Scale minecraft

Seeing as nobody's going outside at the moment, it would be pretty great to have an entire version of Earth to explore in a video game, right?

Enter PippenFTS, a YouTuber who claims to have made a 1:1 scale version of the Earth in Minecraft for the very first time. It's been made possible through the use of two mods, Terra 1-to-1 and Cubic Chunks. As explained by PippenFTS, Minecraft normally has a height limit of 255m, which would have made full-scale Earth terrain impossible. Using Cubic Chunks "changes the shape of Minecraft chunks to 16x16x16 cube, giving you infinite build depth in both vertical directions".

"With the Cubic Chunks mod breaking Minecraft's vertical limitations, we can now experience the Earth in Minecraft, just as it is, with no downscaling of any kind."

The next stage is applying the Terra 1-1 mod, which takes information from geographical data archives (such as Google Maps) and converts it into Minecraft blocks. The video shows a number of vast landmarks realised in Minecraft, such as Mount Everest, the Grand Canyon, and Half Dome from Yosemite National Park in the US.

The problem is that this is only the first step to creating a fully-accurate world: human-generated structures are rebuilt by the mod as part of the landscape, so Egypt's pyramids just become... a big pile of mud. Similarly, the peaks of some mountains which should have snow are currently bare, while glaciers which should contain ice register as just snowy terrain. And at the South Pole, the world border merely shows an endless snowy wasteland - as the Minecraft model of Earth doesn't exactly curve.

To solve these issues, PippenFTS has started a collective project called "Build The Earth" to get other Minecraft players to decorate the Earth with man-made structures, and also create an edge for the borders, fulfilling the centuries-old myth of being able to sail off the edge of the Earth. PippenFTS is hoping players will download the mods, rebuild specific areas in 1 to 1 scale, and then join them all together at the end using map editors. It's a massive undertaking, but PippenFTS has started up a Discord server to help coordinate efforts, and is contributing by building Seattle. "Hardware limitations are ours, and certainly my, main obstacle towards achieving the dream of viewing Minecraft terrain thousands of miles in each direction from the top of Mount Rainier, but one day this obstacle will be overcome", PippenFTS added.

It's going to be one major building project - but the initative has already received a significant amount of attention, establishing its own subreddit and patreon to cover server costs. People are already contributing models of universities, Manhattan skyscrapers and even their own streets. Should you want to contribute, make sure to watch the video for instructions on how to install the mods and get involved. It should be a fun one to watch - even if the full project is never actually completed.

As mentioned in my previous blog post, it will be possible to choose between these different scales:

• 1:200
• 1:100
• 1:50
• 1:25
• 1:33
• 1:10

Smallest scale: 1:200

This scales are somehow limited to the progress of the map creation. Since the Minecraft maps are stored in 512×512 block large sections (called region files), the smallest size for a single Tile is 512×512 blocks.

At the Equator this corresponds to a scale of about 1:217 and at 23.5° N and 23.5° S (Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn) it corresponds to a scale of exactly 1:200. For easier use I will stick to the scales at 23.5°.

Now we have the smallest scale of 1:200 due to the region files, but what about the larger scales?

You might think that a scale of 1:1 is the biggest and best.

Biggest scale: 1:10

In reality, however, it is not useful to create a map on a scale of 1:1. This has several reasons:

First of all: Minecraft has a view distance of 32 chunks, with a chunck consisting of 16×16 blocks, this corresponds to a view distance of 512 blocks. (With some mods you can increase this value, but we will stick to the vanilla experience.)

If we take a look at the following table, we will see that a person of about 2 meters height is visible in a 5 km radius (if the earth is a perfect sphere). In Minecraft, we can only see the area of 500 meters around us, which is roughly one tenth of the real view distance. And keep in mind: higher mountains are visible from much further distances.

As a result, almost the entire map would look like a super-flat world that goes up or down a block every now and then. SUPER BORING!

Secondly, the exported image used in WorldPainter to create one Tile (which corresponds to 1° longitude and 1° latitude) would be about 100000×100000 pixels and this size can’t be handled with WorldPainter.

