Building the Earth in Minecraft

Take yourself back to the beginning of 2020, Covid was in full swing, and the world plunged into inaccessibility like never before in modern history. It was in this period where many of us, including myself, were sat at home figuring out what to do with our newly found time indoors. At the same time on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a youtuber by the name of PippenFTS had an idea, and a crazy one at that. To build the entire world in Minecraft, at a 1:1 scale, meaning that one block in game is equal to one meter in real life. Something like this had never been attempted before, as Minecraft’s vertical limitations made it near impossible to accurately recreate buildings or landscapes, but new mods had just been released allowing for the height limit to be expanded massively and for accurate terrain to be converted into a Minecraft world.

Shibuya Crossing, Japan – BTE Japan

Early BTE

With the goal set, we got to work, and a mad dash of over 200,000 people joined the BuildTheEarth discord, I personally look back on the first 6 months of BTE with a mixture of awe and distress, we had so many people join so fast that we had to form quickly, and we certainly didn’t know what we were doing back then. The Earth was quickly split into different teams, most of which were countries, for example BTE France, and BTE Germany, however not every country was united in a team, for example the team I help run, and the largest in the project, BTE NYC, which specifically focuses on building New York and is managed separately from the rest of the USA. There is also the flipside to this though, as some teams comprise multiple countries, like Benelux and Iberia.

Herstappe in Limburg, Belgium – Senney

Building 1:1 Scale

In a regular build, you let your creativity guide what you want to create, and BuildTheEarth is completely different, as you suddenly have restrictions and a pre-existing guideline to follow, there are some notable ways we ensure that our builds are as accurate as possible, and I will briefly go over some of them here, though this is not an exhaustive list;

Firstly, the thing that 99% of our builders rely on, TPLL. This is a command (used in the form of /tpll) that allows a user to copy latitude and longitude coordinates from google maps and paste them into the command which teleports the user to that exact spot in game. We are able to do this because of the fact that everything is 1:1, and our projection matches that of the Earth, with minimal distortion. We use this ability to teleport to an exact spot to mark corners of buildings, which we then connect with a straight line and before long you have the outline of any building, accurate and 1:1 scale in game.

The next thing we do is check the height of the building, luckily Google once again saves the day, Google Earth has a 3d path measuring feature, which allows you to select the top and bottom of a wall, and it tells you the height in meters, once you have this information you simply stack your outline up and you now have a shell.

All that comes after, though varying in difficulty and complexity, tends to be the same, utilise images and street view to mark out where windows and doors are, make sure the colours are right, add in any little details and voila, a 1:1 scale building in Minecraft.

Volkstheater, Vienna – Milcraftblue

Accomplishments

In the four years since BTE’s creation, we’ve accomplished a lot, our work has been featured around the world in various large newspapers, magazines, social media sites, not to mention multiple Museums, governments of different countries and state agencies, we’ve worked alongside massive youtubers like Mr Beast on multiple occasions, we’re even in the Guinness book of world records as the largest Minecraft project to date. However, as big as these things are, those are just our accomplishments in the real world, so how far are we in completing our goal of the Earth in Minecraft, 1:1 scale?

Larressingle, France – BTE France

Well.. around 0.001%, and that might even be pushing it, but let me explain. You see, when this project started, no one realised quite how massive of an undertaking this is, it was a common view that the Earth could get built in a few years, and this view still exists, just not from us, whenever BuildTheEarth features and does well on social media sites, people assume we have entire countries completed, and this is sadly not yet the case. As the years went on we had more of a focus on the quality of our builds, striving to be the most accurate, the most impressive and most detailed builders we could be, which certainly slowed us down, but in the end, why recreate the Earth if we aren’t going to do it right?

This bleak miniscule figure isn’t all bad though, certain areas of the world do have massive progress, for example in Russia, Krasnodar, where only a handful of builders have utilised newer automated methods to create massive areas in short amounts of time.

Krasnodar, Russia – Criffane14

Or in New York City, where I build, where we’ve managed to create around 25% of Manhattan, and have just reached 70% completion of Lower Manhattan, with an estimated 50,000+ buildings across the city of New York.

Manhattan, NYC – BTE NYC

Not to mention countless other groups that are tirelessly recreating areas that mean something special to them, maybe because they’ve been there personally, maybe they grew up there, or maybe, like a lot of us, we just found ourselves recreating a place that we have never been to, and perhaps never will.

One of my favourite things about this project is that anyone at all is able to join and contribute, each team has their own way of working, so the best way to do so is by joining the discord which you can find at https://buildtheearth.net/ or click the discord link below to join the discord server and get involved directly!

https://discord.gg/buildtheearth-net-690908396404080650

From here you can find your way to the area you want to build, and in some teams, like NYC, can instantly get started without any application process, if this sounds interesting to you, be sure to join us on our server, BuildTheEarth.Net on Java edition 1.20.1.

Written by @d3.cent on Instagram

On behalf of the BuildTheEarth project