If you are only interested in 1m scale, maybe. Even the open satellite imagery goes to 20x that resolution, though, and of course there are small features that can't be resolved even at 5cm resolution, like survey marks. And even at the 1m scale, they've done a bad job transforming the source data to Minecraft, there's tons of errors if you look and most of detailed features (like road centrelines) are faked.
4ggr0 · 2026-10-26 09:24:21 UTC
almost want to download this just so that i can put furniture into the apartment i live in :D nice project.
koziserek · 2026-10-26 09:48:48 UTC
I assure you will be better served with SweetHome3d
BTW, claude can output sh3d for you if you feed it with pdf containing floor plan, half of struggle removed, fun part (re)designing the house layout easily kicked-off!
4ggr0 · 2026-10-26 10:02:16 UTC
sh3d seems like an actual CAD-like tool to actually plan your furniture. what i find fun about this minecraft map is to make my actual home my base in the game, try to make it looo like my home and then just play minecraft while exploring the surroundings i know already.
then again, every building is white and basic, so not that nice for sightseeing.
then again, i could blow up my annoying neighbors house with a couple of TNT blocks (in minecraft!)
xandrius · 2026-10-26 15:13:58 UTC
I also recommend sh3d to do exactly what you needed: got the plans of my home (straight out pdfs) fed them to an LLM and got the 3D version of it in minutes.
Then started plopping in furniture and such, wonderful experience. Then you can navigate your home as a "visitor" to get a better feel. Definitely more realistic than Minecraft for actual planning.
4ggr0 · 2026-10-26 16:29:22 UTC
i think you and the previous person both approach it from a different angle than me. haven't played minecraft in a while and as a kid i used to try to build buildings i knew, and then play minecraft with them as my base. so go hunting, start farming, search for diamonds etc.
sh3d removes the whole game-aspect and acts as a room planning tool, which is of course also neat, but i have no need for it. i also don't need to navigate my home as a visitor in a software, as i can just navigate it in meatspace.
but, if or when i move, i think i'll actually come back to sh3d! just don't see the point right now. maybe claude can help me mod sh3d so i can fight off mobs with a bow and arrow, or blow it up with some TNT :D
ShadowOfThePit · 2026-10-26 09:26:15 UTC
Funky stuff, nice use of government data.
It would be fascinating to see how my house and town is rendered in-game. Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O
> For legal reasons I sell all of Switzerland only to people who live in Switzerland.
Why tho? Something about the data itself, or because you don't want to bother with international purchases?
wmanley · 2026-10-26 09:47:45 UTC
> Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O
Yeah, that’s a travesty. To be authentically Swiss it should cost at least 150 CHF.
amiga386 · 2026-10-26 09:51:41 UTC
Perhaps the description of its file format is 150 CHF
No, you download it then get an invoice in the mail with the bill, 30 days to pay.
evrimoztamur · 2026-10-26 09:33:18 UTC
It's not the most pleasant that you get the constructed buildings embedded into the map as crappy voxel approximations. Would be sweeter to have the terrain only. Also, total LLM goop.
herbst · 2026-10-26 09:35:34 UTC
That's the actual data it contains houses and structures
Lukas_Skywalker · 2026-10-26 12:26:39 UTC
The Lidar point cloud has a classification attribute that lets you filter the data. You can take the class=2 points to get the ground [1].
Point clouds usually are not equidistant or arranged on a regular grid. You are right that filtering Lidar data to only get the terrain does create gaps in the cloud. The conversion of the point cloud to a surface does deal with holes though (that's the whole goal), and it doesn't matter if some are larger than others. There are different methods to do so, for example delaunay tetrahedrization [1], or ball-pivoting [2]. You do get flat areas though, but that's often a good compromise to make.
I wonder how much electricity just gets flushed down the toilet making this stuff.
Rapzid · 2026-10-26 10:21:24 UTC
I never got being bothered too much by this.
Renewables and grid investments come from increased demand and money flowing into the industry..