Furthermore, the accuracy of the elevation map is not good enough to represent the earth 1:1. The horizontal resolution is only 30 m and the vertical accuracy is about 10 m.

Vertical scale

One could imagine that the vertical scale corresponds exactly to the horizontal scale. But there are good reasons to deviate from this assumption.

At a scale of 1:200, Mount Everst, the largest mountain on earth with 8848 m would only be about 44 blocks high.

At a scale of 1:100 it would be 88 blocks high. With the water level at 62, that makes an ingame height of 150 blocks. At a scale of 1:50 the Mount Everest would be 239 (177+62) blocks high. Ideal for the minecraft limit of 255 blocks.

For larger scales, such as 1:25 and 1:10, the Minecraft limit is simply not enough. At least not for the whole planet. For Central Europe, for example, Mont Blanc (4810 m) would be 255 blocks high at 1:25 scale. And for Great Britain even 1:10 would be possible without mods. But for the rest of the planet, i’m currently experimenting with the mod CubicChunks, which has a theoretical build limit of 8388608 blocks.

Sicily

To get a small comparison of the scales, I generated 4 maps of the island Sicily.

Full size gallery:

Here is another comparison for the city of Palermo in 1:25 and 1:50 scale (vertical scale both 1:25). You can clearly see the famous mountain / plateau at the cost. But you also notice the checkerboard pattern at the terrain, which is caused by the poor resolution of the source image material (globcover, only 300 m resolution).

Full size gallery:

Best Java code snippets using net.minecraft.client.renderer.GlStateManager.scale(Showing top 20 results out of 675)

We are recreating the entire planet in Minecraft

Our mission is to fully recreate the entire Earth in Minecraft at a 1:1 scale. One block in Minecraft equates to roughly one meter in the real world, meaning that this project will fully recreate the size of our planet. Anyone is able to join us and contribute to the largest and most expansive build project to ever have been attempted in Minecraft. Every language, nationality, and regional difference is accepted and regarded as our greatest attribute as we continue our journey to unite all of Humanity's greatest achievements into a single Minecraft world.

What have we built so far?

How can you help?

1. Join our Discord chat server

We use a Discord chat server to communicate with each other about our project. Join it now using the following button:

Join the Discord

2. Log in to My BuildTheEarth

My BuildTheEarth is your personal section on this website. This is the place where you will upload your work to the project.

Log in using Discord

3. Join a Build Team, or start building by yourself

On your My BuildTheEarth page, you can join a build team, or apply for a solo build. Build teams work on projects like cities, while solo builds are better suited to smaller villages.

Join a build teamApply for a solo build

4. Upload your work to the website

When your build is done, you can upload it to the website on your My BuildTheEarth page. We will copy your build into our master world, which contains everyone's builds.

Upload my world

Building the entire world in Minecraft on a 1:1 scale seems like it should be possible. It's not, though: Minecraft has limitations, most importantly its 256 block height limitation, which won't exactly allow the construction of, say, Mount Everest. But with the use of two important mods, one YouTuber has not only avoided that height limitation, but has also automated the process of mapping the world.

In the video above, PippenFTS explains how. Using the mod Cubic Chunks, it's possible to effectively remove the game's height limitation. Meanwhile, Terra 1-to-1 does what the name implies: it draws from map data, chiefly Google Earth, in order to closely recreate actual real world landscapes. 

As a result, PippenFTS claims to have generated a full 1:1 map of the world in Minecraft. Examples used in the video include the Grand Canyon and Mount Everest, and it's definitely true: you've never seen terrain on this scale in a video game. It's not without its problems, though. Human made structures, in cases where their dimensions are recorded by mapping services, make use of normal Minecraft terrain blocks, meaning they don't look as they should - even by Minecraft standards. That means if a more realistic model is going to exist, it needs the help of human hands.

So PippenFTS has started an initiative called Build The Earth. The hope is that hundreds of others will help optimise the map, with each user specialising in their own chunk of the world. There's a Discord server if you want to get involved.

Cheers, Eurogamer.