Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale
blocks.manifold3d.ch
blocks.manifold3d.ch
https://geoboxers.com/denmark-in-minecraft/
> ‘Denmark in Minecraft’ was released in April 2014 by the Danish Geodata Agency. The project was conceived, developed and operated by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Kjærshøj Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå, the founders of GeoBoxers.
> The work was funded and carried out by the Danish Geodata Agency as an initiative following the 2013 “basic data programme”, where a significant amount of public Danish data were made available for free. The purpose was to make geographical and topographical data available through Minecraft, and help disseminate the free data to a broader audience and specifically reach children.
> Denmark in Minecraft was released with an invitation to teachers and schools to use the data in geography, math, science and history lessons, and within the first few months Minecraft-data were downloaded 300.000 times from the Geodata Agency, and around 37.000 unique users logged in to the agency’s Minecraft-servers.
> January 1st, 2016 the Danish Geodata Agency changed into the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, and links in English regarding “Denmark in Minecraft” were removed. Since 2020 Denmark in Minecraft can no longer be downloaded.
This reuses the same open source tools, the same open data, and has the gall to put up a slop website and ask for 15CHF (or worse, 48) to pay for a Claude subscription that's doing it all behind.
The whole magic of someone doing this is someone doing this.
No one did this.
And there is no utility in it either. No one needs a 1:1 scale Minecraft map of Switzerland for anything.
So the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea implemented in a way that shows lack of understanding why this niche of content existed in the first place.
If you think it’s easy enough that “no one” made it, why not voxel-ize a location yourself to test your hypothesis? I imagine it wouldn’t take but moments of your day to fire off the prompt “Build New Jersey out of voxels”.
Based on your comment, it sounds like you believe that’s the sum total of work the author put into it.
__
Beside that, you do realize that this is merely an ad for that GIS provider consultancy thingy that can sell you actual swiss maps, right?
I mean judging by your career in adtech. Uh Yeah anyway.
It’s not that, it’s an effort to get you to drop into system 2 and think about all the steps it probably took to put this together.
“Beside that, you do realize that this is merely an ad for that GIS provider consultancy thingy that can sell you actual swiss maps, right?”
Yes, I do. I’m not buying their product, selling it or in any way interested in it. I’m just pointing out that your dismissive comment about someone else’s work sucks.
“I mean judging by your career in adtech. Uh Yeah anyway.”
Case-in-point. Stay classy!
Edit: as I’m reading other replies in this thread, I’m finding that I had no idea how sophisticated tools for Minecraft are.
This could’ve been an opportunity to teach someone something cool like your sibling post did, but you opted to be a jerk instead.
Maybe take a sec to examine that.
If bad behavior is validated by more good faith teaching, then we consequently just see more bad behavior in the future.
If you're genuinely interested in positive exchange, don't kneejerk gotcha people. Or, if you're not, don't complain like this.
I have said nothing in bad faith, I genuinely believed you were dumping on something that a person put real work into. I was defending what I believed was someone’s hard work at the time.
You chose to interpret that in the most negative way you could and then chose express that negative interpretation by insulting me.
I suggest that you continue to examine your attitude; based on your previous result, I think you should take a few hours this time because a few seconds clearly wasn’t enough.
Here's Chicago (assuming their preview is always the same): https://map2minecraft.com/for/developers#world-demo. It took zero effort.
Picking Providence, New York on a map took two minutes to render, and I was walking around it. Paying 20 bucks gets me the whole 88km². Is it steep? Yeah, a bit. At least they get to have the excuse that it takes some actual CPU time to render because it's all on demand, but they don't have the gall to pretend that they "need it to improve the peaks".
But if you don't want to pay a single cent, feel free to download https://arnismc.com/, it'll fetch the data from OSM, terrain elevation from Tilezen, and you can get absolutely any area in the world you want. It'll cost you... The electricity and the time.
You don't even need to prompt it. cargo run --release --no-default-features -- --output-dir="C:/YOUR_PATH/.minecraft/saves" --bbox="min_lat,min_lng,max_lat,max_lng" is right there. It's a single command.
>it sounds like you believe that’s the sum total of work the author put into it.
It _is_ the sum total of work the author put into it. Prism Launcher (https://prismlauncher.org/) handles the modding part of it. OptiFine makes it playable. Cubic Chunks removes the height limit. Can't be arsed to download 1GB of test data, but arnis or equivalent open source software is used to voxelize it. Leeching off of free work, through and through.
