Minecraft has gotten one of the most ambitious terrain recreations in its history: 22-year-old ETH Zurich student Beda Good, known as Manifold, has recreated the whole of Switzerland at a 1:1 scale, where every block corresponds to one meter of real-world terrain. The project, called "Blocks," covers 41,285 square kilometers of the country, and downloading the full map requires pulling down 24 gigabytes of data, as reported by heise.de.

How the map of an entire country was made

The map isn't the product of manual building, but of automatic world generation based on official Swiss geographic data. Good used twelve geodata sets, including swissALTI3D for terrain modeling, swissBATHY3D for lake beds, and swissBUILDINGS3D for buildings. The author told the newspaper 20 Minuten that "the project is only possible because Switzerland provides its geographic data for free."

The standard height limit in Minecraft is 384 blocks, which wouldn't be enough to represent the Alpine peaks. That's why the world runs with the Cubic Chunks mod, which removes that limitation and allows the map's highest point, the Dufourspitze, to be rendered at a height of 4,634 blocks. The map covers terrain from Lake Geneva to the Val Müstair valley, including glaciers, lakes, and forests in full detail.

Download size and hardware requirements

The full version of the map is a 24 GB download, which takes up about 60 GB on disk once unpacked. The project runs exclusively on Minecraft Java Edition version 1.12.2 with the Cubic Chunks mod, which means you need to install Forge and Java 8.

  • Minimum requirements: 16 GB of RAM (with 8 GB allocated to the game)
  • Recommended: 32 GB of RAM for smooth performance on the full map
  • Systems: Windows, macOS, or Linux
  • Game version: Minecraft Java Edition 1.12.2 with the Cubic Chunks mod

Before buying the full map, the creator recommends players first test the free sample to check whether their computer can handle the load generated by the extended height limit.

Free sample and price of the full map

Not everyone has to pay to see the project in action. The Jungfrau-Aletsch region, covering about 2,400 square kilometers and including the Eiger, Mönch, Jungfrau, the Aletsch Glacier, and Lake Oeschinen, is available for free with no registration required, and its download is only 1.1 GB.

The full map of the entire country costs from 15 Swiss francs, while a premium variant for 48 francs adds the buyer's name to a virtual "peak registry," charging one franc for every Swiss peak above 4,000 meters. Purchasing the full version is restricted to residents of Switzerland only: people from Germany, Austria, and other countries can only access the free Alpine region.

What's next for the project

The project remains in Early Access, and Good is planning further improvements, including better water rendering and refined boundaries between regions. The download is available at blocks.manifold3d.ch, where, besides the Minecraft world, the author also offers terrain models in other formats, intended for example for 3D printing.

For Polish players, this is above all an interesting example of using open geographic data to build in Minecraft at an unprecedented scale. While the map itself covers Switzerland, creators of Earth Platform-type projects have long used similar approaches to recreate pieces of the entire planet. Anyone wanting to understand large-scale terrain generation mechanics can start by browsing world seeds or checking out the available tools and calculators for working with maps.

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