“We circle around different districts,” explained Minefact. Two years into the project, they construct the city in short and mobile sprints. The Minecraft build of the 9/11 memorial. ![]() “The servers could barely keep up,” said Minefact. I didn’t realize this was very much in progress”). Strebe first found the project amusing (“Thank you for your interesting inquiry,” he wrote), but this eventually morphed into something like awe (“It looks like you are barreling right along. Over one frenzied week, they developed a novel projection, which they called Airocean, that focused distortion in the oceans rather than land. (Russia is about half as big as it appears on Google Maps, which also uses this projection.) To avoid filling the world with misshapen, funhouse-mirror buildings, they consulted Daniel Strebe, a mathematician specializing in map projections. They had been working off of a map based on the Mercator projection - the map on every classroom wall, ubiquitous since 1569, that warps shapes towards the poles. ![]() With tens of thousands of builders ready to go, Build the Earth’s organizers put the project on pause. “We realized the current projection didn’t work,” he said. Other players, in other parts of the world, reported similar incongruities. But something strange was happening on his map: The pool’s squares were distorted, stretched into rhombuses. The neat geometry of the site - two identical pools, surrounded by a thicket of trees, adjacent to a blocky, triangular museum, built on a flat parcel of land - was ideal for block construction. Where to lay the first brick? Minefact picked the 9/11 memorial. “So it’s a bit like the metaverse, just in a different, low-key style.” “Everyone was trapped inside their house, and so people started to meet in-game, in this new real life, where they could create the world they had known outside,” said Minefact in his fluent, German-accented English. “Literally a week into the quarantine and we’ve already replaced the outside world,” wrote a commenter. It was an absurd proposition, but, soon after, tens of thousands of people signed up. He suggested filling it with the world’s buildings. Just as he was about to begin, Build the Earth launched, and he merged his project with the larger one.īuild the Earth began in March 2020, when a user, PippenFTS, uploaded a video to YouTube explaining two modifications he had made to Minecraft that had created a rough, completely terraformed outline of the Earth’s geological surface. Drawn by the prospect of rebuilding an architectural mecca, he decided to put off building his hometown in Germany and switch to the city. “The quality was so much better than in Frankfurt because the open-street map data is so good in New York City,” he said. On a whim, he tested the program on New York City, and entire neighborhoods rose in gray scale across his screen. He originally wanted to build his neighborhood in Frankfurt using a generator he developed in late 2019, which creates rough outlines of buildings inside the game using Google Maps data. The leader of the New York City team is a 21-year-old coder from Frankfurt, who goes by the username Minefact. In this project, called Build the Earth, the largest team has 2,731 members around the world, who are dedicated to a single goal: Reconstructing New York City on a 1:1 scale, with each Minecraft building block representing one cubic meter of the real world. It wasn’t until the upheaval of the past two years and a simultaneous coding breakthrough that the dream of constructing the entire Earth finally felt achievable, or at least worth attempting. They have re-created all of Westeros from Game of Thrones, an imagined version of the ancient city of Babylon, and complex structures like France’s Orleans Cathedral. With an array of simple, three-dimensional blocks at their disposal, players can fashion almost anything. This was especially true for Minecraft, the best-selling game of all time, which saw 141 million active monthly users during 2021. It’s not surprising that video games - a reliable vehicle for escapism and stress relief - experienced a pandemic popularity boom.
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