Also the "author" is trying to pass this off as a small, funny little independent artist stuff, when the company behind it quite literally sells 3D prints of the same areas of Switzerland. The entire goal is to be a profiteer, a leech. Literally a dropshipper.
Remember when a huge portion of the internet was pirating music because it was expensive and difficult to buy. Then do you remember when a few streaming services came along offering most music and most people stopped pirating it? Because I do.
Saving people a little bit of time and making it easy is how you become a billionaire.
Most giant Minecraft map projects are automated as much as possible. It would be a real labor of love on the spectrum otherwise, and who can maintain that?
I don't get it
You lack the hacker mindset if you think you "must" do anything the way it was designed.
Here's a video of Yosemite Valley from 2014:
> I did not build this by hand. That would take decades! Instead, I wrote an MCEdit filter that took images and elevation data from Google Maps and turned them into blocks!
These country / world maps autogenerated are still cool to look at a bit. Also some people can take these and then rebuild famous landmarks by hand.
"All of Denmark in Minecraft. Recreated in a map with a scale of 1:1. Explore cities, landscapes and landmarks built of 4 trillion blocks."
"Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale. Every block is one metre. Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata. The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one."
The latter website's wording is unnecessarily staccato, self-congratulatory, and draws your attention to odd points, while missing out vital information like the word "Minecraft" (which appears elsewhere in 5 point font). It reads like a failed marketer camping out on LinkedIn wrote it.... and that's probably what the LLM was trained on. And the person using the LLM either didn't care what the website said, or reviewed it and thought it looked good and needed no changes. Either way, awful.
> I don't know the scale Denmark
What does that refer to? Both say "1:1 scale". Are you just trying to pad the list so you can "details" instead of "detail"?
"Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata"
Without the context of what this even is, that the description does not provide, that might as well be someone who is bad at English trying to say something like"swisstopo’s offers open geodata about terrains, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams of Switzerland". Except if they struggled with the language they wouldn't needlessly bloat that list, either.
They didn't read it, the people rushing to its defense apparently aren't parsing it either, but I'm sure they make sure payment processing works, so at least there's that.
Then the next two + the last one "At 1:1 scale.", "Every block is one metre", "The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one" are all redundant, all conveying the same info in 3 different ways.
Anyway, if "LLM puffery" makes this easier, why is that bad? And given that your quote indicates that the Danish equivalent got pulled, maybe LLMs can easily bring it back. Wouldn't that be a good thing?
The world changing - no need to be rude about it.
If I was, then 'puffery' seems about right, and my best angle might be to insist that I'm yeast, leavening, and the massive quantities of gas blowing something up into a puffy empty state are only happening because of me. It's even kind of true, LLMs just sit there until directed.
I might add "you've spent more effort reading it than I spent writing it"
sorry, I'll show myself out...
Okay it’s not technically a mountain but a hill.. and yes it’s about as close to the clouds as my head is.. And yes we usually see people disspear from view because of the curvature of the Earth rather than terrain..
Okay it’s 2D…
He said he wanted a globe for the desk in his office, 'but to scale'.
(Edit: I mean it, that really made me laugh)
I have seen too many examples of people trying to earn money on apps they clearly vibe coded in an hour. Why would I pay for that - might as well make it and sideload it myself. I might even publish it for free to the app store to spite them.
I really don't think you are in a position to be asking for money if you just made something using an LLM. You didn't put in much work yourself, and anyone could replicate it for the "low cost" of their LLM subscription.
Because growing fruits is hard.
>Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify.
Because playing music is hard.
This project is just "I handed https://arnismc.com/ to Claude and it generated maps from the open data that the Swiss government puts out for free. Oh and also I'm charging you for the slop"
Why does this matter? I see the AI detractors still can't cope with the fact that you're allowed to charge for AI generated work. You have to be insane or severely demented to try doing something like this by hand.
As a follow up I just went and looked at the arnismc project since I haven't heard of it. At least it's written in Rust, which is respectable but it's only ~200k loc of Rust? And most of it is also 100% LLM generated by the looks of it?
It's interesting that you immediately call them an AI detractor because they refuse to pay for something that's low effort. You're not entitled to someone's money and people certainly aren't required to pay for something if they think they can just make it themselves. You're complaining about a bed of your own making, where you want to act like it requires a lot of effort while people replicate it effortlessly.
You're not entitled to dictate what someone else charges for their product, no matter how easy it is to make.
