Student rebuilds all of Switzerland in Minecraft at 1:1 scale

A 22-year-old student at ETH Zurich has rebuilt the whole of Switzerland inside Minecraft at 1:1 scale. He goes by the name Manifold in the game and taught himself 3D modelling and the use of geodata. The project's website shows a map of the build, with a slider beneath it that reveals the real Swisstopo aerial photo for comparison. The match is strikingly close.

"It all started with the wish to hold Swiss mountains and valleys in my hands as physical models," Manifold said. The conversion is as simple as it gets: one Minecraft block equals one metre in the real world, which gives a map covering 41,285 square kilometres.

Built on open data

The world draws on several public datasets from Swisstopo, the Federal Office of Topography. Terrain comes from the swissALTI3D elevation model, lakes and bodies of water from swissBATHY3D, forest and tree heights from swissSURFACE3D, and buildings from swissBUILDINGS3D.

That was not always possible. Until 1 March 2021, most Swisstopo digital products required a special permit. Since then, maps, aerial photos and landscape models are free open data, even for commercial use. "This project is only possible because Switzerland makes its geographic data available to the public for free," Manifold said. As far as he knows, no other country offers data this detailed for its entire territory, so the approach cannot easily be repeated elsewhere.

Most of the map is available by subscription, but Manifold has released the Jungfrau-Aletsch region, a UNESCO World Heritage site, for free.

Not the first national build

Denmark's geodata agency recreated the country at 1:1 in 2014, with roughly 4 billion blocks, an idea from employee Simon Kokkendorf as a teaching tool. In 2013, Britain's Ordnance Survey brought Great Britain into the game with more than 22 billion blocks, built by intern Joseph Braybrook. Each of those blocks covered 50 square metres, so the aerial view is much coarser than the Swiss version.

The project also shows how far Minecraft has become a platform for turning large volumes of geodata into digital replicas of real places. Tools such as CartoVoxel, which generates areas of New York from street, building and terrain data, and Map2Minecraft, which uses OpenStreetMap, point the same way.