Vikings vs Creepers

April 25, 2014 4:06 AM

The entire country of Denmark has been recreated in Minecraft. The Danish Geodata Agency has released a 1:1 model of the country of Denmark in Minecraft, complete with buildings and roads. The full model is made up of approximately 4000 billion blocks and takes up a hefty 1TB of hard drive space (first link contains Google Translated links to the agency's website where you can download the map in blocks of 10 km x 10 km).
posted by daniel_charms (25 comments total)

Here's the UK version, from September last year (previously).
posted by effbot at 4:25 AM on April 25, 2014

Now do it 1:1 scale in LEGO.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:09 AM on April 25, 2014 [5 favorites]

I swear to God. Let Minecraft simmer for about three decades in Moore's Law to boost the processing power to support higher resolution graphics, and it will be the Matrix.
posted by Naberius at 5:26 AM on April 25, 2014 [14 favorites]

Dynamite has been disabled on the map to prevent serious modifications.

Denmark has enemies?
posted by R. Mutt at 5:48 AM on April 25, 2014 [2 favorites]

There are Swedes only just across the water. There's a bridge now and all, so they're a bigger threat than ever!
posted by Dysk at 5:49 AM on April 25, 2014 [3 favorites]

You do realize what this means... Eurovision 2014 now has a solid chance of being attacked by Creepers.

It can only help.
posted by delfin at 5:50 AM on April 25, 2014 [4 favorites]

Queue the Steven Wright joke... "it's original size. It says 'one mile equals one mile....'"
posted by easement1 at 5:51 AM on April 25, 2014 [2 favorites]

Does it include Legoland?
posted by ardgedee at 6:24 AM on April 25, 2014

A couple years back on the Mefightclub Minecraft server, cortex had a brainstorm that we should try to recreate Vatican City in its entirety.

I don't think we got very far.
posted by neckro23 at 7:15 AM on April 25, 2014

We truly live in a golden age.
posted by signal at 7:17 AM on April 25, 2014

Denmark has enemies?

Perhaps you've forgotten about this.
posted by aught at 7:17 AM on April 25, 2014

Canada has an ongoing border dispute with Denmark, over a small Arctic island mostly because of the potential for oil/gas. It lead to Googlebomb campaigns a few years back. There was also some tit-for-tat flagging by our respective navies. An agreement is closer now, but it's still not entirely settled.
posted by bonehead at 7:24 AM on April 25, 2014

Long live the aporkalypse.
posted by joecacti at 7:31 AM on April 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

What's more, the Vatican City project on Aporkalypse, IIRC, was only 2:1 scale, because the tallest point of the Vatican (St. Peter's Basilica) was a weeee bit taller than the ceiling of a Minecraft world. (I believe they later raised the world ceiling in the game, but we had moved on to other things by then.) We did flatten a ridiculously enormous area by hand, and marked out the perimeter of the city, and a few buildings got built (or at least started)...but, man, it turned out to be an even more insanely massive undertaking than it sounds like.

So what's the deal with this Denmark world? The terrain and roads are generated programmatically from existing geographical data, of course, but what about the buildings? There aren't many of those in the video, and those you do see look hand-built. Who's doing the building? Is there a server somewhere you can log into?
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:38 AM on April 25, 2014

Denmark has enemies?

No need, plenty of Danes would blow up Denmark in a video game.
posted by brokkr at 8:08 AM on April 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

"Dynamite has been disabled on the map to prevent serious modifications."

My understanding is that if you download "about 1TB, consisting of 4 trillion individual bricks" you can do with it as you will.
posted by vapidave at 8:14 AM on April 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

Let Minecraft simmer for about three decades in Moore's Law to boost the processing power to support higher resolution graphics, and it will be the Matrix.

True fact: the Matrix itself is actually running on a redstone computer set up within the Machine World's Minecraft server (sonofaporkalypse.machineworld.gov).
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:27 AM on April 25, 2014 [3 favorites]

My understanding is that if you download "about 1TB, consisting of 4 trillion individual bricks" you can do with it as you will.

The restriction is probably there to stop people from making too drastic changes on their servers (which seem to be overloaded as it is).
posted by daniel_charms at 9:15 AM on April 25, 2014

I expect Danish taxpayers will be pleased to hear that the Geodata Agency isn't wasting their money.
posted by Segundus at 10:22 AM on April 25, 2014

Making geography more tangible and accessible to school children seems to be a pretty valid use of taxpayers’ money. This morning’s radio coverage had a teacher reporting how she had stood on top of their (virtual) school together with her students, and they apparently all thought it rather splendid.
posted by bouvin at 10:32 AM on April 25, 2014 [5 favorites]

I had wanted to do something like this with USGS data, but the programs are in Linux and all appear to be broken... even the Linux guys I know couldn't get any of that code working. We had wanted to make a server of a real-life place in the US and build on it, but I guess it's not doable.
posted by crapmatic at 4:10 PM on April 25, 2014

Just what is it with the Danes recreating buildings and landscapes out of little building blocks?
posted by sour cream at 5:03 AM on April 26, 2014

Unless they have accurately mapped all the caves beneath Denmark and assigned the proper bedrock formations, I am unimpressed.
posted by ymgve at 5:14 AM on April 26, 2014

I don't think we do bedrock in Denmark. With the exception of the island of Bornholm, the nation rests on chalk.
posted by bouvin at 9:02 AM on April 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

I can't figure out how to download the neighborhods. Can anyone point me towards Østerbro?
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:37 PM on April 26, 2014