Likewise, others are free to criticize your criticism.
My point is it's silly to be upset about others charging for products that are easily vibe coded. If it's that easy to make, and they are charging too much, then someone else (it could even be you!) will come along and undercut them.
Both are strawman arguments, so my mistake on mine.
Just like someone had to grow the potato.
Someone had to 'use' the AI to 'do something'.
The AI just cut out some steps, -> Just Like the Plow did.
Many AI projects are just a few prompts away, and very little labor intensive - you are mostly just delegating.
A much more accurate example would be "Why would I pay your son to mow my grass when i can get mine to do it"
If you want it, and you think it's easy to replace, try to reproduce it with AI.
If you find that it is harder than you thought, then go back and pay for the original.
generating an ai image of a potato is a better comparison.
That's the analogous equivalent of spending the tokens to use AI to make this project.
The analogous equivalent of growing a potato yourself over months would be creating this website without AI.
"Just a few prompts" is the new "can do that in a weekend". In reality it still takes a while to build everything, think about what features you want to have and how to prioritize them, how to build a good UX / UI, set up payment providers etc.
"Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify."
Why do people go to pub restaurants, where one of the overworked staff will put a frozen meal in a microwave until it goes "ding", then slop it onto a plate for you? Probably not the same reasons, and you'd expect a lot cheaper, though not as cheap as the same microwave meal from the supermarket.
Do people go to what they think is a real restaurant, because its marketing has diddled them, but find out it's actually a pub restaurant when they get there, replete with low-effort slop? If they do, I hope they leave a terrible review and don't come back.
Obviously I can judge a place based on the quality of service and food, but that's not the reason I've gone there in the first place.
I am not exactly a fan of this kind of comparison unless one can actually freely allocate one's time, but it is illustrative.
Because of this great price difference, it is not very difficult to optimize how you cook in order to reduce the time spent with that down to a level that would save money even by your accounting method. Moreover, when you cook your own food the greatest advantage is that you know precisely the quality and the quantity of the ingredients that are included and that may be enough to make it worthwhile.
For instance, I normally eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients, but I spend little time for that. I buy some ingredients from a supermarket once per week, which requires about a half of hour. Other ingredients I order from an online shop and they arrive at my home.
Cooking requires each day about one hour, i.e. about a half hour for each of the 2 meals I eat, but most of each half hour is waiting for food to be cooked in a microwave oven or for it to cool down, when I can work or do any other activities. Only about 10 minutes are needed at each meal with things like paring and slicing vegetables, mixing ingredients and washing dishes. I bake even the bread that I eat, instead of buying it. Cooking with a microwave oven allows a lot of shortcuts in comparison with traditional methods, e.g. many dishes that require stirring when done on a stove do not require it when done in a microwave oven, which frees you to do other things. The same is true with bread, which does not require the traditional kneading of the dough when done in a microwave oven, but you can use an excess of water (or milk) that makes the dough fluid enough to mix it easily and this is sufficient and the bread will grow tremendously anyway.
Years ago, I was wasting much more time with cooking, so I typically cooked in a weekend day the food for all week and I just reheated it every day, but after gaining more experience I could reduce the required time until I could afford to cook only immediately before eating, because the time needed for that is short enough.
Nonetheless, when cooking for an entire family while having a job that occupies most of your time, probably only the method with cooking in a weekend day for all week is feasible.
Obviously anyone can make anything once they've seen it implemented from someone else's idea. Maybe sometimes the idea is the value in itself, the action of taking it from zero to product is just a means to distribute the idea.
The human brain works with pattern recognition. Regardless of whether I think that llms are great or not, right now they're vastly used to produce slop (I know it doesn't have to be the case), and because of the aforementioned pattern recognition we are largely being trained to recognize ai-generated content as slop.
There's really only one logical outcome:
If you're trying to sell something to me and you have a vibe-coded website, it doesn't matter how great your product is, I'll never even get to see it because it's slop-by-default.
And you don't even have to bring up AI at all to see how that's a bad idea. AI is flooding everything, isn't it a basic marketing strategy to differentiate yourself from the rest?
But if you’re sure it’s easy, why not give it a try?
Deal! Make a screen recording of you doing the same thing (well, instead of Switzerland let's say Austria, since Switzerland is already done) and I'll pay you 15 bucks.
Here is a good tune ("Minding My Goddamn Business"), and the lyrics really make me laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qhvUJi01ng
The New Yorker also wrote about him here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/that-new-h...
