It wasn’t until the upheaval of the past two years and a simultaneous coding breakthrough that the dream of constructing the entire Earth (on Minecraft) finally felt achievable, or at least worth attempting
Photo: Minefact Network It’s not surprising that video games — a reliable vehicle for escapism and stress relief — experienced a pandemic popularity boom. This was especially true for Minecraft, the best-selling game of all time, which saw 141 million active monthly users during 2021. With an array of simple, three-dimensional blocks at their disposal, players can fashion almost anything.
Build 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. He suggested filling it with the world’s buildings. It was an absurd proposition, but, soon after, tens of thousands of people signed up. “Literally a week into the quarantine and we’ve already replaced the outside world,” wrote a commenter.
With tens of thousands of builders ready to go, Build the Earth’s organizers put the project on pause. 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. To avoid filling the world with misshapen, funhouse-mirror buildings, they consulted Daniel Strebe, a mathematician specializing in map projections.
With an entire city to reconstruct, players gave themselves a reasonable limit: They would only craft the exteriors of buildings. But certain public spaces, like Grand Central Terminal, proved irresistible. “We made an exception because there is a lot of data for it,” said Minefact. “And people actually went to the station and took photos of it from each corner to create the inside.” Anxiety was their primary motivation, he said.
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