Minecraft Scale Version Of The Earth Is Slowly Taking Shape

Even before there were such things as quarantines and shelter-in-place orders, Minecraft players have already been building painstaking recreations of both fictional as well as real-world locations and structures. Now that there is more time available, one can only imagine the out of this world ideas some would come up with. You don't have to travel that far, though, as our very world itself is already a source of inspiration as this new project to create a 1:1 version of the Earth in Minecraft demonstrates.

Building the whole world, even if just its surface, brick by brick is an inconceivable task and, fortunately, YouTuber PippenFTS had two mods to help him maintain his sanity. Cubic Chunks modified Minecraft chunks to 16x16x16 cubes, practically giving users infinite space and bypassing the world's 255-meter height limit. Terra 1-1, on the other hand, used geographical map data to recreate surface details in Minecraft blocks.

The result is more or less an approximation of the Earth as if you took out a flat geographical map and converted every detail into a block, complete with height and depth. As it is a 1:1 scale, standing on top of Mt. Everest in Minecraft would pretty much look the same as if you were standing on top of the real one. Except more blocky, of course.

It's hardly a finished project, though, as the two mods were not enough to fully recreate the world as we know it. Man-made structures, for example, were treated as land formations, causing the pyramids of Egypt to look more like giant dollops of mud. Even more curious is the phenomenon of never going around the world because the Minecraft world is practically a flat map that goes off into infinity at the borders.

As such, there is still a lot of work to be done to get the finer details right but the solid foundations are already there. The project has definitely garnered a lot of attention, not to mention financial support, to recreate our Blue Marble into a flat one.