Hello stranger, you might know me from the Legacy Maps, a scale map of the entire planet in scales of 1:1000, 1:2000 and 1:4000.
A lot of people ask me for higher resolutions / scales, but it is not possible to increase the scale of the existing map / source images. At least it is not possible with the process I used to generate the Legacy Maps. For this reason I sat down at my desk and developed a completely new procedure, which allows the user to recreate more detailed maps of every place on earth in Minecraft.
The biggest problem of a high scale map is the pure size. The 1:1000 scale of the earth has already 43008×21504 blocks and needs around 15 GB of space. When you try to double the scale, the size would be four times the size, because this doubles the map horizontal and vertical.
The idea was to create smaller parts of the world, like continents, countries or just small islands.
I am doing this by splitting the earth in different parts, called “Tiles”. Each Tile has a dimension of 1° latitude and 1° longitude by default, making a total of 64800 Tiles for the whole planet. It’s also possible to create Tiles that are 2° longitude and 2° latitude, or even bigger.
With this program, called “Minecraft Earth Tiles”, this is all possible without any knowledge of programing, scripting or modding the game.
What can I do with this program?
You can chose from a lot of settings, scales and the number of Tiles and run generation to get a complete Minecraft map.
The map is generated in parts with the dimension of 512×512, 1024×1024, 2048×2048 blocks and so on for each Tile. Minecraft maps are stored in region files, which also have dimensions of 512×512 blocks. This allows us to merge the files afterwards to obtain a transition between the Tiles without interruption. But since the map is generated in small parts, hardly any computer performance is needed.
What map features are included?
Some features may change, but already implemented features are:
- Highest resolution height maps that are available for free (1:30 for land and 1:300 for bathymetrie)
- Streets (different kind of real streets)
- Seas and Rivers (and other natural water deposits)
- Real distribution of landuse (like meadow, farms and buidlings)
- Real distribution of trees (at least evergreen and deciduous forests, shrubs and herbs)
Is this similar to the mod Terrarium or Terra-1-to-1?
In some ways yes, but not exactly. With these mods you can create a map while playing the game. The biggest problem: You can’t pregenerate a map with this mod, it is only available for Forge 1.12.2 and you can’t modify much of the generation progress.
This program creates scripts that let you generate Minecraft maps befor you even play it. So it is perfect for server owners. You can also modify every aspect of the map. Which streets should be generated, which features do I need, and so on. You can also split the process to generate small parts of the map and increase the size over time.
Finally, it is available for newer versions and it is easier to update this tools to newer versions, because it only requires WorldPainter to update.