The big problem I have is what's seeming to shape up in Texas; massive off-grid and on-site generation using fossil fuels. This pollutes and bypasses grid and renewable investment.
lotsofpulp · 2026-10-26 11:33:52 UTC
Is it in a different category than the electricity (or broadly speaking, any increase in entropy) flushed down the toilet making reality TV shows, or nonsense Tik Tok videos, or a mission to overthrow a government that doesn't bend the knee, or giving a 95 year old dialysis, or eating foods transported from far away?
ckx · 2026-10-26 21:02:49 UTC
About 0.0000000001% of the daily global production.
dguest · 2026-10-26 17:32:05 UTC
It would be cool if they embellished on the buildings and towns a bit: realign them on the grid so that they actually look good, embrace the medium. Maybe even tweak some of the narrow valleys to be more aligned.
They also have an execellent iOS app that I use whenever I'm hiking.
abricq · 2026-10-26 09:48:18 UTC
Nice ! I have a fun survival challenge: the swiss Via Alpina hike in Minecraft !
Quickly did the math. The real trail is ~390 km long, with 23,500 m of elevation gain and 14 Alpine passes. I found that Minecraft walking speed is 4.317 m/s (1 block = 1 m), so that's ~25 hours of continuous walking, or ~33 hours assuming 75% movement efficiency for terrain. That's one Alpine pass every ~2.4 hours, and a new hiking-stage destination every ~1h40!
swasheck · 2026-10-26 22:37:05 UTC
I got home from a section of the Via Francigena last month and that walk from Bourg-Saint-Pierre to Col du Grand-Saint-Bernard is beautiful and also challenged my normal rate of walking. It would be fascinating to see this replayed in Minecraft.
amiga386 · 2026-10-26 09:49:15 UTC
Denmark did this in 2014 and didn't need a pile of LLM puffery to do it:
> ‘Denmark in Minecraft’ was released in April 2014 by the Danish Geodata Agency. The project was conceived, developed and operated by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Kjærshøj Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå, the founders of GeoBoxers.
> The work was funded and carried out by the Danish Geodata Agency as an initiative following the 2013 “basic data programme”, where a significant amount of public Danish data were made available for free. The purpose was to make geographical and topographical data available through Minecraft, and help disseminate the free data to a broader audience and specifically reach children.
> Denmark in Minecraft was released with an invitation to teachers and schools to use the data in geography, math, science and history lessons, and within the first few months Minecraft-data were downloaded 300.000 times from the Geodata Agency, and around 37.000 unique users logged in to the agency’s Minecraft-servers.
> January 1st, 2016 the Danish Geodata Agency changed into the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, and links in English regarding “Denmark in Minecraft” were removed. Since 2020 Denmark in Minecraft can no longer be downloaded.
stavros · 2026-10-26 10:08:43 UTC
It's interesting to me how people say "someone did this before it was cheap!" as if it's a slight. I mean, yes, it's much more impressive when it was expensive, but it's good that things are cheaper.
well_ackshually · 2026-10-26 10:15:21 UTC
Denmark did it 10 years ago with existing open source tools and open data.
This reuses the same open source tools, the same open data, and has the gall to put up a slop website and ask for 15CHF (or worse, 48) to pay for a Claude subscription that's doing it all behind.
stavros · 2026-10-26 10:17:06 UTC
Yeah but that's different from "LLM puffery".
convict · 2026-10-26 10:54:44 UTC
The LLM puffery referring to the website and the texts on it, i guess
hypfer · 2026-10-26 10:59:25 UTC
I think the point that might've been lost here is that Art (and this is Art) is not supposed to be about the destination but about the journey.
The whole magic of someone doing this is someone doing this.
No one did this.
And there is no utility in it either. No one needs a 1:1 scale Minecraft map of Switzerland for anything.
So the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea implemented in a way that shows lack of understanding why this niche of content existed in the first place.
jnovek · 2026-10-26 12:44:40 UTC
“No one did this … the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea“
If you think it’s easy enough that “no one” made it, why not voxel-ize a location yourself to test your hypothesis? I imagine it wouldn’t take but moments of your day to fire off the prompt “Build New Jersey out of voxels”.
