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Minecraft has seen an explosion in creativity and collaboration as the Lego-like freedom of the game leaves so much room for experimentation, with blocks used to painstakingly build grand designs.
These builds include Lord of the Rings-style Minecraft Middle-earth and a recreation of Cyberpunk 2077's Night City. There's a version of Game of Thrones' King's Landing; a blocky version of Teyvat from Genshin Impact; and a recreation of the ancient city of Babylon. But moving into the modern world, a community of many, many hundreds of Minecraft players are seeking to recreate New York City.
As reported by The New York Times, a project called 'Build the Earth' has some 2,731 members intent on recreating New York City, with the group committed to building a 1:1 replica, with each in-game block representing one cubic metre of the real world. The Minecraft New York City has been under construction for over two years.
It helps that the data available for The Big Apple is a lot better than for many other cities. The leader of the building team is a 21-year-old programmer with the username Minefact. Minefact is based in Frankfurt and creates building outlines for Minecraft based on Google Maps, but the American city was a lot easier to tackle than his hometown: "The quality was so much better than in Frankfurt because the open-street map data is so good in New York City," he told the NYT.
The project kicked off with the 9/11 memorial as the clean lines and geometry of the site proved ideal to rebuild with Minecraft blocks. After overcoming initial problems to do with map projections distorting real-world locations, the team picked up pace, and now two years into construction the group has settled into a rhythm. "We circle around different districts. We work one week in Chinatown, then one week in Tribeca, one week on Bowery and then come back to Chinatown", Minefact said. "We always work on multiple districts at the same time to keep things interesting".
Minefact hasn't even ever visited the real-life NYC, but he, like many of the builders, hopes to one day visit, perhaps before the project is complete, which could still take many years. The entire city contains around one million buildings, according to The New York Times, so that's still a lot of blocks to go.