The Minecraft Map of the World

In his short story 'On Exactitude in Science' Borges famously imagined a one-to-one scale Minecraft map of the world (or something like that). This dream of a huge planet sized Minecraft map of the Earth becomes a little more real every day. Using the data portals of mapping authorities around the world you can create Minecraft maps based on real world locations.

In France the Institut Géographique National has released Minecraft a la Carte, which allows you to create Minecraft worlds based on real locations in France. Use the Minecraft a la Carte interactive map to navigate to the location data that you wish to download and post your request. After a few hours you should then receive an e-mail from IGN with a link to download the data in Minecraft.


If you want to build a Mincraft map of UK locations then you can grab data from the British Geological Survey or the Ordnance Survey.

The British Geological Survey has released a Minecraft world using the Survey's geology data of mainland Great Britain and surrounding islands. You can download the BGS's world for Minecraft at the GB Geology with Minecraft page on the BGS website. This page also includes a Google Map which allows you to explore the BGS Minecraft world of Great Britain with Google's popular interactive mapping interface.

Minecrafting with OS OpenData is a Minecraft map of mainland Great Britain and surrounding islands that anyone can download and explore in Minecraft. The OS Minecraft world was built with OS OpenData, which is Ordnance Survey data that is freely available under an attribution-only license.

The OS Minecraft world of Great Britain consists of more than 22 billion blocks representing over 220,000 square kilometres. Each block in the world represents 50 square metres. To help you navigate this 3d world the Ordnance Survey website has published a list of Minecraft world co-ordinates to some well known UK locations.


SparseWorld is creating huge Minecraft maps of New York and other cities around the world. These Minecraft worlds are created using elevation, landcover and orthography data from USGS, 3d buildings from Google Earth and street mapping data from OpenStreetMap.