Based on your comment, it sounds like you believe that’s the sum total of work the author put into it.
hypfer · 2026-10-26 12:53:35 UTC
I'm not interested in engaging with bad faith gotcha-style communication like this.
__
Beside that, you do realize that this is merely an ad for that GIS provider consultancy thingy that can sell you actual swiss maps, right?
I mean judging by your career in adtech. Uh
Yeah anyway.
jnovek · 2026-10-26 14:54:12 UTC
“I'm not interested in engaging with bad faith gotcha-style communication like this.”
It’s not that, it’s an effort to get you to drop into system 2 and think about all the steps it probably took to put this together.
“Beside that, you do realize that this is merely an ad for that GIS provider consultancy thingy that can sell you actual swiss maps, right?”
Yes, I do. I’m not buying their product, selling it or in any way interested in it. I’m just pointing out that your dismissive comment about someone else’s work sucks.
“I mean judging by your career in adtech. Uh Yeah anyway.”
Case-in-point. Stay classy!
Edit: as I’m reading other replies in this thread, I’m finding that I had no idea how sophisticated tools for Minecraft are.
This could’ve been an opportunity to teach someone something cool like your sibling post did, but you opted to be a jerk instead.
Maybe take a sec to examine that.
hypfer · 2026-10-26 16:28:51 UTC
I have taken the sec and concluded - just like before it - that teaching is effort and energy is finite.
If bad behavior is validated by more good faith teaching, then we consequently just see more bad behavior in the future.
If you're genuinely interested in positive exchange, don't kneejerk gotcha people. Or, if you're not, don't complain like this.
jnovek · 2026-10-26 17:47:25 UTC
Once again, the “bad faith” thing is something you’re manufacturing.
I have said nothing in bad faith, I genuinely believed you were dumping on something that a person put real work into. I was defending what I believed was someone’s hard work at the time.
You chose to interpret that in the most negative way you could and then chose express that negative interpretation by insulting me.
I suggest that you continue to examine your attitude; based on your previous result, I think you should take a few hours this time because a few seconds clearly wasn’t enough.
hypfer · 2026-10-26 18:05:40 UTC
Huh? Insult?
jnovek · 2026-10-26 20:26:21 UTC
“I mean judging by your career in adtech. Uh Yeah anyway.”
Picking Providence, New York on a map took two minutes to render, and I was walking around it. Paying 20 bucks gets me the whole 88km². Is it steep? Yeah, a bit. At least they get to have the excuse that it takes some actual CPU time to render because it's all on demand, but they don't have the gall to pretend that they "need it to improve the peaks".
But if you don't want to pay a single cent, feel free to download https://arnismc.com/, it'll fetch the data from OSM, terrain elevation from Tilezen, and you can get absolutely any area in the world you want. It'll cost you... The electricity and the time.
You don't even need to prompt it. cargo run --release --no-default-features -- --output-dir="C:/YOUR_PATH/.minecraft/saves" --bbox="min_lat,min_lng,max_lat,max_lng" is right there. It's a single command.
>it sounds like you believe that’s the sum total of work the author put into it.
It _is_ the sum total of work the author put into it. Prism Launcher (https://prismlauncher.org/) handles the modding part of it. OptiFine makes it playable. Cubic Chunks removes the height limit. Can't be arsed to download 1GB of test data, but arnis or equivalent open source software is used to voxelize it. Leeching off of free work, through and through.
Also the "author" is trying to pass this off as a small, funny little independent artist stuff, when the company behind it quite literally sells 3D prints of the same areas of Switzerland. The entire goal is to be a profiteer, a leech. Literally a dropshipper.
pixl97 · 2026-10-26 13:40:54 UTC
>It'll cost you... The electricity and the time.
Remember when a huge portion of the internet was pirating music because it was expensive and difficult to buy. Then do you remember when a few streaming services came along offering most music and most people stopped pirating it? Because I do.