Plus it seems Suno still hasn't managed to figure the static noise creeping up as the song goes on (compare the sound of the hi-hats at the start vs. the end)
I recall in the 1990s a big argument about using vocoders in the production of pop music to adjust the tone of a singers voice. Many critics were quick and loud to say the users were no longer "real artists". Really, those critics have been left in the dust. In modern music production, vocoders are now commonplace.
I do not share the same sentiment regarding drawn art or music and will try my best to support artists who don't need AI to perform/create. Modern music production already is using AI to its fullest extent for sure, its their loss. I've never listened much pop and instead have always tried to support people who actually have more skills in their toolset than just writing lyrics. My most listened genres atm include jazz, psychedelic rock and metal.
> For the Nick Hustles track that I shared, you cannot tell.
I accept that the future is bleak and there will be many cases where I won't know until someone points it out. It has happened a couple of times already. Always a big disappointment, then I shrug it off and go back to artists I know. I'm not alone in feeling this disappointment. [1]
> Many critics were quick and loud to say the users were no longer "real artists". Really, those critics have been left in the dust. In modern music production, vocoders are now commonplace.
How is this an apt analogy? Yes, those critics are better left in the dust, a signal modifier (vocoder) is just a signal modifier. Suno creates whole songs, skipping all the skills needed to even be a musician. Are you seriously comparing the two?
Also if that analogy worked, this "gotcha" doesn't really work for me as I never haven't really liked modern music production where playback is more and more common live. Multiple times I've thought of organizing a "live-only" festival where only simple setups are allowed to allow artists to show how skilled they really are, but I've realized that 1) most pop artists won't go there to show their lack of skills 2) jazz festivals exist for already skilled musicians.
I personally think there will be some "no AI used" label for artists, much like there is for organic food, and people like me who value human skills & craftmanship and want to support that kinda lifestyle can use that labeling when making purchases. Much in the similar fashion as with organic label nowadays I predict it will be gamed, there will be disappointments, but it will on a longer run be better than not having anything like that. It is to make a statement, it is to support local, smaller artists and reject the norm.
[1] https://business.columbia.edu/insights/digital-future/why-ai...
Did someone make 1x1x1 wooden cubes and remade Switzerland? Oh no, the tiny tiny text above the gigantic title says "Minecraft".
"Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?
Then there's an embedded map that is an attempt to convey information that I still can't figure out what.
How to run it? Aha, download Prism Launcher (not a clickable link), import the zip... and oh, you need to have purchased Minecraft too!
What an exercise in convolution...
A mountain irl is, for instance 783 meters tall (sea level). A block in minecraft is always 1x1x1meters (according to the game engine def). Thus you make a mountain 783 blocks tall. You can also easily raise the sky limit if it becomes a problem.
Quickly did the math. The real trail is ~390 km long, with 23,500 m of elevation gain and 14 Alpine passes. I found that Minecraft walking speed is 4.317 m/s (1 block = 1 m), so that's ~25 hours of continuous walking, or ~33 hours assuming 75% movement efficiency for terrain. That's one Alpine pass every ~2.4 hours, and a new hiking-stage destination every ~1h40!
[1]: https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/de/hoehenmodell-swisssurface3...
Renewables and grid investments come from increased demand and money flowing into the industry..
The big problem I have is what's seeming to shape up in Texas; massive off-grid and on-site generation using fossil fuels. This pollutes and bypasses grid and renewable investment.
I consider the third option worse, because it is better to choose the right map for your application than a map that is not optimal for any application.
Mercator is an angle-preserving map, so it is appropriate for navigation, but not for giving you a global view of the Earth, for which an area-preserving map is more useful.
Because I do not know the purpose of your map, I cannot judge whether Mercator is a good choice or not, but Mercator and similar navigation maps are seldom useful today, when navigation should be planned by computers, not with ruler and compass on a physical map.
A world for anyone. should have more than enough are. it would be interesting to see if wars and terretorial conflicts arise here as well
> Every mountain stands at its real height
> The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one.
The models are RLd so hard to declare their own legitimacy. Everything has to be correct, genuine or real, no x, y or z.
This is my first post although I have been following Hacker News for years.
I have been building something similar except not for Minecraft but hiking maps on mobile (Android). This is my app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chessvorte...
