Mainland Great Britain mapped in Minecraft

Joseph Braybook, intern at the Ordnance Survey mapping authority of Great Britain and fan of Minecraft, spent his time at OS working with the Innovation Labs team. His time there was well-spent, culminating in an impressive virtual representation of England, Scotland and Wales. The enormous map covers 224,000 square kilometres of mainland GB and some surrounding islands, equating to 22 billion Minecraft blocks.

Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man were not included as these fell outside the scope of the Ordnance Survey.

The map took just two weeks to complete and was put together by inputting two types of Ordnance Survey data sets into a proprietary program. One data set contained height data which the program used to build up blocks to the required height while the other contained image data and was used to determine block type. Each block represents 50 square metres and an average desktop system was tasked with compiling the final map which surprisingly took only seven hours.

And the best thing?

The map has been made available for download, you can grab it here

System Requirements:

• A licensed copy of Minecraft
• 5GB free disk space. The world is approximately 3.6 GB uncompressed
• Minimum 4 GB of memory