Saving people a little bit of time and making it easy is how you become a billionaire.
jnovek · 2026-10-26 14:58:02 UTC
I’m not from the Minecraft realm, I had no idea the tools were this sophisticated. That’s pretty rad.
aacid · 2026-10-26 13:24:00 UTC
Art is subjective, you not liking it doesn't mean it is bad. You just do not like it and that is ok.
hypfer · 2026-10-26 13:24:38 UTC
I did not say that I wouldn't like it.
cadamsdotcom · 2026-10-26 11:47:02 UTC
Doing something and charging money for it is how a lot of things that cost money got started.
stymaar · 2026-10-26 10:47:09 UTC
Interestingly enough the “before it was cheap” version was distributed for free when this one is for sale for half the price of the game this is supposed to run on.
INTPenis · 2026-10-26 10:11:27 UTC
I'm sure if they had a bunch of LLM puffery back in 2014 they would have used it.
Most giant Minecraft map projects are automated as much as possible. It would be a real labor of love on the spectrum otherwise, and who can maintain that?
pluc · 2026-10-26 11:21:24 UTC
That feels so weird. Isn't the whole premisce of these things "this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose", and so using anything automated literally takes out most of that sentence and it just becomes "this is a game". I don't get the appeal or the expectation of triumph.
spicyusername · 2026-10-26 11:28:23 UTC
Don't overcomplicate it. There is no one true way, for Minecraft or for anything.
I don't get it
Because it looks cool to see the real world in blocks. And if it looks cool, it is cool, as they say.
YeahThisIsMe · 2026-10-26 11:37:07 UTC
You're actually allowed to play video games the way you want to.
INTPenis · 2026-10-26 11:45:00 UTC
"this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose"
You lack the hacker mindset if you think you "must" do anything the way it was designed.
xylidszi · 2026-10-26 20:37:47 UTC
thank you for the wisdom INTPenis
FrustratedMonky · 2026-10-26 12:19:52 UTC
Think you are missing a couple decades of Minecraft automation. Its been done since the beginning. This is just cool example of taking it to extreme.
tantalor · 2026-10-26 13:52:58 UTC
People have been doing this for a LONG TIME
Here's a video of Yosemite Valley from 2014:
> I did not build this by hand. That would take decades! Instead, I wrote an MCEdit filter that took images and elevation data from Google Maps and turned them into blocks!
The game generates the worlds using automation even when playing normally. Have you even played Minecraft?
mahboi · 2026-10-26 21:13:52 UTC
Yeah, but normally the world-gen is automated and then the rest isn't. I get the comment. Minecraft isn't fun when you automate everything. People have been hosting WorldEdit-spammed servers since the beginning that were always lame. The real-life to ingame map conversions were novel at first but are old news now. One famous example was the UC Berkeley replica, which was done in creative mode manually in 2020. Tons of people joined that server and explored the entire campus. Then Stanford auto-gen'd their campus ingame from real-life spatial data, and it was boring, and nobody cared.
These country / world maps autogenerated are still cool to look at a bit. Also some people can take these and then rebuild famous landmarks by hand.
skrebbel · 2026-10-26 11:25:43 UTC
The puffery is the webpage copy, not the automation to produce the map.
mbesto · 2026-10-26 14:23:14 UTC
If thats the case, the parent's critique was oddly stated and confusing. The phrase "to do it" implies the "LLM puffery" was required to accomplish the task, which clearly providing LLM generated praise isn't required in either setting to create a world in minecraft.
amiga386 · 2026-10-26 14:59:32 UTC
Denmark presented the world with their entire country as a Minecraft map, and they did it without inflicting an awful marketing website on us. This Swiss project couldn't resist the urge to produce such an eyesore of a website while providing the world with another 1:1 Minecraft map of a country.
orangedog · 2026-10-26 15:02:36 UTC
I don't think there's anything wrong with this website, just some people hate slop.
amiga386 · 2026-10-26 15:20:27 UTC
Compare:
"All of Denmark in Minecraft. Recreated in a map with a scale of 1:1. Explore cities, landscapes and landmarks built of 4 trillion blocks."
"Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale. Every block is one metre. Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata. The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one."