I combine OpenStreetMap data for routes, satellite data from Sentinel-2 and Copernicus DEM GLO-30 for heights, resolution is around 10m/pixel for image and 30m for heights - those are the highest resolution datasets I can legally redistribute, although I am also including what I call hi-res maps building for some countries (USA, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Romania) which has image resolution at 1.5m/pixel instead of 10m.
I could have used higher resolution for hi-res maps, data is available at precision like 30-50cm/pixel but this being a mobile app I needed to consider storage for a map on mobile, at hi-res a 10x10 km squared area takes around 25MB.
The idea for this came from my own hiking trips, in many mountains there is not so good internet connection, so I can build an offline map beforehand and in terrain I can use this to see where I am in 3D - and just use the phone GPS for location, no data needed.
For building the map packages I have setup a linux server that combines all 3 data sources (OpenStreetMap, Sentinel-2, Copernicus GLO-30) so once an area is chosen it can build it in like 1-3 minutes. Since all OSM endpoints are giving lots of timeouts I setup a local OSM mirror with the data that I need - takes around 50GB of storage for the whole world data and I have a script that updates it weekly.
Coming back to the original post, seeing 1:1 ratio of Switzerland made my heart stop for a bit, then I realized it's 1m resolution. Switzerland was also my first choice for hi-res data, they provide good accurate image and height datasets. Pretty cool all this Minecraft voxel rendering, I intend to see how it would look in my own app.
Minimum wage in Zurich city is 23.90 chf/hour. About 37 minutes of time, at most.
Can't tell if you are being sarcastic?
Now, back then 1-m resolution DEMs were not widely available, but 10-meters were up for download, freely.
It would be fascinating to see how my house and town is rendered in-game. Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O
> For legal reasons I sell all of Switzerland only to people who live in Switzerland.
Why tho? Something about the data itself, or because you don't want to bother with international purchases?
Yeah, that’s a travesty. To be authentically Swiss it should cost at least 150 CHF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...
>>Obtaining and using the data and services is free-of-charge, subject to the provisions on fair use.
https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/general-terms-of-use-fsdi#2.-Dat...
Am i wrong here?
https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/dufour-map
I still think it's by far the greatest map I've come across throughout history: given both the limitations of the time period and the painstakingly consistent hachuring. It's just immaculate
But since microsoft took over i exlusively play without an account using polyMCs client. You can play any version/modpack you want, you just can't play on official servers.
Aren’t most high-resolution aerial imagery (Google Earth), 1 metre resolution.
> In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
> — Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658
BTW, claude can output sh3d for you if you feed it with pdf containing floor plan, half of struggle removed, fun part (re)designing the house layout easily kicked-off!
then again, every building is white and basic, so not that nice for sightseeing.
then again, i could blow up my annoying neighbors house with a couple of TNT blocks (in minecraft!)
Then started plopping in furniture and such, wonderful experience. Then you can navigate your home as a "visitor" to get a better feel. Definitely more realistic than Minecraft for actual planning.
sh3d removes the whole game-aspect and acts as a room planning tool, which is of course also neat, but i have no need for it. i also don't need to navigate my home as a visitor in a software, as i can just navigate it in meatspace.
but, if or when i move, i think i'll actually come back to sh3d! just don't see the point right now. maybe claude can help me mod sh3d so i can fight off mobs with a bow and arrow, or blow it up with some TNT :D
Why? It looks like a hundred other web sites. The text isn't different from any other generic sales copy that humans have been doing for ever.
People are so paranoid about AI slop, that they see it everywhere, even if it was just a human. You can't tell.
"MINECRAFT JAVA 1.12.2 · CUBIC CHUNKS · SWISSTOPO"
this is such a classic llmism
> Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale
> Real mountains. Real valleys. All of it walkable.
> Every block is one metre
> Every block is one metre
> Your browser loads the aerial image directly from swisstopo, only once you move the slider
> If it runs on your computer, all of Switzerland will too.
> the game builds the distant view itself on first launch
> the game builds the blocks from the world package
> You pay for the licence to the world package, the world calculated from geodata
> The world, however, fills the whole rectangle around Switzerland, including parts of the neighbouring countries
> the world is built by a program from open data, not by hand
It's like... if someone typewrites out every number from 1 to 1 million, wow totally useless but impressive effort! If someone prints that with a laser printer... Why? Who cares?
"Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to the Collective." -- Borg Collective, Star Trek TNG
> B~ b~ but they would have used LLMs back then if they could, too.
"You're absolutely right."™ But they didn't/couldn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