Minecraft players looking for a little realism in their gaming sessions now have all of Great Britain to explore in the game. The British Geological Survey created an accurate geographical map of over 22 billion Minecraft blocks and is now offering a free download of it to any of the game's active users.
The map, which uses data from the Ordnance Survey, contains England, Scotland, Wales, and even several islands around Great Britain. If you zoom in to the surface, its detail is eerily accurate.
The map started as an experimental educational project.
"When Joseph Braybrook joined the team as part of Ordnance Survey's summer internship program, we discovered he was an avid Minecraft fan and we decided to explore the potential education benefits of the popular video game," says Graham Dunlop, Innovation Lab Manager at Ordnance Survey. "We decided to build a Minecraft world using free-to-use OS OpenData products to display the landscape and terrain of Great Britain."
The map's creators built the map to scale with Minecraft blocks using the BGS' soil material map. For example, water blocks in the game represent water, and sand blocks represent sand. For materials not available in the game, the team improvised: limestone and chalk are stone blocks and peat is soul sand.
Braybrook used a three-dimensional model of Earth's surface called a "Digital Terrain Model," which shows Great Britain's geography in a grid. The map's surface also outlines roads: motorways are blue, A roads are green and B roads are orange.
The map took just over two weeks to build, and it is currently the largest map in the game that's ever been built based on the real world.
"The resulting map shows the massive potential, not just for using Minecraft for computer technology and geography purposes in schools, but also the huge scope of applications for OS OpenData too," says Braybrook.
However, players don't have to use the real world for inspiration when playing with the map in-game. If they want to build their own version of Hogwarts on the map, they can. Basically, the whole of Great Britain is now Minecraft users' playground.
The map is free for download to anyone with a Minecraft license and 6GB of free space on their PC.
Minecraft is a critically acclaimed video game with many awards under its belt and has sold over 54 million copies worldwide on PCs, game consoles and mobile devices.