The latter website's wording is unnecessarily staccato, self-congratulatory, and draws your attention to odd points, while missing out vital information like the word "Minecraft" (which appears elsewhere in 5 point font). It reads like a failed marketer camping out on LinkedIn wrote it.... and that's probably what the LLM was trained on. And the person using the LLM either didn't care what the website said, or reviewed it and thought it looked good and needed no changes. Either way, awful.
orangedog · 2026-10-26 15:23:50 UTC
I don't feel there's that much of a difference. It certainly isn't "awful" to me.
XenophileJKO · 2026-10-26 15:39:01 UTC
Actually is wasn't useless, I don't know the scale Denmark or where the data came from. So the bottom example is slightly bigger but includes more relevant details.
customguy · 2026-10-26 20:41:31 UTC
Without the "detail" of "Minecraft" you don't even know what "the data" is.
> I don't know the scale Denmark
What does that refer to? Both say "1:1 scale". Are you just trying to pad the list so you can "details" instead of "detail"?
"Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata"
Without the context of what this even is, that the description does not provide, that might as well be someone who is bad at English trying to say something like"swisstopo’s offers open geodata about terrains, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams of Switzerland". Except if they struggled with the language they wouldn't needlessly bloat that list, either.
They didn't read it, the people rushing to its defense apparently aren't parsing it either, but I'm sure they make sure payment processing works, so at least there's that.
NBJack · 2026-10-26 16:18:01 UTC
I'm not a fan of AI generated prose myself, but this was at least informative to me.
everyone · 2026-10-26 17:49:04 UTC
Yeah, like a lot of AI stuff it gets worse the more you look at it.. eg. "Block by block" the 2nd sentence fragment in this very important intro paragragh.. and, it doesnt mean anything. In fact its misleading, if it meant anything I would take it to mean that this was made by a human without tools placing one block at a time, which is clearly not true.
Then the next two + the last one "At 1:1 scale.", "Every block is one metre", "The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one" are all redundant, all conveying the same info in 3 different ways.
ckx · 2026-10-26 20:53:06 UTC
everyone spotted in the wild!
nidnogg · 2026-10-26 21:27:09 UTC
I am mind blown at how long it took me to read that this was Minecraft. I agree, the wording makes you mentally skip Minecraft somehow.
gambiting · 2026-10-26 17:57:17 UTC
There's literally nothing wrong with the website, what are you on about.
Spooky23 · 2026-10-26 16:38:32 UTC
Some people get a rise out of dissing LLM stuff.
mahboi · 2026-10-26 21:24:29 UTC
Was thinking, the automation to produce the map was probably not an LLM
epihelix · 2026-10-26 11:10:22 UTC
To be fair, Denmark is very flat and could probably be represented by a single block :)
Anyway, if "LLM puffery" makes this easier, why is that bad? And given that your quote indicates that the Danish equivalent got pulled, maybe LLMs can easily bring it back. Wouldn't that be a good thing?
ecto · 2026-10-26 11:48:32 UTC
How would you feel if someone described your work as LLM puffery?
The world changing - no need to be rude about it.
jagged-chisel · 2026-10-26 11:59:03 UTC
“Puffery” is about the article, not the work
Applejinx · 2026-10-26 13:21:40 UTC
That would be weird and disheartening BECAUSE I'm not using LLMs to work instead of me and have ideas instead of me and implement them instead of me.
If I was, then 'puffery' seems about right, and my best angle might be to insist that I'm yeast, leavening, and the massive quantities of gas blowing something up into a puffy empty state are only happening because of me. It's even kind of true, LLMs just sit there until directed.
mpalmer · 2026-10-26 13:23:20 UTC
Me personally? I'd feel shame for not spending the half hour it would have taken to put even the flimsiest human stamp on the thing I asked an LLM to make for me.
amiga386 · 2026-10-26 14:23:42 UTC
If someone said that about a website I had an LLM shit out, that led with such inauthentic marketroid speak, I'd say "it's a fair cop, guv"
I might add "you've spent more effort reading it than I spent writing it"
rossy · 2026-10-26 14:24:18 UTC
I'll never have to worry about that.
gambiting · 2026-10-26 18:03:35 UTC
Because you never produce anything? Just consume?
