Minecraft: Ordnance Survey Create Full-Scale 22 Billion Block Map Of The UK Inside World-Builder

Minecraft Britain
Ordnance Survey

At this point it seems like anything which can be made in Minecraft, has been made in Minecraft.

Full replicas of fictional space craft? Check. Working scientific calculators? Oh yes. Full scale recreations of fantasy kingdoms? Again, yes.

But this is something else.

The Ordnance Survey has announced it has created a full-scale, 22 billion block map of Great Britain, in Minecraft, using its OS data.

The national maps authority have created the world with more than 224,000 square kilometres of detailed information. It includes woods, water, roads and other key features, and users are now being encouraged to build their own models of landmarks like Stonehenge and the Royal palaces.

The grid has a resolution of about 50 metres, meaning the world is quite a bit smaller than you're used to. But it's still a vast and frankly ludicrous thing to have done.

Graham Dunlop, Innovation Lab Manager at Ordnance Survey, said:

"The purpose of our Labs team is to explore and assess ideas for new products and services... We decided to build a Minecraft world using free-to-use OS OpenData products to display the landscape and terrain of Great Britain."

"We think we may have created the largest Minecraft world ever built based on real-world data."

The world took just two weeks to build, OS said. You can download the data in full at their website.

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