Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Minecraft Maps the World


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.

The BGS's Minecraft World uses data from the UK's Ordnance Survey on the world surface. The geology of Great Britain beneath the surface is also represented on the surface of the map and shown beneath the bedrock.


The British Geological Survey's Minecraft world is inspired by last year's Ordnance Survey Minecraft map. The UK's Ordnance Survey is charged with maintaining the UK's geospatial and cartographic data. This largely involves creating and publishing maps in paper and digital form and now also in textual cube form for Minecraft fans.

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.

The Ordnance Survey Minceraft Overviewer Map of the UK allows you to view this Minecraft map of the UK within a Google Maps interface.


Denmark's government has also released its free spatial data in a format which can be used with Minecraft. You can download the Danish Minecraft data at Danmarks Frie Geodata i en Minecraft.

The Danish Minecraft world is on a scale of 1:1, so it should take you a long time to explore the whole country. The Danish Minecraft world also includes 3d buildings so there is a lot of fun to be had navigating around Denmark's cities.


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.

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