syshyk · 2026-10-27 07:22:41 UTC
The suggestion is they'd never use an LLM to do the work.
gambiting · 2026-10-27 09:07:43 UTC
No, the suggestion is that no one will accuse their work of being LLM puffery - which as I'm sure you can appreciate, can happen whether you've used an LLM or not.
mahboi · 2026-10-26 21:39:51 UTC
LLM-written code is fine, but the slop docs are worthless. The world is changing. When LLMs went mainstream, managers were encouraging writing docs with those, but the novelty has worn off and people realize the output is bad. AI slop public websites are like docs, people get a whiff and bail out.
osense · 2026-10-26 12:47:37 UTC
Denmark? Ah, so it's a 2D dataset only?
sorry, I'll show myself out...
jbrnh · 2026-10-26 13:17:35 UTC
Denmark has a larger area then Switzerland, but Switzerland has a larger surface then Denmark.
alasano · 2026-10-26 13:55:58 UTC
I'd like to subscribe to your Denmark vs Switzerland fun facts, cause I just had fun.
xquce · 2026-10-26 13:58:21 UTC
How dare you! We have The Sky Mountain!
…
Okay it’s not technically a mountain but a hill..
and yes it’s about as close to the clouds as my head is..
And yes we usually see people disspear from view because of the curvature of the Earth rather than terrain..
Okay it’s 2D…
_doctor_love · 2026-10-26 17:55:59 UTC
The Denmark reference made me think of a funny thing I heard about the Danish entrepreneur Simon Spies (quite a character).
He said he wanted a globe for the desk in his office, 'but to scale'.
teddyh · 2026-10-26 19:00:43 UTC
Just turn the desk upside down. Now he has a 1:1 scale globe on top of his desk.
_doctor_love · 2026-10-26 19:35:27 UTC
Holy shit that's genius!
(Edit: I mean it, that really made me laugh)
netsharc · 2026-10-26 09:53:33 UTC
This AI-written page seems to be typical of LLM: Sentences are 4 to 5 words long, and the reader have to fill in the details.
Did someone make 1x1x1 wooden cubes and remade Switzerland? Oh no, the tiny tiny text above the gigantic title says "Minecraft".
"Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?
Then there's an embedded map that is an attempt to convey information that I still can't figure out what.
How to run it? Aha, download Prism Launcher (not a clickable link), import the zip... and oh, you need to have purchased Minecraft too!
Comments
BTW, claude can output sh3d for you if you feed it with pdf containing floor plan, half of struggle removed, fun part (re)designing the house layout easily kicked-off!
then again, every building is white and basic, so not that nice for sightseeing.
then again, i could blow up my annoying neighbors house with a couple of TNT blocks (in minecraft!)
Then started plopping in furniture and such, wonderful experience. Then you can navigate your home as a "visitor" to get a better feel. Definitely more realistic than Minecraft for actual planning.
sh3d removes the whole game-aspect and acts as a room planning tool, which is of course also neat, but i have no need for it. i also don't need to navigate my home as a visitor in a software, as i can just navigate it in meatspace.
but, if or when i move, i think i'll actually come back to sh3d! just don't see the point right now. maybe claude can help me mod sh3d so i can fight off mobs with a bow and arrow, or blow it up with some TNT :D
It would be fascinating to see how my house and town is rendered in-game. Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O
> For legal reasons I sell all of Switzerland only to people who live in Switzerland.
Why tho? Something about the data itself, or because you don't want to bother with international purchases?
Yeah, that’s a travesty. To be authentically Swiss it should cost at least 150 CHF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...
[1]: https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/de/hoehenmodell-swisssurface3...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaunay_triangulation
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_triangles
Renewables and grid investments come from increased demand and money flowing into the industry..
The big problem I have is what's seeming to shape up in Texas; massive off-grid and on-site generation using fossil fuels. This pollutes and bypasses grid and renewable investment.
