Over the years, dedicated gamers have created incredible recreations of real (and not so real) locations and structures within the confines of Minecraft. Thanks to their efforts, you can explore everything from New York city to Middle Earth and the U.S.S. Enterprise in 1:1: scale.
But what if you wanted to recreate your own town, and didn’t have the hundreds of hours of spare time necessary to do it by hand? Enter Arnis, an open source project from [Louis Erbkamm] that can pull in geographic data from OpenStreetMap and turn it into a highly detailed Minecraft map with just a few keystrokes.
The tool, written in Rust, can be either run via an interactive graphical interface or on the command line. In either case, you provide Arnis with the latitude and longitude for a bounding box around whatever you want to import into the game. [Louis] warns that the resulting process is fairly computationally heavy, so you should start be experimenting with small areas.
Once generated, the map can be loaded into the Java Edition of Minecraft. This refers to the original build of the game that predates the Microsoft buyout. Once Redmond took over they spearheaded a new version of the game written in C++ which was then ported over to mobile operating systems and game consoles. Long story short, if you want to wander around a Minecraft version of your home town, you’ll have to do it on your desktop computer instead of your Nintendo Switch.
While the tool is usable in its current state, [Louis] has a fairly long list of features that either still need to be implemented or could use some improvements. From the number of pull requests that have been merged in, it looks like any assistance the community can provide to make Arnis as capable as possible is welcome, so feel free to lend a hand if you’ve got that geospatial fever.
We’ve seen several examples of hackers bringing objects from Minecraft into the physical world, so it’s refreshing to see a bit of our reality sneaking into the game’s blocky universe.
The urge to try out rust becomes stronger every day. If only the syntax was less verbose with random characters sprinkled everywhere.
Well, of course there’s random characters everywhere, they’re caused by the oxidized metal. Why do you think it’s called “Rust”?
Thanks for this post. Arnis is really easy to use and works great!
Microsoft bought Minecraft?
There goes the neighborhood.
Quite a while ago. Neighborhood still seems to be there.
You’re years behind, brother. And everything is just fine.
“Once Redmond took over they spearheaded a new version of the game written in C++”
That’s not right – the C++ engine began from developing Minecraft for smartphones, which they called Pocket Edition, since smartphones circa 2011 weren’t practically capable of running Minecraft in Java. There’s a second C++ engine for Minecraft which was used for older consoles (Console Edition) which was made by a separate studio.
Microsoft bought Mojang around 2014: both Pocket Edition and Console Edition(s) had existed for a while by then. The main change was in 2017 when Pocket Edition basically morphed into Bedrock which ran on multiple platforms and allowed cross-platform play.
The version of Minecraft that was playable on the original Raspberry Pi was famously an early Pocket Edition alpha.
ugh. and project developers are trying the opposite: getting Minecraft buildings in the real world…
its the same with interiors. in the fifties, showrooms emulated real houses, now real houses emulate the showroom.
but I like the idea and the algorithm behind it. figuring out on what coordinate a certain element should go is a challenge. A little bit like making something in really low-res pixel art.
There was already something like that offered by the french Institut Géographique National at minecraft.ign.fr ; even produced worlds compatible with Minetest (well, sorry, Luanti).
There’s a project going on in the Netherlands called Geocraft, where people have been painstakingly recreating the entire country in a Minecraft server. With how low the Netherlands is the world height limit is not an issue :)