The building game Minecraft is known for letting the creativity of its users shine. Take for example this shot-for-shot remake of the original Star Wars, all done inside the game. Now a small group of players are making their own richly detailed fantasy world -- one that is more than 2,000 miles long.
Starting as a two-man creative server, the world now known as Aerna continued to grow with the imagination of the players. Pretty soon towns and castles littered the landscape, and the creator decided to bring on additional players to help expand the world. They recruited architects to build, terraformers to craft mountain ranges and also started to equalize biomes, carefully zoning the world to their liking so that deserts and snowy forests did not sit right next to one another.
That was just the beginning. After discovering WorldPainter, a program that can generate terrain in-game, the team set about crafting Aerna II.
"Aerna II was far larger than Aerna I," says the developer in a blog post. "The latter was only 8,000 blocks wide, but Aerna II would be a whopping 102,400. As far as I know, this is the largest Minecraft map ever created."
Keep in mind that each block in Minecraft is approximately one cubic meter, so 102,400 blocks is about 5,242,880,000 square meters, or 5,242.88 square kilometers. For those unfamiliar with the metric system, that is more than 2,000 square miles.
Sadly, Aerna II didn't pan out.
"The countryside looked amazing, but we simply couldn't generate realistic mountains on that scale," the developer continues in a blog post. "It was clear they were smaller hills scaled up to absurd proportions. Slowly, with no hope of ever making the world as realistic as we wanted, and with no way to host such a large map, the project was scrapped."
That isn't stopping the project's latest incarnation, Aerna III. The world is still the same size as its predecessor, but is being generated procedurally via a program to generate an infinite amount of highly detailed terrain, which can then be further tweaked using the WorldPainter tool.
"This server's end goal will be a fantasy world filled with quests, lore, dungeons and even a town building aspect," says one of the developers on the Minecraft forums. "The world is roughly 84 GB and a total of 102,400 blocks across. Not only do we have realistic land formations that draw inspiration from the world we live in but we take into account wind patterns, tectonic plates, and positioning along latitude lines."
Who knows when the map will actually be finished, but creating one of the largest and most beautiful Minecraft worlds in the history of the game is quite the achievement.
