If you’ve ever wanted to walk around a Minecraft version of the Lake District – you’re in luck.
Ordnance Survey has built a hyper-realistic map version of Cumbria inspired by the recently released and massively popular film A Minecraft Movie.
The national mapping service has re-created the county using its own detailed mapping data.
It features all of the counties roads, vegetation, meadows, ferns, forests, woodlands, lakes, rivers, beaches, railways, islands and, of course, mountains.
Cumbria was chosen as one of 16 areas across the UK to be released to players first as part of Ordnance Survey’s wider attempt to break a world record by creating the largest real-world place to ever exist in Minecraft.
Due to the extraordinary level of detail, accuracy and size of the world, the 16 areas have been chosen to improve the gaming experience for players.
The Cumbrian map features co-ordinates for players to orientate themselves and players can use the in-built game mapping features to create their own maps or find areas they want to build upon.
This means players can be as creative as they want and can choose to build a home on top of Scafell Pike or morph all of the Lake District’s waters into one – if they want to.
Ordnance Survey said the map aims to bring geography and mapping to younger generations.
The block types used in the map have also been chosen on purpose to represent aspects of the land.
The include:
- Dark stained clay: Roads
- Stone and Brick: Buildings
- Cobblestone: Rail
- Grass: Meadows
- Podzol: Woodland Area
- Sand: Foreshore
- Water: Rivers, Lakes, Ocean
For vegetation, trees are randomly distributed over woodland areas, grass tufts and flowers are randomly distributed over meadows as flowers generate at lower elevations, and ferns are densely packed over Podzol.
The Minecraft version of Cumbria was developed by Ordnance Survey graduate and Minecraft enthusiast Jonathan Allsup, who created and processed the map at the organisation’s headquarters in Southampton.
Jonathan said: “Finding new, innovative ways to map and visualise our nation is what it’s all about when working for Ordnance Survey.
“The same principles of cartography apply here in game space as they do when making OS maps. Balancing map styling and our data’s capability is an art form.
“For this project, we strived to push our open data to the limits which is why it looks so realistic.
“Plus, the educational aspect to it is strong. Kids relate to this game. It’s still popular now and is a great way to communicate the idea of location data and geography.
“Playing and building on a Minecraft map of Britain is much more engaging than looking at PowerPoint presentations in a classroom.
“There’s so much you can try and do. Build a theme park in your local village, freeze over the entire Lake District, rewild Britain, or build a bridge to the Isle of Wight. The possibilities to redesign Britain are endless! “
It also marks the second time that Ordnance Survey has built a world in Minecraft.
Back in 2014 it made the Guinness Book of Records for the largest real-world place in Minecraft containing 83 billion blocks that covered 86,500 square miles of landscape.
It was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times by Minecraft fans.
But the original record-breaking version is dwarfed by the latest one – the new version is powered by OS OpenMap Local data and uses block sizes that are 15 metres squared, compared to the 25 metre squared blocks from 11 years ago.
Ordnance Survey estimated this latest version exceeded over 100 billion blocks.
Th new world also looks much more realistic, with more detailed vegetation, buildings in 3D, and sandy beaches among the improvements to the world’s visual quality.
Jonathan said: “The latest version is natural advancement in quality and size as more resources became available for this work which means everything looks so much better and more detailed than 10 years ago.
We want this to be a resource for anyone to try. Ordnance Survey is an organisation founded on exploration and we encourage anyone to do to the same with these maps.”
To download and play the Cumbria map, click here.
Planning to create a Minecraft world using the Cumbria map? We’d love to see your creations! Especially if they feature a chicken jockey. Email us at [email protected]