Quickly did the math. The real trail is ~390 km long, with 23,500 m of elevation gain and 14 Alpine passes. I found that Minecraft walking speed is 4.317 m/s (1 block = 1 m), so that's ~25 hours of continuous walking, or ~33 hours assuming 75% movement efficiency for terrain. That's one Alpine pass every ~2.4 hours, and a new hiking-stage destination every ~1h40!
https://minecraftdanmark.dk/
https://geoboxers.com/denmark-in-minecraft/
> ‘Denmark in Minecraft’ was released in April 2014 by the Danish Geodata Agency. The project was conceived, developed and operated by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Kjærshøj Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå, the founders of GeoBoxers.
> The work was funded and carried out by the Danish Geodata Agency as an initiative following the 2013 “basic data programme”, where a significant amount of public Danish data were made available for free. The purpose was to make geographical and topographical data available through Minecraft, and help disseminate the free data to a broader audience and specifically reach children.
> Denmark in Minecraft was released with an invitation to teachers and schools to use the data in geography, math, science and history lessons, and within the first few months Minecraft-data were downloaded 300.000 times from the Geodata Agency, and around 37.000 unique users logged in to the agency’s Minecraft-servers.
> January 1st, 2016 the Danish Geodata Agency changed into the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, and links in English regarding “Denmark in Minecraft” were removed. Since 2020 Denmark in Minecraft can no longer be downloaded.
This reuses the same open source tools, the same open data, and has the gall to put up a slop website and ask for 15CHF (or worse, 48) to pay for a Claude subscription that's doing it all behind.
The whole magic of someone doing this is someone doing this.
No one did this.
And there is no utility in it either. No one needs a 1:1 scale Minecraft map of Switzerland for anything.
So the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea implemented in a way that shows lack of understanding why this niche of content existed in the first place.
If you think it’s easy enough that “no one” made it, why not voxel-ize a location yourself to test your hypothesis? I imagine it wouldn’t take but moments of your day to fire off the prompt “Build New Jersey out of voxels”.
Based on your comment, it sounds like you believe that’s the sum total of work the author put into it.
__
Beside that, you do realize that this is merely an ad for that GIS provider consultancy thingy that can sell you actual swiss maps, right?
I mean judging by your career in adtech. Uh Yeah anyway.
It’s not that, it’s an effort to get you to drop into system 2 and think about all the steps it probably took to put this together.
“Beside that, you do realize that this is merely an ad for that GIS provider consultancy thingy that can sell you actual swiss maps, right?”
Yes, I do. I’m not buying their product, selling it or in any way interested in it. I’m just pointing out that your dismissive comment about someone else’s work sucks.
“I mean judging by your career in adtech. Uh Yeah anyway.”
Case-in-point. Stay classy!
Edit: as I’m reading other replies in this thread, I’m finding that I had no idea how sophisticated tools for Minecraft are.
This could’ve been an opportunity to teach someone something cool like your sibling post did, but you opted to be a jerk instead.
Maybe take a sec to examine that.
If bad behavior is validated by more good faith teaching, then we consequently just see more bad behavior in the future.
If you're genuinely interested in positive exchange, don't kneejerk gotcha people. Or, if you're not, don't complain like this.
I have said nothing in bad faith, I genuinely believed you were dumping on something that a person put real work into. I was defending what I believed was someone’s hard work at the time.
You chose to interpret that in the most negative way you could and then chose express that negative interpretation by insulting me.
I suggest that you continue to examine your attitude; based on your previous result, I think you should take a few hours this time because a few seconds clearly wasn’t enough.
Here's Chicago (assuming their preview is always the same): https://map2minecraft.com/for/developers#world-demo. It took zero effort.
Picking Providence, New York on a map took two minutes to render, and I was walking around it. Paying 20 bucks gets me the whole 88km². Is it steep? Yeah, a bit. At least they get to have the excuse that it takes some actual CPU time to render because it's all on demand, but they don't have the gall to pretend that they "need it to improve the peaks".
But if you don't want to pay a single cent, feel free to download https://arnismc.com/, it'll fetch the data from OSM, terrain elevation from Tilezen, and you can get absolutely any area in the world you want. It'll cost you... The electricity and the time.
