such a relief honestly because I think it could be so much drier if we weren’t enjoying it so much – that’s what really makes it shine through is the authenticity of having a lot of fun in it.”
“I think the original YogLabs episodes were a bit disparate and sometimes very random, very eclectic,” Lewis tells us. “A couple of ones that I really enjoyed were the Raiders of the Lost Archives. That was sort of peak Yogs for me, where we’re going around exploring the facility and it’s full of Indiana Jones references and silly stuff, and we’re not really necessarily even showing off a mod – we’re just pootling around in a mysterious universe with loads of weird stuff to look at.”
Some types of mods work a lot better with the show format than others. “It has to be visual and silly,” Lewis tells us. “I think Create is brilliant, but it’s also very silly – it’s got lots of swinging arms and you can build a train that’s sort of hanging out of the air. Minecraft is at its best when you have to embrace the glitchiness and the jankiness. Anything very ambitious or very weird is always good as well.”
“One of the things we’ve got is a skateboarding mod which is amazing, but also so glitchy,” Lewis teases of the new series. “The first time we tested it, every time Simon jumped on the skateboard, he just appeared stuck in the opposite wall. There’ll be so many outtakes from these bits where we’re trying to dig him back out of the wall and then try and do it again.”
“The episodes are all very loose, and they’re not really scripted or planned, but we have a rough path that we take Simon through, and we just hope that it doesn’t break too much,” Lewis continues. “We have had to restart the server three or four times because of things he did when we recorded the final episode – literally as a direct result of things Simon chose to do that we indicated beforehand that maybe he shouldn’t do. It did mean rolling back the server, but hopefully we can cut around the inconsistencies there and people won’t notice.”
Despite the time gap, the new YogLabs series should be very familiar to those who watched the original series. “We want them to feel like they’re the same videos,” Lewis says. “You should be able to just pick up where where you left off and nothing’s changed really. The coffee machine is still broken, but not for long… there’s a whole episode featuring my favourite coffee machine. Harry built an incredibly elaborate working coffee machine in Create. It grinds up the beans and steams the milk and squirts it out. We take it a step further than that, which you’ll have to watch in the episode – it’s a good one.”
In addition to the main series, there are also some extras to look forward to. “Sparkles was the old OG Yogscast sound engineer who wrote all of our original songs back in the day,” Lewis explains. “He’s helping me to write some songs that go along with the series, and they’re a bit weird but a lot of fun. It’s been fun to work with Sparkles again – he is a brilliant man. In the days of AI songs and terrible Taylor Swift albums, we have got handcrafted stupid comedy Minecraft songs coming your way in 2025.”
Another extra in the works outside of Minecraft is a puzzle-adventure game on Steam, made by developer Sergio a.k.a. “Four White Cats”, who is a fan of the Yogscast. The game, “YogLabs: Testing Initiative” will be released publicly for free on Steam on 24th October. “It’s a half an hour long experience full of references and silly voices and jokes,” Lewis tells us. “It’s entirely fan-made – we’re not involved at all – but it’s honestly quite fun, and we’re happy to support this and other awesome stuff made by community members. He’s clearly put a labour of love into this game, and it’s just astonishing really the effort that’s gone into this.”
The first episode of the new season of YogLabs will premiere on the Yogscast’s YouTube channel next week, on Thursday 16th October.
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