planet earth as seen from space

Build the Earth

Part of a series on Minecraft. [View Related Entries]

Updated Jun 08, 2020 at 04:05AM EDT by Philipp.

Added Apr 20, 2020 at 08:18AM EDT by Philipp.

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Overview

Build the Earth is an ambitious collective Minecraft building project which pursues a goal to recreate the planet Earth at a 1:1 scale in Minecraft. The project started in March 2020, drawing the attention of over 50,000 builders within one month.

Background

On March 21st, 2020, YouTuber and Minecraft builder PippenFTS posted a video[1] announcing the start of Build the Earth project. The project pursued a goal of recreating the Earth in Minecraft at a 1:1 scale. The video accumulated over 9.2 million views in one month (shown below).



In the video, PippenFTS explained that he managed to make a 1:1 scale version of the planet by utilizing Cubic Chunks mode, which allowed to bypass Minecraft's 255m height limit. In the project, the globe is projected onto a flat rectangular map.

With the Cubic Chunks mod breaking Minecraft's vertical limitations, we can now experience the Earth in Minecraft, just as it is, with no downscaling of any kind

On the same day, BuildTheEarth Discord[2] was launched, with buildthearth.net[3] website being created on March 24th.

Developments

In the following month, PippenFTS posted update videos about the project. On April 3rd, 2020, YouTuber[4] reported that the Discord server for the project attracted over 50,000 memebers within one week and outlined the problem with choosing a way to project the globe onto the surface (shown below, left).

On April 18th, 2020, Pippen FPS reported[5] that with help of mathematician Daniel Strebe a more accurate Dymaxion map projection would be applied to enchance accuracy of the Minecraft recreation (video shown below, right).



Online Reactions

The announcement of the project attracted significant attention online both within the Minecraft community and outside of it, as well as from mainstream media. On March 27th, 2020, Eurogamer[6] reported on the project, with VICE[7] running an article on April 2nd, 2020.

The Discord server for the project gained over 52,300 members in one month.

Search Interest

External References

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Top Comments

Nedhitis
Nedhitis

>build Earth in Minecraft
>get VR support for Minecraft
>wait for mind transferring technology to become a thing
>intergrate all
>we can live on a better version of Earth at the mere price of looking blocky in the future

Turbo introverts:

+63
Kommando_Kaijin
Kommando_Kaijin

My main question is how large is the file size of the world going to be? The largest a world can be is estimated at 60-97 Petabytes from what I've seen, but that's a normal Vanilla world with the 256 block height limit. Considering that they've found a way to exceed that (up to 8,848 if they're going to be accurate to Mt. Everest's height) I'd assume the file could be larger than normal.

TL;DR: How serious of a RAID are they going to need?

+12

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