You don't even need to prompt it. cargo run --release --no-default-features -- --output-dir="C:/YOUR_PATH/.minecraft/saves" --bbox="min_lat,min_lng,max_lat,max_lng" is right there. It's a single command.
>it sounds like you believe that’s the sum total of work the author put into it.
It _is_ the sum total of work the author put into it. Prism Launcher (https://prismlauncher.org/) handles the modding part of it. OptiFine makes it playable. Cubic Chunks removes the height limit. Can't be arsed to download 1GB of test data, but arnis or equivalent open source software is used to voxelize it. Leeching off of free work, through and through.
Also the "author" is trying to pass this off as a small, funny little independent artist stuff, when the company behind it quite literally sells 3D prints of the same areas of Switzerland. The entire goal is to be a profiteer, a leech. Literally a dropshipper.
Remember when a huge portion of the internet was pirating music because it was expensive and difficult to buy. Then do you remember when a few streaming services came along offering most music and most people stopped pirating it? Because I do.
Saving people a little bit of time and making it easy is how you become a billionaire.
Most giant Minecraft map projects are automated as much as possible. It would be a real labor of love on the spectrum otherwise, and who can maintain that?
You lack the hacker mindset if you think you "must" do anything the way it was designed.
Here's a video of Yosemite Valley from 2014:
> I did not build this by hand. That would take decades! Instead, I wrote an MCEdit filter that took images and elevation data from Google Maps and turned them into blocks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jWAwWD47OE
These country / world maps autogenerated are still cool to look at a bit. Also some people can take these and then rebuild famous landmarks by hand.
"All of Denmark in Minecraft. Recreated in a map with a scale of 1:1. Explore cities, landscapes and landmarks built of 4 trillion blocks."
"Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale. Every block is one metre. Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata. The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one."
The latter website's wording is unnecessarily staccato, self-congratulatory, and draws your attention to odd points, while missing out vital information like the word "Minecraft" (which appears elsewhere in 5 point font). It reads like a failed marketer camping out on LinkedIn wrote it.... and that's probably what the LLM was trained on. And the person using the LLM either didn't care what the website said, or reviewed it and thought it looked good and needed no changes. Either way, awful.
> I don't know the scale Denmark
What does that refer to? Both say "1:1 scale". Are you just trying to pad the list so you can "details" instead of "detail"?
"Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata"
Without the context of what this even is, that the description does not provide, that might as well be someone who is bad at English trying to say something like"swisstopo’s offers open geodata about terrains, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams of Switzerland". Except if they struggled with the language they wouldn't needlessly bloat that list, either.
They didn't read it, the people rushing to its defense apparently aren't parsing it either, but I'm sure they make sure payment processing works, so at least there's that.
Then the next two + the last one "At 1:1 scale.", "Every block is one metre", "The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one" are all redundant, all conveying the same info in 3 different ways.
Anyway, if "LLM puffery" makes this easier, why is that bad? And given that your quote indicates that the Danish equivalent got pulled, maybe LLMs can easily bring it back. Wouldn't that be a good thing?
The world changing - no need to be rude about it.
If I was, then 'puffery' seems about right, and my best angle might be to insist that I'm yeast, leavening, and the massive quantities of gas blowing something up into a puffy empty state are only happening because of me. It's even kind of true, LLMs just sit there until directed.
I might add "you've spent more effort reading it than I spent writing it"
sorry, I'll show myself out...
Okay it’s not technically a mountain but a hill.. and yes it’s about as close to the clouds as my head is.. And yes we usually see people disspear from view because of the curvature of the Earth rather than terrain..
Okay it’s 2D…
He said he wanted a globe for the desk in his office, 'but to scale'.
(Edit: I mean it, that really made me laugh)
Did someone make 1x1x1 wooden cubes and remade Switzerland? Oh no, the tiny tiny text above the gigantic title says "Minecraft".
"Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?
Then there's an embedded map that is an attempt to convey information that I still can't figure out what.
How to run it? Aha, download Prism Launcher (not a clickable link), import the zip... and oh, you need to have purchased Minecraft too!
What an exercise in convolution...