On October 5, 2026, Build The Earth Poland published screenshots of Toruń's Old Town Market Square rebuilt in Minecraft, down to the facade colors, the town hall interior, and the restaurant patios in front of the townhouses. It's the latest step in a project that has set out since 2020 to build all of Poland at 1:1 scale, where one real-life meter equals one block in the game.

An Old Town built with attention to every detail

According to tylkotorun.pl, the photos released by the team show the market square's Gothic buildings with the proportions and colors of each townhouse preserved, the mass of the town hall, and small details of the surroundings like outdoor restaurant seating. Toruń's Old Town has long been on the UNESCO World Heritage list, which makes it one of the more demanding targets for builders who want to stay faithful to the original, right down to the color of the roof tiles.

Recreating historic architecture in Minecraft's blocky style takes more than a glance at satellite maps. Builders use street-level photos of facades, archival city plans, and consultations with other members of the group to capture details like roof shapes, window placement, and the plaster colors typical of a given region.

Build The Earth: from one creator to an international movement

The global Build The Earth project launched in 2020 on the initiative of a single online creator and grew over time into a distributed network of national teams, each responsible for recreating its own country. The Polish branch, Build The Earth Poland, works on the same principles: volunteers sign up for specific cities or regions, divide the area into plots, and build it piece by piece, trying to keep the real-world scale.

The team had already tackled Stargard, where the group summed up its mission on Facebook in a few words:

"We've been building Poland in Minecraft at 1:1 scale since 2020! Join us!"
as quoted by stargard.news. Bydgoszcz has also been put under the digital magnifying glass, as covered by the local newsroom TVP3 Bydgoszcz, which called the result the most accurate digital reconstruction of the city within the project so far.

Poland by the numbers: more than 680 builders and 115 km² of terrain

According to the official website bte-poland.pl, more than 680 builders are now involved in the project, and the total area recreated so far reaches 115.8 km². The list of finished or in-progress locations includes Warsaw, Poznań, Białystok, and Rzeszów, and alongside the big cities there are smaller towns like Stawiszyn and Kalinko.

The scale of the undertaking is impressive, especially since all of the work is done by the community, unpaid, mostly in spare time between participants' school and jobs. Every new building has to pass through the hands of someone who knows that part of the city well enough to recreate it with the right proportions relative to neighboring plots, which requires coordination across the whole team.

How to join and see the results

The Build The Earth Poland world runs on its own server that's available around the clock, compatible with Java Edition clients from version 1.8 all the way up to the latest 1.21 releases and beyond, with no whitelist signup required. Anyone who owns Minecraft Java Edition can simply join the world and explore the recreated Old Town Market Square on their own, instead of only looking at photos on social media.

If you're interested in doing your own building at a similar scale, guides on planning large structures and a list of other Minecraft servers running similar community projects may come in handy. If you're just taking your first steps in accurately recreating real-world buildings, you'll also find useful tips in the guides section, which covers things like planning proportions and working with large block grids.

A project with no finish line

Build The Earth Poland doesn't publish a fixed schedule for upcoming cities, since the pace of work depends on how many volunteers sign up and how much time they have. Still, the progress so far, from single townhouses to whole districts like Toruń's Old Town, shows that the community keeps growing, and more Polish cities will sooner or later make it onto the list of completed builds.

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